The effort by Autofx (and others) to create a viable EA that can trade according to Williama's principles is admirable, but has anyone noticed the many times Williama interferes with his own rules to enable him to make the profits he does? To remind us of all the intricacies in this methodology that require human intervention to maximize profits, here are some extracts from Williama's own remarks:
Same thing with Lot Size, it is just a money management factor, preference and efficiency; 0.5, 1.0 even up to 1.5 lots depending in market trend (opportunity). When you suspect the market is going to move quickly towards one end for instance, you may want to allocate higher lots but regulate with number of Pending Orders. These are all trading, money and risk management preferences and trading skills.
Most of the times it finishes within a day. Sometimes i might be finished in 3 days. In that case, if the rate nears stoploss, ill again add 100 pips in stoploss and make it 400 pips. Then when it comes in profit i finish the deal. Some times even i close with half profit. First long will finish soon and then further it might increase which will be a loss for the short position. in that case, when the rate gets down, ill close the deal with 15pip loss.
One more thing, I do not necessarily have to place pending orders every time a level is triggered all I need is to have my calculations in place. This means, I keep track of the balance among lot size in each side. I calculate how much will be made when one side is reached. If I see that my other side is short, I place more pending orders in that side to compensate and make profit. If I see there is enough in that side I do not place more pending orders to save free margin. As you can see, I maintain a control real time to make the system efficient.
The secrets of the system is in the calculations and timing of Pending Orders and not the setting alone.
The calculations to be made are not the system but mathematics. All you have to do is to add and subtract your open orders to be able to know what is needed in the opposite side to make profit.
I make sure the opposite side has more Pending Orders placed than the one I am in the current time. I add the pips and find out how much money I am going to make, if I want to make more and I see that I have plenty of free margin (not the actual active margin but the total margin taken when the pending orders are triggered) I place some more pending orders.
At this moment the market is threatening to Trigger Sell Stop 213.00 and most like it will take. Therefore, I made calculations, I look at market, I look at how many lots are at that level and I conclude:
Delete 10 lots from sell stop orders at 213.00 because market looks like is going to reverse back up and therefore it would take aprox. $13.000 off the profit, if it went to the upper target. Let the market go up to see if it goes up to Buy Stop level 1 and then place back the sell stop at 213.00 with the 10 lots. This way you avoid taking profit from you.
This is the kind of analysis I make to maximize profit.
I am going to illustrate something. This is an analysis of the current situation. If I did not do anything and let things go, this is what would happen:
If bottom target is reached I make approximately $20k.
If top target is reached I have a loss of approximately $8k because I have not been placing Pending Orders in that side to see if anyone came back reporting. Therefore, to fix that I can place a Buy Stop at 213.00 with 10 lots. Then if the market went all the way up I make approximately $4.5k.
This is how I control the system. The important point here is that you have to make your calculations to place the necessary pending orders to make it work. Don´t mind a fixed set of rules, those are the basic rules I gave for people to grasp the concept. The most important issue is for you to understand what is going on and that you must have the correct side overcoming the other side by placing pending orders ahead of time always taking into account free margin availability.
Understand that I am not saying that we cannot develop an EA on Williama's principles that can make good profits, but to get the same results as he is getting there HAS to be human intervention.
As a matter of fact I want to come back to my previous concern about the heavy losses made by the very wide StopLoss placements. Why cannot we build into the system either a fixed StopLoss of say two levels or either a trailing StopLoss??? Do you realize how many open positions, and therefore margin, we will save by doing this - not to speak of reduced losses!
After all this I am still looking forward to Autofx improved EA!