Sitting Tight
by Trader Rich
I'm sitting tight tonight, Sunday because I'm expecting consolidation after the Dollar bearish moves last week. I'm expecting consolidation also on Monday and most of Tuesday until the FOMC interest rate statement on Tuesday at 2:15 p.m. EST. As always, there is no way to tell what might happen the days ahead, so I'll be keeping my eye on 3 currency pairs nevertheless. This weekend, I went through all of my charts and deleted the AUD/USD, USD/CHF, EUR/JPY and USD/CAD. I'm going to stick with trading only 3 pairs, the EUR/USD, USD/JPY, and GBP/USD. I've been trying to maintain 7 currency pairs on 4 different time frames and this is just not wise to do as a beginner. I have to get to know these 3 pairs.
I've been reading around today to see what an interest rate hike or a pause in rate hikes may do to the market on Tuesday and from most everything I've seen, 2 out of 3 scenarios could be dollar bearish:
- FED pauses in rate cycle would equal dollar weakness
- FED raises rates and keeps a hawkish statement could be initially dollar bullish
- FED raises rates and tones down their hawkish statement could equal dollar weakness
I did some manual backtesting this weekend of a couple of systems I've been working on. I'm still learning MQL4 (Metatrader programming language) so I haven't automated my backtesting but hopefully I can close the knowledge gap this week.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Craig, yea I’m not crazy about the backtesting platform for Metatrader. I too am a programmer and used to do some backtesting on the backend using perl but it because arduous getting data from gain or elsewhere. Where do you get your data?
Using gain capital at the moment, it’s tick data, there are some 1/2 hour holes but overall it’s not too bad. It has the bid/ask which is the important thing. Wrote a little util which walks directories and inserts the data into a database.
Hi Rich,
Be careful with the MT4 backtester, it drove me round the f**king twist. Witness this set of questions (http://www.strategybuilderfx.com/showthread.php?t=16959) nobody knew the answers!!, bit of a worry would you not say? Experts that backtested well in MT4 all lost money in forward testing for me.
The default data that comes with MT4 is crap, so it is recommeded to use the alpari data, problem is you can only use that data in the smaller timeframes, the catch 22 is that the MT4 backtester does not take the spread into account so backtesting in these small timeframes is pointless.
I got so pissed I ended up writing my own backtester (I’m a C++ programmer in my real job), at least I know how the data is being processed now.
Cheers
Craig.