What is the reason I haven't suffered a major loss? An EA that crawls online information and trades based on fundamentals
We'd like to review the subsequent performance of the crawler/EA that crawls online information for trading, which appeared around autumn 2019.
First, you may be wondering what crawling online information actually means. In short, it refers to scanning publicly available news and various economic data and accumulating them in a database.
The accumulated data is then used by traders skilled in investments such as FX to perform original trade analyses and to execute or halt trades.
The Crawler series consists of three works, but the information used mainly includes the following:
- Nikkei 225 / Dow Jones
- Position information for various currency pairs, etc.
- Options information
- Key indicators
Let's take a look at each EA.
The first is, the Crawler / CRAWLER_Lite.
Trading style is scalping; although the logic yields some early take-profits, the take-profit value is 25 pips. In contrast, the stop-loss setting is 18 pips. There are many instances of early stop-outs, averaging around 10 pips, which is a feature of the shallow stop.
In the Lite version of CRAWLER_X, described later, the maximum open lot size is up to 0.2 lots.
Because the shallow stop-loss has worked in its favor, it has not caused large losses and its performance has gradually improved.
Next is, CRAWLER_X. As mentioned above, the logic is the same scalping style as CRAWLER_Lite, and the maximum open lot size is unlimited.
The timing to start measurement was about one month later than Lite, so there is less data from periods of winning trades, and the following trading results do not look favorable.
However, the results show that it has not suffered losses and has managed to persevere in its trading.
The last, third, is CRAWLER_U, a logic that handles scalping and day trading.
Profit targets and stop-loss settings are the same as the previous two EAs, but it has performed well in corona-related markets since February.
It is notable that it does not collapse significantly either.
It is precisely the kind of feat that a crawler-based fundamentals EA, which continuously monitors the ever-changing market conditions and makes swift, flexible trading decisions, can achieve.
That was probably about 15 years ago.
I think there has historically been a profession called prop traders who, working in investment banks' proprietary trading desks, securities firms, and hedge funds, looked at fundamentals and performed technical analysis to manually trade. Also, even today, the majority of individual FX trading is the same as what those prop traders did back then. Active prop traders nowadays are said to be only quants using programming, and manual traders are zero or near zero.
I think it's fair to say that crawlers are trading by mimicking the behavior patterns of prop traders from a bygone era.
Written by Hayakawa
