[Journey] - trading bot that may actually work

I get that but selling this for cheap with a basic guide could be far more helpful to folks than the guru cringe scams we all see day in and day out.

Don't sell your skills/ ideas short bud , you seem smarter than you give yourself credit for.

francisirving said:

To answer both those last questions, I cant imagine I'd ever sell it for 2 reasons:
1 - the bot is pixel based and can be a trick to maintain
2 - I'm a firm believer in 'if its works why are you selling it?' I'd give the source code away for free if I think it's worth it. It's not doing anything special that a real Python coder couldnt make better. It's about the strategy+risk management, not the bot.

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Great answer, wishing you best of Luck.


If you were interested in making a tg group where people would just follow your lead and you’d earn a % and whoever participates at their own risk would make more sense and you wouldn’t need to share your tool at all, just your knowledge for a % , dunno how the quote really is but something like “best way to get richer is by using other people’s money instead of yours”


P.s id definitely participate!

Hoboninja said:

I get that but selling this for cheap with a basic guide could be far more helpful to folks than the guru cringe scams we all see day in and day out.

Don't sell your skills/ ideas short bud , you seem smarter than you give yourself credit for.

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I appreciate that. If I nail this done I'll come up with something.

cpa37710t said:

Great answer, wishing you best of Luck.


If you were interested in making a tg group where people would just follow your lead and you’d earn a % and whoever participates at their own risk would make more sense and you wouldn’t need to share your tool at all, just your knowledge for a % , dunno how the quote really is but something like “best way to get richer is by using other people’s money instead of yours”


P.s id definitely participate!

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I've seen those kind of TG groups. I'm in a couple where the main point of the free TG group is to get you to sign up for the premium discord. It's a good idea, but I'd only do if it I have something genuine to offer. Right now its close, just not quite there yet.

I've been working on a test bot for the last hour with a more complicated entry strategy, and then I'll pause every now and then to wonder if these complicated strategies are even worth it.
Yesterday (Wednesday 6pm to Thursday 6pm est) was a crap trading day, botting issues aside.
This is what a sideways day looks like (1m chart, NASUSD, 9pip S/L)

All the gains for the week (15%) lost on a crabbing day.

So I do a bunch of backtesting and come up with some crazy ideas:
- wait for 'x' amount of rising candles before entering a long?, but a different strat for shorts since the longs have a tendency to rise fast and the shorts straggle around? or just skip short trades all together? make the entry volume variable based on how fast the candles rise in a sequence? blah blah

So I was tired and just raised the SL to 20pips to see what happens overnight, then I'll work on it tomorrow. No biggie, demo account

Boom and we're back to +15% while I'm making coffee the next morning.

I shut the bot down to work on it around noon or so, and missed another 3 trades that I would have manually stopped and made another easy 100pips/10% on:

It was just a good trading day, and I had nothing to do with it besides stopping a couple trades where my intuition told me to (and even those would have made a bit more money if I just let them go). It's nice in a way, but also frustrating when you're banging your head against the monitor trying to come up with trading logic that could end up helping or hurting.

- Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were good trading days. I kept having to fix exception and logic errors or the bot would have made a lot more pips if it had been stable
- Thursday was crap, just in time for me to have fixed the exception issues and get the logic in a workable place.
- Friday was great, even though I missed some big trades due to fiddling with it. Whatever; demo account

* A note on Thursday; doing some backtesting shows a 20p SL may have reduced the losses from 15 to <10%, plus there's a couple missed trades where I think the indicator is appearing to late to be picked up (working on that). Would of helped but nothing drastic.

+15% for the week. I'll take it considering all the growing pains of this new bot

Have you tried your bot on a real account before or now?
If yes, tell us about it.

francisirving said:

I've seen those kind of TG groups. I'm in a couple where the main point of the free TG group is to get you to sign up for the premium discord. It's a good idea, but I'd only do if it I have something genuine to offer. Right now it’s close, just not quite there yet.

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If you have some sort of waiting list plz include me for your future plans

makni2804 said:

Have you tried your bot on a real account before or now?
If yes, tell us about it.

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Yes. I had a small live account on Hanktotrade before they lost MT4/MT5 access (For US residents).
It was the same experience as the demo account, I was interested to see if the spreads would be wildly different, but they weren't. The bot was a lot more hit or miss then this new one seems to be, which isn't surprising since my new bot is a little more nuanced.
What I'm seeing is, and this flys in the face of conventional wisdom, is that making money with the bot is EASY. Dont think so? Look at my last post and Fridays results. The problem is that keeping the money is HARD. Again, look at my last post and reference Thursday.
The trick is discovering the rules to make this profitable.
If someone forced me to go to a live account Monday these would be my current rules for the NAS100 (subject to change as data comes in)

US, eastern time zone
- start the bot at 18:00est for the night. It wont do much until later in the evening after the Asian and London markets open. Might get lucky with some trades (or take small losses) and a lot less spikey than New York open
- stop the bot at 08:15 or so and close any open positions. If it's a big 8:30am news day (like today) the market will likely start going crazy at 8:30. If you are on the wrong side of the results you could get stopped, or destroyed if you dont have a SL
- 08:30 to 10:00am is a DEAD ZONE/NO BOTTING. This is because the 9:30 New York open is when the roller coaster begins. If you have a major 08:30am news blast like this morning it will just bleed into 09:30. You could make a lot, then you could lose a lot. Better to stay out
- start the bot again after/around 10:00 if its a volatile day (like today). If it's not a volatile day and you think the market is going to crab/go sideways (like Thursday this week) you're probably better off staying out. Again, you could lose out on some trades, but you'll more likely just crabwalk into stop losses all day
- Mondays and Tuesdays are usually good days for botting. Especially Tuesdays for some reason. That's why I call it 'Super Tuesday'.
- Dont bot on US holidays, like this upcoming Monday (Presidents Day). likely just crab all day
- How do you know if its going to be a volatile day? On big news days like today, here's the 08:30AM chart

You can usually pick up a win or two before the 15:00pm 'last call' move before the market closes, which can pick up another win.
To contrast, this was Thursday, a no big news day. Timerange 09:30am to 09:55am

This was kind of 'meh', not even that terrible really, but meh. I want to see a fight between buys and sells for the first 25 minutes. That tells me there's lots of indecision. This just went 'phhpt'.
Take a look at Monday, which was also not a big news days but had more excitement at the 09:30 to 09:25 open:

The rest of the day Monday was good. Three super easy wins you can spot. My bot was breaking faster than I could fix it and still made wins that first day.

When I say slow or busy news day, I'm grabbing that from the babypips website:
https://www.babypips.com/economic-calendar
vs Tuesday

This was 'Super Tuesdays' opener at 08:30 btw

These examples are not hard-set in stone, it's just what I've experienced over and over and over again trading the NAS100 everyday. Never take my word for it, open Tradingview and start analyzing and backtesting and see what your experience is.
My point is it's never going to be completely automated for me, especially on a live account, but if you use your experience and intuition, it can make your life a lot easier.

2 friends of mine bought a bot idk the name, got a few profit for days then one day the bot malfunction and they lost everything

patoxzika said:

2 friends of mine bought a bot idk the name, got a few profit for days then one day the bot malfunction and they lost everything

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This is common and unrelated to what OP been posting

cpa37710t said:

This is common and unrelated to what OP been posting

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Yes, unrelated but also a fair point; it's all about risk management, which is one of the biggest things I'm trying to accomplish with this bot.
I am looking into starting a free telegram channel to play around with. It will probably just be the bot posting that it opened a position with the time it opened, open value and Stop Loss, then post when it closes and if it was in profit/loss. Thats going to be new to me so I'll keep you posted.

can’t wait!

Well my bot got broken; again. My new offshore exchange lost access to MT4/MT5, as is happening with lots of these brokers and with forex prop firms (I dont do prop firms, but similar experience with MT4/MT5).
So if I want to continue botting it looks like I'm going to have to go with some legit US exchanges for now, especially if I want to use MT5. I'm experimenting with a pixel based Ninjatrader (right now trading NG MAR24 futures) bot thats working good as far as technically, just have to play around with some strategies for it. I'm also looking into Forex.com to use MT5. I have a demo Oanda account that I can use MT5 but we cant trade NASDAQ in the US because we are too stupid and will hurt ourselves /s.
So next week will be a mixture of live trading on Hanko and messing around with this Ninjatrader bot and finding an MT5 bot with a pair that I like.

I'm done botting for now while I figure out and learn about scalping/swing trading MNQ (hopefully move to NQ at some point) on Ninjatrader. I spent the better part of last week looking for strategies that will work with my small account size (starting with $300 USD). On Hanko I was essentially trading NAS100 at $0.10 per pip/tick, and now on MNQ its $2 per tick, so you can see how tight it is. My trading style based off support/resistance on the 5 minute chart (and basing entries/exits on the 1 minute chart) swings too wild with that little amount of margin so instead of throwing a few thousand into the account I thought it would be more fun to trade off the demo and find a way to make it work with smaller invalidation zones/stop losses (around 15 to 25 ticks).
I ended up using a modified strategy from @DeeAnthonyTrades and @FatCatsOfWallStreet on you tube, and so far its been working good. Its very simple:
- 20 SMA
- 200 SMA
- DynamicSRLines (ninjatrader indicator) for support and resistance
- 30 second timeframe (crazy! i know)

When the 200 and 20 SMA cross, look for possible long or short (depending on who crossed who) opportunities based on price action and support/resistance,
try to get about a 10 tick take-profit
thats about it really. it has a pretty high win-rate in forward and back testing. @DeeAnthonyTrades claims 80%+ on his with a 1RR. I'll find out as the trades roll on.
Here's my first trade of the week a little while ago

after commissions worth about $9.30 (using just 1 position btw, just keep adding positions if you want more risk/reward if your margin can take it)
boring right? looking at it another way it raised the account value 3.1% in 4 minutes (remember its a 30 second chart)

I was out walking the dog when the crossing alert went off again 40 minutes later

I'm sure you can see some good entrance and exit opportunities there for a long scalp.
Anyways if anything exciting happens I'll keep it posted. For now, just going to march on and see if I can absolutely nail this strategy and keep growing the account.

As a coding ignoramus, this looks cool. Loving your approach and tenacity.

Ps. would/could it work trading crypto?

francisirving said:

I'm done botting for now while I figure out and learn about scalping/swing trading MNQ (hopefully move to NQ at some point) on Ninjatrader. I spent the better part of last week looking for strategies that will work with my small account size (starting with $300 USD). On Hanko I was essentially trading NAS100 at $0.10 per pip/tick, and now on MNQ its $2 per tick, so you can see how tight it is. My trading style based off support/resistance on the 5 minute chart (and basing entries/exits on the 1 minute chart) swings too wild with that little amount of margin so instead of throwing a few thousand into the account I thought it would be more fun to trade off the demo and find a way to make it work with smaller invalidation zones/stop losses (around 15 to 25 ticks).
I ended up using a modified strategy from @DeeAnthonyTrades and @FatCatsOfWallStreet on you tube, and so far its been working good. Its very simple:
- 20 SMA
- 200 SMA
- DynamicSRLines (ninjatrader indicator) for support and resistance
- 30 second timeframe (crazy! i know)

When the 200 and 20 SMA cross, look for possible long or short (depending on who crossed who) opportunities based on price action and support/resistance,
try to get about a 10 tick take-profit
thats about it really. it has a pretty high win-rate in forward and back testing. @DeeAnthonyTrades claims 80%+ on his with a 1RR. I'll find out as the trades roll on.
Here's my first trade of the week a little while ago
View attachment 330141
after commissions worth about $9.30 (using just 1 position btw, just keep adding positions if you want more risk/reward if your margin can take it)
boring right? looking at it another way it raised the account value 3.1% in 4 minutes (remember its a 30 second chart)

I was out walking the dog when the crossing alert went off again 40 minutes later
View attachment 330142
I'm sure you can see some good entrance and exit opportunities there for a long scalp.
Anyways if anything exciting happens I'll keep it posted. For now, just going to march on and see if I can absolutely nail this strategy and keep growing the account.

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It's amazing that you have come this far on your journey.

Musa_fwd said:

As a coding ignoramus, this looks cool. Loving your approach and tenacity.

Ps. would/could it work trading crypto?

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Absolutely. The big diffrence is going to be how well your token adheres or 'respects' the support and resistance zones. NAS100 has a great habit of respecting support and resistance zones, especially on the 5 minute chart and higher. To be fair, the higher the time on the chart the more it will respect support and resistance for anything you are trading, but, you would need to study the chart you are trading for big wick spikes to get a feel for how far it will bounce and stretch on any given candle.
For instance, this is a snapshot of MNQ on a 30 second chart, still with decent trading volume going on:

I put black squares around some of the wicks to show how 'spikey' it can be, which can blow out your stops then keep on going. In MNQ/NAS100 its usually not too bad, so it keeps some consistency.
I found a live chart for LINU to show how crazy spikey it would be but it doesnt look bad at all.

I was trying to find something like WAVES, that I started trading with, that would spike 6x+ more then drop and blow my accounts right out, but no dice. I've seen similar things with gold which is why I was always nervous about trading it.
Anyways, my point is the strategy can work. You could even do something safe like:
once it crosses, place a small negative RR (0.66:1, for example)
here's the last few hours of bitcoin:

It's a lot of back testing and knowing what you are trading. What's the best hours? Does it act erratically at the 9:30 am market open? is it better to bot it after hours when volatility is low? Just a lof trial and error.

Andembar said:

It's amazing that you have come this far on your journey.

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Thanks
I decided about a year ago that I was either going to figure out how to be profitable in trading or die of natural causes, whatever came first lol.
It's just one of the mental attributes you have to have in order to make it in trading, hell, just about anything you really want to succeed at. But there is a cost. For example, its on my mind most of the day.
How do I do this better? Is learning this or that worth my time? Should I try this? Make adjustments to that? You have to be self aware enough to know if its harming you. I dont know if it is.
I'm older, my kids are out of the house, my wife works all day and I work from home, so is there something else or more important that I can be doing in my downtime? Maybe, but I'm not so sure. All I know is that I think it's important for me and I've never thrown myself at anything, ever, as hard as I've thrown myself into learning this.

Good luck on your journey mate. I’ve got a project I’m trying to get off the ground this year and then after that I’m jumping into trading, so I’m following this closely

Not really bot related but I thought it would be a fun write-up on how (nearly)stress free and easy trading can be with the perfect setup.
So today (April 4) around 2pm est the market took a huge dump. Why? Who knows, and to be honest I really dont care since I try trade on small timeframes and am using more and more price action in my day to day.
2-minute view of the start to about 1st half hour (Heikin Ashi candles cause I've been playing with it)

That's my 2 minute trading view chart of MNQ above. I'm trading on Ninjatrader so I have that chart up on the 2 minute as well, as shown below

Since I'm such an amazing trader /s (please, please note the sarcasm) I know exactly what's going to happen because I've seen this a hundred times. It's going to drop like a rock, do a pullback, then either drop more or continue down until it curves off and goes sideways. Unless there's some big news event (which there wasnt) its just a massive selloff. I just wait for the pullback, look for some confirmation that its about to head back down them put in a big sell order and wait for it to drop again. Like I said, its's damn unlikely it's going to rip back up in this situation. As you see above it did what I expected. My short was placed somewhere around the bottom wicks before the pullback. It dropped and I made money.

Ok its still going down, cool, lets wait for the next pullback and do it again. Same strategy: its going to pullback , then continue down more or go down and start to curve off.


There's the pullback a few minute later. You can see a clean 'railroad' track reversal after the pullback and a nice candle down. Jump back in with another short position, taking profits just below that mini pullback below it

Still going down, lets do it again.

It's starting to chop up now, the bear run is slowing down. Still worked again as expected, took profits. It's still going down.
The last one bit me but I bit it back.

Now its really choppy but the strategy is the same. I set my SL too low, as pictured and got stopped out. That sucks. But I waited for my entry point because I know the price has nowhere to go but down. Being confident in that (like I said, I've seen this a hundred times in back and forward testing) I tripled my positions and took profits at the next pullback.

In the end it did what was expected, it petered out and drifts sideways/up and down. Actually, it pulled back farther then I thought it would but I was long gone by that time.

I just missed the pretty 'Realized PnL' on the Ninjatrader homepage before it rolled over cause I was going to post a screenshot, but it was like +$1450 for about an hour of trading.
You can bot, do technical analysis, indicator trading, price action, tarot cards, whatever; but sometimes if you just hang around and wait for the right setup to fall in your lap it's like trying to pick up money in a bucket as its falling from the sky. I wish I had the patience to do just that.