I decided to post up the Euro's cousin, the British Pound/USD Futures. Mainly, because I am trading it live every day and I've been able to put together a reliable and robust tradeplan using UTA. I trade a 144 tick chart and like the Euro, I begin my trading at the start of the US Equity Session, 9:30 est. Also like the Euro, the BP trades on the CME so we'll use exchange times as our time reference.
Like the EC, I backtested about 6 weeks of trading, Feb 1 thru Mar 12th. I researched a tight plan with the intention of getting my trading done early each session. Two wins and a positive result meant I was done for the session, or, by 11 am cst if I hadn't yet hit my goal, I'd be done. Over the first 6 weeks I tested 83 trades, 60 winners and 23 losses! Not bad. 72.3% winners and a nifty +505 points.
Since then, as of today's date, I've been posting my real trades (the trades I take and call live in the traderoom that I host every day). I now have 191 total trades, including the backtested trades; 132 winners and 59 losses for a respectable 69.1% win rate. April was a tough sideways month, with wins and losses evenly distributed, yet we were able to hang out just below our equity highs and remained poised to break out to new profit levels, which happened last week. Today we hit new equity highs again, and have amassed +819 total points. The stair stepping is forming nicely as you can see from the attached screen shot of our equity curve.
I am using HVMM 2010 for this market as well. It's a great compliment to the EC. The different timeframes 144 vs 233, and the different rhythm that each trade in, make them not correlated enough to worry about. Their results do not track too closely day to day, other than the fact that they both seem to be consistent performers. Too much correlation is something to be concerned with but I just don't see it being a real factor in this case.
Check out the Trade Distribution Frequency Histogram too. What a beautiful distribution of trades. Notice the strong bias on the positive side with the majority of our winners hitting around 16 to 18 points. Notice also how our tight trade mgt plan has ended up with about 10% of our trades stopping out with just 1 point. Many of those trades would have wound up losing, but we were aggressively eliminating our risk while also covering the cost of our commission. No pip spreads to worry about with futures! Notice also how our longs and shorts were very simimlar in personality. This is the type of thing we like to see. It shows a stable trade system that does equally well going long or short.
Feel free to post comments, questions or whatever is on your mind. Start a new thread and share the results that you are discovering on your favorite markets. It's amazing what the UTA reveals to us. Get in the habit of posting your trades to UTA every day and soon you'll build up a valuable history of trade data that will help you improve your trading.