Automatically Optimize cross Moving average!

March 11th, 2010

Still believing in Cross Moving Average and always seeking the simplest solution. I came across the sentence “there is no magic setting for cross MA”. This indicator tries out a lot of settings each time the time frame or the symbol changes or even on each new candle. It works by dull “trading” the last 100 or so candles and choosing the settings with the best success. It is simply measuring the distance between a short and a long signal, as if anybody have traded this without stop loss. It takes the spread into account.

The lower window shows the distance between the short and the long Moving Average positive values are for long trades, negative values are for short trades in pips. It may indicate a take profit.

The upper line says “Profit today with MA 5/19 is 60 pips”. The indicator or the user has chosen 5 for the fast MA and 19 for the slow MA. The next text field displays the results from yesterday followed by the signal Long or Short. Traders may like to drop two moving averages to the chart and set them up to the given value.

Inside the chart it draws triangles to indicate were a trade have had been on this MA settings, red triangles are for loosing trades, green for winning.

Parameters

PeriodShort=6;
Period for the fast MA. Ignore if optimize is true
PeriodLong=40;
Period for the slow MA. Ignore if optimize is true
Method=0;
Method for iMA
Optimize=true;
The indicator automatically chooses values for fast and slow MA
DrawTringles=true;
Draw triangles into the chart
MinShortMA=2;
MaxShortMA=20;
MaxLongMA=100;
Min and Max values for the optimization, it will try out values between 2 and 20 for the fast MA and 7 to 100 for the slow MA
StepLongMA=3;
StepShortMA=3;
For speeding up the search, it is trying out every third value
CountOptimize=200;
It is analyzing 200 candles from the past. The more candles you analyze the slower it will be, a big number may also result in less good results
OptimizeOnNewCandle=false;
Start optimization on each new candle. Note: Optimization can take some time and slow down your terminal
Alarm=true;
Ring the bell if a new signal arises

Next step, I want to create an expert Advisor of it, however I am still wondering how to detect a sideways trend which should not be traded with cross MA. Until now my EA based on optimized cross MA sometimes makes excellent gains and burns it the next day.

Image:

Created by: tflores