Author: Alan Ross

Four 5-minute entries on 16,926 EURUSD bars, filtered by the M15, M30, H1 or H4 trend. Read from the last closed bar, the filter beat no filter in 67 of 144 setups and made 4 profitable. Read with the unfinished bar’s final close, as repainting MTF indicators draw it, it showed 114 better and 32 profitable.

Keltner (EMA 20 ± ATR), Bollinger 20/2, Donchian 20 and a plain ATR impulse on the same 16,926 EURUSD M5 bars with the same exits. All 50 tests lost after costs. The ATR channel was the best to follow and the worst to fade. As a filter, ATR cut an EMA cross’s loss from 2.60 to 0.22 pips per trade.

Four ATR breakout rules on 16,926 EURUSD M5 bars: impulse, range expansion, Keltner channel and the daily open breakout, with ATR 7 to 50, multipliers 1 to 3 and five exits. Following the break lost before costs in 289 of 310 setups. Fading it was positive before costs in 297, and a 1-pip spread, half an ATR on M5, took most of that.

One entry rule on 16,925 EURUSD M5 bars, traded with a fixed 0.01 lot and with martingale. With 10-pip targets and stops the fixed lot lost $82.27 and never broke; the martingale ran out of margin on 57 of 66 start dates. With 20-pip targets the fixed lot made $39.02 and the martingale $191.73.

Martingale, grid, Asian breakout, EMA cross and RSI return, each run on 16,925 EURUSD M5 bars with a $1,000 account, 0.01 lots and 1 pip of cost. The grid won 146 of 147 baskets and hit a stop-out on 22 of 66 start dates. The martingale ran out of margin on 57. The three robots with a stop never blew up and never made money.