Archive for September, 2010

Brokers Using Suffixes

I never liked suffixes added to symbol name. Make developer life even more difficult. Now I have a reason more.

Although Crescendo is made to handle them, a few hours ago we found a nasty bug that was causing the opening of multiple duplicate orders on brokers using suffixes for currency pairs symbol names.

I already have the solution and in the next 12 hours maximum we’ll release an updated version of Crescendo EA for you all. Version 1.1.

I will email everyone when I have it. In the meantime just either wait or demo trade.

The brokers affected are only those using suffixes for their currency pairs symbol name like IBFX, Gallant FX, Collective FX, Broco, etc.

The other brokers are OK.

Thanks for your patience but was a nasty problem that showed up only on rare occasions.

Smiley Faces And Magic Numbers

Ciao a tutti,

I just woke up after a very few hours sleep.

Yesterday has been a really great day. Much more that I expected!

We are having an incredible feedback from you all

I’ve been answering for 10 hours in a row to your emails. And looking at my mailbox something says that today I’ll spent my day in a very similar way. Fortunately I’m not alone. The team is working great and we are keeping answering time very very low. This is another way to show you how different we are.

Let go to 3 of the most frequently asked questions that we had.

Smiley Face (error 126)

You apply Crescendo to the chart but there’s no text interface. Usually you also have an “error 126″ shown in the “experts” tab.

This is because your system is missing some important DLL to make Crescendo EA work. You can download it from the Microsoft website here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9B2DA534-3E03-4391-8A4D-074B9F2BC1BF&displaylang=en

This solves 99% of the times the problem.

Magic Numbers

There is a little bit of confusion about that here and probably is my fault. My words in the manual and in the videos can be read in different ways.

To clear out things… you don’t need to modify GBPUSD and GBPJPY magic numbers. Leave them as they are.

They only need to be change IF (and only IF) there are other EAs running on the same MT4 platform and uses the same magic number. This is very unlikely to happen. So in 99.999% of the cases you don’t have to change them.

What I wanted to mean is that the GBPUSD MN has to be the same both on the GBPUSD chart and GBPJPY chart. Same thing for the GBPJPY MN :)

Those who changed had experienced double open orders, sometimes even on the opposite direction. So close them, and take the MNs back to the original.

Sorry about that!

Changing timeframe and/or preferences with Crescendo on the chart

In that case Crescendo EA need to re-authenticate to the server.
To do so without reapplying the EA you should:
  1. right-click the chart
  2. select Template > Save Template
  3. name as you want, example: “Crescendo”
The above saves the template, so everytime you open your charts or make changes in the timeframe, your can just apply the template to reauthenticate the EA:
  1. right-click the chart
  2. select Template > Crescendo (or any other name you have used to save it)
I also recorded a short video for you regarding this matter. You can find it here:

You can find the list of all the FAQs here:

http://oldtreepublishing.estreamdesk.com/forums/8061

This list is continuously updated. You’ll find probably most of your questions already answered there already. So I suggest you to give a look there before sending an email.

That’s all for now. Let me get back to your emails.

Welcome to Crescendo… this is just the start :)

How Far A Backtest Should Go

…to consider an EA a reliable one.

During the last few days  I’ve been asked for more years of backtest for Crescendo. Yesterday we posted a backtest started Jan 2009 till last friday, so about 20 months.

To develop and backtest Crescendo EA, we used data coming from 2008.

That mainly because the Forex market has changed so much during the very last few years that most of the times something that was good in 2007/2008 is no longer good now. We all know that, isn’t it? ;)

Let me tell you something on my experience as a developer and tester: backtesting and optimization doesn’t need to be done for very long ranges of time, but for significant periods. Periods with trending market, flat market, with high and low volatility, etc. The 20 months used for backtesting Crescendo EA, tell you a lot of things. Most of all because they has been made using tick by tick data (99% quality so very near to real time data). THAT is the real difference ;)

The data that are usually used for backtesting (and that are used for common commercial EAs optimization) are very far from real data. That’s one of the reasons why most of the EA fail the real life test even if they perform great in backtests for a lot of years.

But we also have more than 7 months of live trading performances to confirm backtest performances that probably is the most important proof that you can have of the consistency of Crescendo.

So a part of Crescendo EA performances, in general don’t trust too much backtests, not even those made by you on your platform because is mainly the data that you use that are not good. Start trusting them only if after a few months of live trading, performances are confirmed and almost in line with them.

Less Than 24 Hours…

…and Crescendo EA will be publicly available.

Counting the hours after all those months of work. Everything is ready now and we almost only doing the last checks and tests. The “machine” is working in full force to get you also the best support service out there.

I’m sure you’ll appreciate that and most of all, you’ll enjoy trading WITH Crescendo.

9999 pips

Hi,

a few hours ago Crescendo’s live account just closed the 9999th pip in gain in a little more than 7 full months of trading.

Well it’s an exciting target. Sincerely, Crescendo performances still surprise me :)

The first thing I do when it reaches those targets, like when we passed the 100% gain a few months ago, is to share with the rest of the team, Mark first of all.

If you have the chance to trade using Crescendo EA, and if it will be a success (hopefully) is thanks to all of them.

Thanks guys… this is just the start!

After The Webinars

My first post in Crescendo’s blog is for all the people that partecipated to last two days webinars. Thanks for being so “patient” to listen to me for 2 hours each time.

And even more to those leaving comments and sending emails about them.

THANKs! THANKs! THANKs!

Even if I’m quite tired those days (you can’t imagine what does it mean to prepare a launch like that) reading all your questions and comments makes me feel incredibly “up”.

This blog will be one of the many ways I want to find to keep you and me in touch and help you in taking the best out of Crescendo and out of automatic trading in general.

Soon I’ll start a Twitter channel as well and (maybe) a Facebook account as well. Not sure about Facebook as sincerely I’m not a great fan of it.

So feel free to comment my posts, email me and I’ll try to do my best to reply to you personally.