Hello.
I have stumbled upon this thread some days ago.
Since I consider myself kind of new at trading, the ease of use of this indicator attracted me.
I read it's now ineffective and not good for these times and thus the interest dropped.
In my possibly naive point of view, the indicator issue is mostly because it's conservative and requires a good trend (not the often crappy flats) and its exit strategy triggers so late that it's easy to eat much of the gain in case of quasi-horizontal market.
But for some reason, this is the one TS I actually earn money on (and I am not in demo so money hurts...), so I decided to see if it's possible to adapt the TS to more modern days.
Notice I will
mostly talk about the 4 hours time scale version, not the 5 minutes. And I'll talk about the manual way, since EAs have been published already.
First of all took the Alert version
Link
which in turn is adapted from the original
Link
First of all I want to give credit to the original makers, all I did are some bugfixes.
I am adding copies of their indicators (and my fixed version) to reproduce my setup, feel free to moderate and remove them if it's against something.
Setup
Get the following stuff at this post:
Link
by fxid10t
Add it in a 5 minutes graph only, or use my template.
Get the attached bugfix of this thread's indicator called Vahrokh-Gann-ICWR v0.1.1 beta5_alert.mq4
Add this
only in a 4 hours time scale graph. If you'll use my templates it should be setup already.
If you'll put it in a 5 minutes graph, MT4 will hang and you'll have to click and remove it waiting for 1-2 minutes per click you do.
While you add it, switch to "Input values" tab and make sure "RequiredWaveHeight" is 150.
Get "pivot.mq4" - Copyright © 2004, MetaQuotes Software Corp. off their indicators site. Any pivot would do, really.
Get MACD with crossing.mq4 - © 2004 MetaQuotes Software Corp. off their indicators site. It's totally optional, just a personal preference of mine to see all the MACD lines.
Get Heiken Ashi Real.mq4 off the same site. This is optional but very juicy for scalping. Use it on 15 mins scale for this TS.
Get the templates attached to the post:
eur_usd_icwr.tpl
(to be applied to a 5 minutes graph)
eur_usd_4h_vah_icwr.tpl
(to ba applied to a 4h graph)
Notice how in the 4 hours screen there's a RSI setup with a 50% line.
The name is mistakenly suggesting they are for EUR / USD: they work for the other pairs as well.
Feel free to remove the moving averages and bands if they are too confusing.
At the end you should end up with a setup with these screens:
5 mins graph
4h graph
Operativity
You'll do what the original text says plus the following:
1) Learn what the original book says and
ALWAYS obey to the "daily RSI > 50" contraint if you want to go long and "daily RSI < 50" if you want to go short.
2) To have good results, you want the daily RSI to be above 60 or at least to be rising.
3) Use the 5 minutes version to get the best entry point. The trend should not be flat during that phase (once you enter, it's fine to have flat periods) and to maximize profit you'd want to see the wave to go to the minimum of the last 10-30 minutes (ie bouncing over a support). Wait for the 5 mins indicator to give the signal then enter.
The system will work even if you ignore some of the above (but NOT the RSI > 50 bit, which is *the key* to this TS) but not as good.
4) At this point switch to the 4h version and check it out every now and then, expecially when an alarm is raised.
5) Use the stop loss they told in the book, don't use a trailing stop for 4 hours or you will lose gobs of money due to continuous triggering of it.
6) To exit, you can do as the book says or you can be more reactive. Make sure to be on the 4h a rising edge and not in a "valley". Then aided by EMAs or Heiken Ashi Real on a 15 minutes scale, you manually exit (or put a stop loss or a tight trailing stop) as they begin turning downwards.
If you don't manually exit, be prepared to earn pips but at an hiccuping rate, i.e. you gain 100 today, then go down 80 tomorrow, then up 90... The net result will be positive but not as attractive as you want.
Another tip: check your currency natural cycles. Since 4h is pretty long, you can adapt to the currency cycle and enter when it's low and exit when it's high (in case of bullish RSI > 50 that is).
Issues found and / or fixed
- High CPU usage on 5 minutes: my knowledge of MQL is not huge, for what I have seen the "pretty" indicator uses a way to redraw that is not optimized.
Fix: As I indicated in the instructions above, I downloaded another somewhat less pretty indicator and use it when I want to trade on 5 minutes and to take the exact buy / sell signal.
ICWR as an EA?
by fxid10t
- Totally wrong zig zags: it's due to your account dealing with 5 decimal pips. This is easily dealt with.
I did not get the issue with the fxid10t indicator but I did with the one I fixed and linked here.
To fix it, just open the indicator's properties and change "RequiredWaveHeight" from 150 to 1500. This will deal with decimal pips.
To make sure it works, count the pips off the zig zags the indicator shows and see if they are actually 150. If they are short, you have to multiply the value.
Hope the above stuff will help someone like it helped me.
Vahrokh
Linear Mode
