PipSniper Expert Advisor - Observations

A few ideas for improving the results of the PipSniper expert advisor

First, for some strange reason, the developers did not set a ban in the expert advisor on trading on the night from Sunday to Monday. This contradicts the rules for working with night scalpers. Moreover, I have never even seen a scalper trading from Sunday to Monday at all, because there is a risk that the expert's stop-loss will be hit by a sharp move at the market open.

What should be done? Simply disable the expert advisor on the night from Sunday to Monday.

Can this be done through the settings without removing the expert from the chart?

Yes. Click on the chart with the attached expert advisor and press F7 on the keyboard.

On the "Common" tab, remove the check marks from the "Allow alerts" and "Allow live trading" items. Press OK.

On Monday evening, to make the expert advisor trade again, put the check marks back in place.

The results will change somewhat when adjusting the deviation from GMT time. The idea was suggested by Shengler from RuTracker, many thanks to him for that.

The idea is to disable the AutoGMtoffset function and manually set the deviation from Greenwich time, but 1 less than it should be in accordance with the terminal time (see How to set the correct GMT offset).

For example, the GMToffset for Alpari is 3, but we will set 2.

How to do this in the settings - see Description of the Piplaser expert advisor settings

The question is, how will the results change? Let's take a look.

(Images are clickable)

Backtest for the same period, but with an "incorrect" offset 1 less:

As we can see, the results improved significantly when the offset was reduced by one.

But how will this affect testing on an earlier period?

Backtest from April 2007 to April 2011 with the correct offset:

The same period with the offset 1 less:

We get a much less attractive chart, although the final profit is at about the same level in both tests. I think it was precisely the equity curve that forced the developers to move the time one hour forward. We should not forget that their main task is, above all, to sell this expert advisor.

And what should we, ordinary traders, do? The forex market changes very quickly, and we need to apply what works now, in the current market. Therefore, setting the GMToffset for this expert advisor 1 less may well have a favorable effect on the results.

Unfortunately, there is too little information on real trading with these settings to draw confident conclusions,- it needs to be checked by testing on real accounts.