Introduction to Athekros

The development team has a finance and risk management background and for this reason the EA exploits main financial theories in order to trade.

The trading system has been built with a primary goal: replicate the strategies of investment funds exploiting the accessibility of retail trading systems.

For this reason performance are designed for longer time horizons.

You do not need any knowledge, use default settings and no pre-optimization needed since optimization is not used. For this reason the product is “plug and play” and ready to use as soon as bought. Our team is continuously working in enhancing performance by updating the code periodically, all new suggestion and instructions will be indicated on our page.

Robustness

Our development team has been primary focused in testing the robustness of the trading system:

• Extended back-testing period - 8 years
• We only use REAL-TICK data to reach 99,90% modelling quality. Demo downloads and relative testing must be assessed on this data to be considered as reliable
• Multi-symbol back-testing - USDJPY, EURUSD, EURJPY, GBPJPY, CADJPY
• Monte Carlo Simulations - randomization of trade results for a total of 30 alternative paths of the system over 8 years
• Trading Environment Sensibility - the system has been tested on 6 different ECN brokers
• Low Commissions Sensibility - the system has been tested using variable spreads and real slippage, the average profit target is always at least 20 times greater than the average spread and slippage of most liquid forex symbols
• Low Latency Sensibility - the system is a low frequency trading system which permits to use average VPS latency
• NO OPTIMIZATION - Athekros was strictly developed by avoiding the optimization process in order to generate performance which are independent from built-in parameters (this feature directly bypasses the issue of curve-fitting)
• Forward test provided - 6 months
• 5 digit broker back-testing accuracy

Logic

The system is volatility driven exploiting conditional heteroscedasticity as a primary theory (similar logic of GARCH models). The system detects the alternation between low and high volatility clusters to trade high volatility rather than price direction. The volatility signal algorithm analyzes raw price information, this permits to apply the financial efficiency theory (randomness of predictions->50% and 50%). This logic permits to build a statistical method constructing a positive expected value of the “gaming structure” for each trade. Small single returns develop growth in time using the continuous compounding method.

The trading system has a low operativity but trades continuously (average trades per month=13).

General Recommendations

• EA parameters Settings: use default settings
• Symbol: USDJPY, EURUSD, EURJPY, GBPJPY, CADJPY. It is fundamental to diversify in order to trade correctly and so to use each suggested symbol. This has to be done by attaching the EA to every symbol chart using a unique magic number for each symbol
• Time frame: H4
• Brokers: ECN
• Spread: variable spread only (true ECN)
• Leverage: >=1:50
• Trading Condition: Self-adaptive
• VPS: average latency required
• Minimum Capital: 1000

Money Management and Risk Management

• 1% of the account balance for each trade in order to not over-leverage the trading account.
• We use a circuit breaker that automatically stops the EA from trading if the built-in algorithm recognizes a deviation from the theoretical a-systematicity of forecasting errors (efficiency theory). If circuit breaker is activated the EA will notify it in the Journal and recommendations are to wait for 2 weeks and then back-test to assess recovery.

Parameters

• Percentage_Of_Account: partition of account to use
• Individual_Trade_Allocation: individual trade max risk (% of account balance)
• MagicNumber: Magic number of the EA
• Send_Email: if set to true you are enabling e-mail push notifications to know when new trades are opened/closed or when circuit breaker is activated
• Push_Notifications: if set to true you are enabling mobile push notifications to know when new trades are opened/closed or when circuit breaker is activated
• Max Slippage: to change the acceptable slippage threshold in pips