Ray the Random Robot Reborn

I recently stumbled across a thread on LinkedIn which started with the querulous claim:

Do you know any trading system that generates more than $20,000/month profit?

accompanied by a suspiciously familiar looking equity curve:

I wasn't the first to suggest that Mr. Martingale seemed as though he might be involved, and I wasn't the last either!

Hmmm – Now where have I seen an equity curve like that before? Aha! Now I remember…..

http://trading-gurus.com/buru-trader-blows-up/

The owner of the nameless "robot" in question demurred:

Not a martingale system is all I can say 🙂
What shall I say when seems some of you have all the answers looking to a simple chart? 🙂

so I pointed out:

The "simple equity curve" speaks for itself Peter!

Peter demurred some more, so eventually I conceded:

In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary I'll stick with "Martingale like money management".

All of this prompted me to bring Ray the Random Robot back from the dead! A quick test suggested that even the very latest incarnation of OOP enabled MetaTrader 4 still doesn't allow backtesting of multiple instrument strategies. A rummage around my hard drive revealed that version 8.80 of the ActivTrades flavour of MetaTrader 5 was all present and correct. I fired that up, opened a new demo account, and it wasn't long before Ray was happily playing with pretend money in MetaTrader land once again. I let him loose on a basket of USD crosses starting arbitrarily on January 1st 2016, and this was the pleasing result:

Evidently there's life in the old donkey's head yet!

Two Robots and a Human at the Design of the Year 2013 Exhibition

Regular readers may recall that Ray Robot Senior uses (pseudo) random entries with a 50 pip profit target and stop loss. Without even bothering with "optimisation" and the like he somehow managed to produce a total net profit of $548,578 over the course of somewhat less than 14 months. Ray assures me that works out to be well over $20,000/month profit. In Monopoly money of course!

The question therefore remains:

What has Peter's Paragon system got that Ray the Random Robot does not?

The inverse question is easier to answer. Peter's robot doesn't come complete with full source code.

[Edit – February 26th 2017]

I've upgraded my copy of MetaTrader 5 to build 1545. The Strategy Tester now has a "Every tick based on real ticks" option, which I don't recall seeing before.

I tried testing Ray again using that, but it seems to have a bug:

Perhaps it's confined to USD/JPY? I think I'll try testing Ray Robot Jr. with "real ticks", too see if MT5 now gets closer to duplicating his real money trades than it used to!