Email dated Fri 12/30/2007 from Steve Fleming in response to Bob telling him about specific problems with the Gap Trader EA and urging him to take a serious look. UPDATE - 2 days after I sent this via email and had heard nothing from Bob I decided to ensure he heard my concerns by posting to the group. Obviously I knew it wouldn't reach the group as I was already being heavily moderated/censored. Within 12 hours I had been completely banned and my membership revoked. The act of a man with nothing to hide? You decide. Also on another point the idea that one has to have multiple instances of the same EA and multiple .set files is ridiculous and as many users are finding out, error prone. If the programmer had actually given the matter some consideration there is a much more elegant solution that does not require intervention from the user. As a suggestion one could have a text file that the EA would load on startup. This text file would simply have each set of the 4 sp levels. Each set of 4 would just be repeated as many times as necessary. There would be a variable in the normal EA set up box entitled 'NumberOfLevels' which would be used for monitoring each level of the hedge. The same solution would do away with the other item that is causing people to unwittingly inject errors which is the ludirous situation of having numerous 'Magic Numbers'. The idea of magic numbers is and always has been for instances where an EA is operating on different pairs or different time frames. Its is not intended to ciruumvent the fact that the EA was not written correctly. See example below. It may sound complicated to the layman but for a competent programmer it is a simple matter. The point is this is something that the EA should handle thus freeing the user from overly complicated, error prone and mundane/repetitive tasks. Bottom line is this EA is being touted as a revolution as something never before seen. It's ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! Well unless you consider somebody having the audacity to charge people $200 and then happily watch them lose their money because of a VERY poorly coded EA.
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Bob Thanks for your personal reply. I asked the question of Jerry purely because I could see the obvious double standard going on AND because of the fact that I am a developer with over 10 years experience in various languages and have been programming in mql for almost 2 years. I've written many EA's and know for a FACT that the shadow profit resetting to zero was infact a bug and a very dangerous one at that. It's also obvious that Jerry realised that, way too late, and tried to fix it with the amatuer hack of having the code check if the shadow was zero (the quick and dirty approach) rather than spending the extra time to find the bug and correct it which he later did. Now I've read your seminars and your numerous posts and to me you seem like a very honest and genuine guy who is truly trying to help and for that I applaud you. It's also for that reason that it bothers me when I see somebody pulling the wool over your eyes which Jerry is quite blatantly doing. It's apparent from your response to me that either one of two things is happening. Either you and Jerry are both aware of the problem and are trying to fool your customers with claims of a 'super EA that is TOTALLY different from anything that has come before' OR, and this is my personal belief, Jerry is giving you a bunch of techno-bable and blinding you with mumbo jumbo like so many snake oil salesmen often do in the computer programming arena. The truth is the EA itself, not the system, is a VERY poor example of coding, filled with bugs and poor programming practices that a professional programmer would be embarassed to show a client let alone charge money for it. I'm assuming since you hired him you are not too familiar with coding but even a layman will be able to see the problem with this function taken directly from your latest version. Ask Jerry to show you the code and you'll see it and many other terrible coding practices. int CloseAll() { Notice how line 1,5, 9 etc etc are the same piece of code? This whole function is wrong and could have been written in just 3 lines. Doesn't seem like much to you I'm sure but as a professional programmer it just screams AMATEUR! The above code could be rewritten something like this... int CloseAll(int NumberOfInstances){ *Not meant to be a real working function but just as an example of what a proper function might look like* But even that is a bit clumsy but it's still WAY more efficient than Jerrys effort. Another totally newbie mistake he has made is in his file read/write functions. He has copied the same functions 10 times rather than simply writing them once and passing in variables which is what a professional would do. A professional programmer would be using arrays to hold variables and not using multiple IF statements when one would do if used in a properly constructed function. I'm certainly not asking you to simply take my word, why should you, but if you're serious about your business and product which I genuinely believe you are PLEASE have an unbiased third-party take a look at the code and I know without any trace of doubt that they will confirm what I'm saying. Bob I hope you accept this constructive criticism in the manner it was intended. I'm a 41 year old guy who, like yourself, has been around the block a few times. I've seen people being duped by so called experts in many different professions and it annoys me to see it happening here. I hope all that helps you in some way. Steve
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This was NOT in the original email but I include it here for Jerrys convenience |
// load the values from text file |
| And the text file would look something like this. |
0 |