FAITH Software Life Cycle Model for Forex Expert Advisors

Abstract

The emotional stress and uncertainties associated with foreign exchange (forex) trading due to the high risk of losing the investment capital has left most forex traders in a state of indecision on the best methodology to apply for achieving long term profit. The provision of lot sizes, leverages, take profits and stop losses in forex trading implies that very high profit can be made within a very short time with the same capital, but at the same time, very high losses can be incurred. On one hand, this provision often prompts a set of traders to become greedy by increasing their take profit levels, lot sizes and leverages, which in turn increases their probability of losing out. On the other hand, the provision creates doubts and induces the fear of losses in some other set of traders. Consequently, these set of conservative traders employ the use of relatively small lot sizes, low leverages and low values of take profit and high stop loss levels. This in turn often results in a devastating effect on the investment capital due to lost opportunities and resulting losses. The problem of losses in forex trading effort is compounded by the fact that many programmers and developers of forex expert advisors do not adopt a software life cycle, having learned only how to write codes to program the trading platform. Furthermore, software engineering professionals who understand the import of software development life cycles soon discover that conventional software life cycles are not capable of effectively handling the complexity of the forex market. This paper models the human characteristics of greed, fear and doubt as manifested by traders in forex trading using selected expert advisors’ properties. It proposes Facts, Analysis, Implementation, Testing and Hope (FAITH) software life cycle model for Forex trading profitability to tackle the problem of indecision in the development of forex expert advisors. The proposed model was implemented on a live trading platform for a period of three months and compared with doubt, fear and greed approach to trading. The results showed that while a level of greed can be profitable, FAITH software life cycle produced more profitable results and can be adopted for forex trading. Keywords: Software Development Life Cycle, Expert advisors, Forex Model, Losses, Profit