Deadline June

[Adamus]

Re: Gap Filler system - starting from scratch again

After several programming mistakes which cost me several days of worktime and which made the results I collected completely confusing since they were all out of whack with the first set I had (above), I decided to start from scratch and build up the set of backtest results for the system as it develops.

Fortunately the first results I posted in msg 774 are correct, but I'm going to go back to the basic idea and post the results right from the bare bones system and onward.

For some reason NinjaTrader now can't run 2001-2008 without crashing. It can only cope with 2004-2008 and even then it crashes occasionally. Must be a memory thing. It provides more incentive to get my systems running on a VPS so I can use my trading machine as a dev box.

I have to decide which switches and filters to apply. There are several to choose from as I have already outlined.

(1a) how much of the gap to aim for when placing target order - I haven't varied this and I don't think it's that important, but I chose 90% on the whim that I don't want to see that the price reached the target but the order was never filled.

(1b) enter on open in direction to close gap, exit all trades at end of day. This can be the baseline to compare everything against.

(1c) exit on closing gap, or at end of day.

(2) whether to base the stop size on Friday's range or on the average range e.g. 21 bar daily ATR - the results were no different. I decided to keep it simple and ditch the ATR, just using Friday's range.

(3) what % of (2) should be used for the stop size. I optimised this earlier, using a % of the previous days range, but I'm testing this time with one value for the whole portfolio. I can optimise later. This is the most important parameter.

(4) filter out the small gaps. I won't take gaps that were less than 5 points in size.

(5) filter out the huge gaps. I optimised this earlier - 40%, 50%, 60% etc of Friday's range.

(6) Friday's range can be divided into 5 zones with different probabilities that the gap will fill. If Friday's candle is 3 zones, (candlestick = 1 zone, wicks = 1 zone above & 1 zone below candlestick) the 4th zone is above the high and the 5th below the low. I don't know if the technical relevance of this in the S&P market is equally valid in forex though. I doubt it somehow.

(7) use an MA to filter out trades against the trend, maybe just a strong trend - in which case I need a trend strength indicator too

(8) another idea from this S&P gap trader is to place the entry trade as a stop away from the Open, to benefit from any market move away from the gap initially. This requires optimisation, or perhaps just placing it half way from the Open to the stop loss.

 

[traderman1]

I am about to launch myself into a new career as an algorithm trader.

My plan in outline is simple: I have £40K risk capital and £15K to live off and the goal is to start trading at the latest at the beginning of June and to be profitable enough to withdraw £1500 per month from then on for subsistence.

Hopefully my career will last a bit longer than June.
.

I have used the last couple of hours reading through this thread.
It is now 12 months on. And long past the June deadline to start trading.
Have you actually placed a trade yet?

 

[Adamus]

Have you actually placed a trade yet?

I have used the last couple of hours reading through this thread.
It is now 12 months on. And long past the June deadline to start trading.
Have you actually placed a trade yet?

Yes I have.

With all due respect, if it makes you yawn, why are you pretending to be curious? Did you just give up reading because you didn't see the answer to your question?

I know the thread can run into the sand on occasion, but give me a bit of leeway, I am actually trying to achieve quite a lot here and keeping a perfect journal is not on my list of high priorities.

 

[brettus]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

Yes I have.

With all due respect, if it makes you yawn, why are you pretending to be curious? Did you just give up reading because you didn't see the answer to your question?

I know the thread can run into the sand on occasion, but give me a bit of leeway, I am actually trying to achieve quite a lot here and keeping a perfect journal is not on my list of high priorities.

I think you should stick to the majors with your gap filler system. Did you know GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair? Well is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. Rather than EURGBP being derived from EURUSD and GBPUSD.

 

[Adamus]

Choosing Forex pairs to trade

I think you should stick to the majors with your gap filler system. Did you know GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair? Well is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. Rather than EURGBP being derived from EURUSD and GBPUSD.

The point you raise is typical for forex. It's a bloody camel market as far as I can see.

Maybe at Deutsche Bank they quote the GBP/USD like that, but I bet it's different at Citibank, or at another big bank, or for IB, who knows how they assemble their quote feed. And another question is how the order matching algorithms work on their systems e.g. Currenex, as opposed to the price feeds.

Basically I'm not saying I don't believe you, I'm just saying I don't believe they all do it like that.

I think the important thing to bear in mind is whether the costs of trading are manageable and the system is profitable after accounting for them.

As meanreversion cares to say, GBP/AUD - you cannot be serious? But yes I can.

At this point in time I have one system which I trade on 21 currency pairs, and I have one system which I trade on just one pair.

I want three portfolios of currency pairs. I already have 2 - an extended set with 21 pairs, and a standard set with 13 pairs - and I'm still trying to decide on the pairs to put into a core set with only 5 to 8 pairs.

I'll test my systems on all of them and see where it works.

At the end of the day, if I'm going to trade the system on the extended set of 21 pairs, it's got to be the type of system that I would consider trading on any market, futures included, from energy to bonds.

If it doesn't make sense to trade it on the exotic crosses, then obviously I'll only trade it on the core currencies, e.g. if it's a system where the reasoning behind it is based on known fundamental or technical theories rather than just a pattern discovered without an identifiable explanation. For instance, systems based around pivot points for which technical traders often actually create the surrounding price action are only going to work on the core currencies where sufficient technical traders are active.

Obviously I also look at slippage and bid/ask spread e.g. I wouldn't try to run a low profit, high frequency system on the extended set where the average spread is 3 whole points or more.

So yes, point taken but with a pinch of salt.

 

[Adamus]

Choosing Forex pairs to trade, more.

I think you should stick to the majors with your gap filler system. Did you know GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair? Well is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. Rather than EURGBP being derived from EURUSD and GBPUSD.

Brettus,

another trader pointed me to the Bank of International Settlements - look at the xls spreadsheet linked on the right "Triennial...." and see table 4 "Global Foreign Exchange market turnover by currency pair".

In 2010 GBP/USD was 9%, EUR/GBP was 3%.

I think it's pretty conclusive: it's a camel market. However the banks and settlements and quote providers do it under the hood, it's up to us as individual traders to work out what works for us best.

 

[Adamus]

Re: Gap Filler system - starting from scratch again

I have to decide which switches and filters to apply. There are several to choose from as I have already outlined.

Finally I have some results from backtesting for this. Each one took an hour at least to complete and occasionally crashed NT7, hence the long time it took.

It's going to be a pain in the neck trying to post it on T2W because the forum just doesn't do tables, but here goes anyway. Decided the quickest way to do it is to take a screen shot of the excel spreadsheet - see the attachments.

The time period is 2004 through 2008. That was restricted by NinjaTrader crashing if I tried to use longer time periods.

The forex pairs traded are my 13 standard. At the end of backtesting, I have the opportunity to test it on the core set of 8 forex pairs, or the extended set of 21.

The results do not include any commission or slippage.

The trade P'n'L are highly correlated per week. Generally speaking, most win or most lose per week. So as well as the largest losing trade, I included the largest losing weekly period in the results.

Since all trades kick off simultaneously on the week's Open, for purposes of calculating the optimal fixed fraction for money management which requires the largest foreseeable loss on any one trade, I have to enter the largest loss on the week. If the trades are simultaneous I don't get a chance to modify my bet size.

Point (1a) is what % of the gap to aim for. It is fixed for all backtests. If the market is going to fill the gap, I figured 90% will do. I didn't test with 100% so that's something to go on the to-do list.

Column B (1b)
enter on open in direction to close gap, exit all trades at end of day. This is actually profitable for this time period and these forex pairs. This possibly demonstrates the raw tendency I'm trying to exploit. I have other periods I can test on - another item for the to-do list.

Column C (1c)
exit on closing gap, or at end of day. It's good to see that this made an indisputable improvement to all statistics.

Column D (3)
the stop: what % of the Friday range should be used for the stop size? I optimised this earlier, but I'm testing this time with one value for the whole portfolio. This is the most important parameter. Columns D to G: 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%. It's pretty obvious that 50% is the way to go. Another item for the to-do list: check the individual instruments - if they are not all profitable, then I'll optimise each individually, especially since the optimisation earlier showed that some pairs have optimal values in the 100% or 20% area.

Column H (4)
Add on a filter to prevent trades on the small gaps. I won't take gaps that were less than 5 points in size. It doesn't make sense if the trade's going to cost me more than it can possibly make.

So compared to column F with 50% stop only, this reduced the number of trades, logical. Most changes to the results were negligible except these:

- decrease net profit - bad
- decreased profit/DD - bad
- increased the average trade - good
- decreased max time to recover - good

So I'm going to keep this filter. It's all about increasing the profit per trade and getting rid of the small profit trades will save commissions and the effect on the results is acceptable.

Column I (5)
filter out the huge gaps. This backtest is without the small gaps filter, but with the 50% stop. I optimised this earlier too, as a percentage 40%, 50%, 60% etc of Friday's range. Here I used 90% for all instruments.

I lost 10 trades from the results compared to F. That's nothing really. Less than 0.1% of the trades. It makes a $1000 improvement to the Largest Losing Week.

Obviously my guess that 90% of the Friday range as a filter would be significant was wrong. I should retest with 60%. On the to-do list.

Column J (6)
Friday's range can be divided into 5 zones with different probabilities that the gap will fill. If Friday's candle is 3 zones, the candlestick = zone 1, the wick above = zone 2 if Friday was up for the day or zone 3 if Friday was down for the day, and vice versa for the wick below. The 4th zone is above the high and the 5th below the low. I tested only entering when the Open fell within zones 1 & 2.

The largest winning week was way down, but the largest losing week was hardly changed.

The maximum time to recover was markedly improved.

So, more swings and round-abouts. Importantly the profit per trade was down, as was the profit/drawdown.

I think I can live without this filter.

Column K (7)
Use an MA to filter out trades against the trend, maybe just a strong trend - in which case I need a trend strength indicator too.

This was so bad it's worth reversing for another backtest.

Column L (8)
The idea is to place the entry limit order away from the Open, to benefit from any market move away from the gap initially. Placed it half way from the Open to the stop loss. Again, the results were bad.

However from my trials of the system in simulated trading, it's very difficult to get a decent price at the market. It needs a limit order. But it should be much closer to the Open than halfway to the stop.

The equity curve attached is from column F.

Note how the Credit Crunch volatility kicks in for 2007 & 2008.

The huge losing weeks are from 2008.

 

[Adamus]

Predetermined Goal

As Ralph Vince advises in The Mathmatics of Money Management, if you play a game with unlimited liability indefinitely, the biggest loss you experience will only become larger. He therefore says you need a goal at which point you will get out, should you achieve it.

Naseem Nicholas Taleb outlines the process in Fooled By Randomness, describing Black Swans and their occurence in great detail.

I also want a goal, because trading isn't the only thing I want to do in life. If I achieve that goal, I can quit trading.

I already have an account level stop-loss, £20K. If I get down there, I'm out.

However I haven't ruled out working for pay to get more money to pump up my account and get away from £20K. It would actually be a sensible thing to do right now, if only this trading lark wasn't such a ball. Taking living expenses out of the account means the account equity will go nowhere at this level unless I have a large number of systems running and I stay lucky. WIth IB I can reduce the bet size to $25K per trade which would let me trade several more systems but it would take so long to get them online.

But the goal - my account level limit order. The obvious goal is the big six zeros - a million, sterling. Assuming in the future sterling is worth what it is now.

That's it - my conclusion - target £1,000,000 - with the option to carry on if I happen to get there fast.

I should also put a time stop on this too. Now that is difficult. So if I don't make it to a million after x years, and my account equity hasn't fallen to £20K, then I get out.

Alternatively, I could raise my 'get-out' account level stop loss. Say my account equity rises to £200K, I could raise the stop loss to £100K.

 

[Adamus]

This week's 7 Habits priority setting

Updated Long Term Goals

(1) Make a million - but work out a time limit or a escalating account minimum for this game
(2) Build a trading platform that does all the good things I need that I know from the various different trading platforms I've used or evaluated, e.g. TradeStation, NinjaTrader, TradingBlox as an open-source collaborative project made up of trader-developers.

Medium Term Goals

(1) Find or invent, write, test and implement trading systems firstly to cover monthly outgoings and secondly to increase the capital in my trading account. At this time this is a question of keeping my living costs as low as possible, and secondly putting as many systems as I can onto NinjaTrader.

(2) Software for foundation of trading platform - name it, get it up and running without the database performance issue it currently has dealing with millions of trades.

Short Term Goals

(1) Gap Filler system: finish backtesting and run forward tests.

(2) Other low hanging fruit in the systems ideas list I have: Joel Rensink's One Night Stand and First Strike systems. No progress last week - write in at least 4 hours to work on this.

(3) Get some kind of definitive response from British Telecom on the network problems causing the disconnects in the IB TWS logs - currently getting out-of-office replies on the email of the support staff contact who I'm dealing with.

(4) Software - name it, set up the project testing batch run and code a database performance test which fails if it falls below a desired level.

(5) Sofware 2: get Apache and Tomcat running together on VPS

(6) VPS for NinjaTrader - find best hosting service

Considering it is now Tuesday and I've spent all the time so far on (1), I should be looking at other stuff. I can do this in the hour-long waits while NT7 is churning over the backtests for Gap Filler.

 

[Adamus]

Re: Gap Filler system - starting from scratch again

Refer to this post outlining the second major round of backtesting for background to the results I'm discussing here.

I discovered enough about the way the system works to decide that the basic system for further backtesting should be a limit order entry near the week's Open (set a minute afterwards), exiting either on target filling the gap, or on a stop at 50% of Friday's range from the Open, or at Monday's end of forex session.

Sometimes for comparison's sake I have reverted to market order entries at the weekly Open.

A major factor I have backtested just now is what % of the gap to aim for. I tried 90% on all previous backtests, so here I backtested 100%, 80%, 70%. I used market order entries at the Open, and I put in place the 5 point minimum gap size filter too. I was surprised to find that aiming for 70% of the gap improved all measures except the maximum wins, and at that point I stopped short of doing an optimisation - but I'm going to put that on the list of things to do - test with 60%, 50%, 40% of gap as target. But up to now I'm happy with 70%. There was a clear improvement from 100% stepwise to 70%, although 70% was only marginally better than 80% so I figured it is probably the zenith.

I also backtested filtering out the huge gaps. This time I removed the 'no small gaps' filter, and used market orders to enter on the Open. Previously the filter cutting out trades where the gap was >90% of Friday's range had shown little impact. So I dropped this to filter >60% of Friday's range. The result showed:

number of trades dropped from 3313 to 2288
profit decreased slightly
profit/DD increased from 6.03 to 6.81
profit per trade increased from $36.89 to $52.91
largest losing week decreased from $-10,645 to $-7,445
max time to recover decreased from 350 days to 203 days

So this one looks like a pretty convincing filter.

The MA filter - I reversed it so that I only took trades when there was a gap in same direction as the prevailing trend, i.e. I would then be trading against the trend. This was a major hassle to backtest because the extra moving average pushed the NT7 strategy's memory requirements just beyond what WinXP was prepared to deal with, and it crashed several times. This is with 4 gigs of RAM.

Anyway, the initial MA filter had filtered out trades against the trend. Its results were rubbish. So reversing it and only trading against the trend did improve things - but only marginally. If I get more computing power it would be worth adding a strength meter to allow it to trade against strong trend or weak trends etc, but until then I'm ditching this filter.

Now the next stage of backtesting is adding all this together - the 70% of the gap as target, the filter excluding small gaps, and the filter excluding big gaps - and then working out the best place to put the limit entry order to replace the nightmare market on Open order. I expect backtest results to take a tumble, but it would slaughter the results on slippage with every trade I'm sure if I tried to trade it live. At least that's what simulated trading showed, and live will only be worse.

 

[Adamus]

Re: TurningPoints Improvements Needed

I'm going to start saving charts from NinjaTrader with the Chart Trader showing the TurningPoints strategy running in mid-trade that should never have happened.

Hopefully at some point in the future I'll find ways to program the strategy better.

This trade attached is probably going to be stopped out soon. It's a disaster from the start.

The enter-trade came way too late. The 'Turning Point' name refers to the strategy of spotting turns in the market, and the one on this market was the low of the day yesterday (US style dates on x axis).

So it turned, made a new low but the simple MA cross-over that confirms the turn didn't happen until 2 big bars had gone past.

So maybe big bars like that should be ignored.

Secondly, the entry was too high already because (a) it's entering against the trend down from the top on 27th, and (b) there's a pretty clear down channel too which the entry point is at the top of.

Thirdly the stop is way too close. I have no idea without looking at the code why the system would have chosen to put it there and not at the low yesterday.

Snafu.

This whole sequence of trades is coming too late. The latest exits are selling within a couple of pips of the high, which at first glance looks great but in reality is damn close to turning into loss.

The only way out if the system misses the high is either reversing when the market gets half way down again or just hitting the stop loss if it doesn't catch the reverse.

The entries are just too late. Even while the system can see the turning points mostly correctly, it should be using closer targets on the upside because of the dominant down trend. And the downside targets could be further.

 

[Adamus]

Re: TurningPoints Improvements Needed

I'm going to start saving charts from NinjaTrader with the Chart Trader showing the TurningPoints strategy running in mid-trade that should never have happened.

Hopefully at some point in the future I'll find ways to program the strategy better.

This trade attached is probably going to be stopped out soon. It's a disaster from the start.

The enter-trade came way too late. The 'Turning Point' name refers to the strategy of spotting turns in the market, and the one on this market was the low of the day yesterday (US style dates on x axis).

So it turned, made a new low but the simple MA cross-over that confirms the turn didn't happen until 2 big bars had gone past.

So maybe big bars like that should be ignored.

Secondly, the entry was too high already because (a) it's entering against the trend down from the top on 27th, and (b) there's a pretty clear down channel too which the entry point is at the top of.

Thirdly the stop is way too close. I have no idea without looking at the code why the system would have chosen to put it there and not at the low yesterday.

Snafu.

Here's another one, but with a different problem.

The system is suffering from a massive case of overoptimism. I know what's going to happen here - it's just going to reverse at some point for a small loss, while the big moves will escape without yielding any pips.

Sorry it's not great to look at, if you're reading this thread, but this is just to serve as a reminder when I get to writing MkII of this system.

It's confused by all the Forex Morning Trades but the one I am talking about is the one that's open with the target and stop loss orders in place, shown nicely by NT7 - one of my favourite features.

Just worried for a moment that it was showing my account number there, but it's not, good. That wouldn't have been too clever.

Ignore the 100K trades, that's the other system. The Turning Points system trades are all 50K lot size. Not only is this a ridiculously big stop and target for the system, but the previous trade was also big, not quite as big, and remarkably turned out a winner. This is something I'll have to check somehow. I don't believe many of these big targets and stops are successful.

 

[Adamus]

Re: Gap Filler system - starting from scratch again

Now the next stage of backtesting is adding all this together - the 70% of the gap as target, the filter excluding small gaps, and the filter excluding big gaps - and then working out the best place to put the limit entry order to replace the nightmare market on Open order. I expect backtest results to take a tumble, but it would slaughter the results on slippage with every trade I'm sure if I tried to trade it live. At least that's what simulated trading showed, and live will only be worse.

It turns out the optimal setting for limit entry orders is 5 points away from the Open. It's marginally worse than the market order entries, but since they are just cloud cuckoo land backtest executions, I'm actually quite pleased.

Performance 	Mkt order	5pt limit
Total Profit	$108225	$93625
Profit Factor	1.68  	1.59
Max. Drawdown	$-18495	$-18240
Sharpe Ratio	0.65  	0.55
Profit/DD   	5.85  	5.13
Total Trades	2254 	1475
% Profitable	88.15%	82.58%
Average Trade	$48.01	$63.47
Average Winn	$134.50	$207.72
Average Loss	$-595.58	$-620.14
Ratio Win Loss	0.23  	0.33
Largest Win Wk	$11490	$8680
Largst Loss Wk	$-7445	$-7620
# Trades / Day	1.21  	0.79
Profit / Month	$1784	$1543
Max to Recover	202 days	258 days

Adding a 5 point limit order instead of a market order at Open results in the addition of an extra 5 points to the winners and subtracting an extra 5 points from the losers, hence the increase in the profit per trade.

Obviously though this means that far fewer trades are going to be successful so I would have expected the % profitable trades to drop further than it did.

It makes me wonder whether I'm going around 2 sides of the triangle to reach this conclusion, i.e. why couldn't I see it before without running the 1 hour long backtest?

Perhaps it just wasn't visible in the performance stats I'm looking at.

 

[traderman1]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

Did you know GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair? Well is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. Rather than EURGBP being derived from EURUSD and GBPUSD.

That is not correct. EVERY sentence above is incorrect.

 

[traderman1]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

Yes I have.

With all due respect, if it makes you yawn, why are you pretending to be curious? Did you just give up reading because you didn't see the answer to your question?

I know the thread can run into the sand on occasion, but give me a bit of leeway, I am actually trying to achieve quite a lot here and keeping a perfect journal is not on my list of high priorities.

I did not mean to be rude. I was curious as to what you are trying to achieve. It seems to me, after reading all of the thread that you are looking to derive a perfect algorithmic formula for trading.

I am about to launch myself into a new career as an algorithm trader.

My plan in outline is simple: I have £40K risk capital and £15K to live off and the goal is to start trading at the latest at the beginning of June and to be profitable enough to withdraw £1500 per month from then on for subsistence.

Hopefully my career will last a bit longer than June.

.

You are now 8 months past your June 2010 deadline. Your capital to live off must be dwindling lower.
I was only asking whether you had made a trade because in reading the whole 98 pages, I never saw a trade. And you were hoping to be profitable enough to withdraw £1500 per month from June 2010 for subsistence.

But Keep Calm and Carry On.

 

[Adamus]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

I was only asking whether you had made a trade because in reading the whole 98 pages, I never saw a trade.

What exactly were you expecting to see in terms of trades?

You can see a couple of the markets I've been trading above with the entries and exits from NinjaTrader.

But I'm not trying to prove anything here. I'm not making calls or such stuff.

 

[Adamus]

Re: Gap Filler system - almost done with in-sample testing

One more tweak to the system: after testing originally with a max allowable gap of 90% of Friday's range, and then improving the results by changing it to 60%, I just ran it with 75% and that works significantly better. Better stats all round by about 5%. For reference this is my number 12.

I've just run a couple of loops with different transaction costs for a reality check and it survives. Here are some stats. That's column 1 = zero, col 2 = $7 per execution, col 3 = $15.

Performance		12-0comm     12-7comm	12-15comm
Total Profit	$98505		$77589		$53685
Comm			$0.00		$20916		$44820
Profit Factor	1.60		1.46		1.31
Max. Drawdown	$-17955		$-18431		$-18975
Sharpe Ratio	0.57		0.46		0.33
Profit/DD		5.49		4.21		2.83			
Total  Trades	1494		1494		1494
% Profitable	82.20%		82.20%		82.13%
Average Trade	$65			$51		$35
Average Win		$213		$199		$183
Average Loss	$-614		$-628		$-642
Ratio Win:Loss	0.35		0.32		0.29
Largest + Week	$8680		$8512		$8320
Largest - Week	$-7620		$-7816		$-8040			
# Trades / Day	0.80		0.80		0.80
Profit / Month	$1624		$1279		$885
Max Recovery	279.70 		384.83 		405.79 days

 

[brettus]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

That is not correct. EVERY sentence above is incorrect.

Ask a bank how they would hedge 50mio gbpusd. Let me know. Why do you think eurusd and eurgbp have more liquidity than gbpusd?

 

[traderman1]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

Why do you think eurusd and eurgbp have more liquidity than gbpusd?

That sentence is also incorrect.
The eurusd has more liquidity than the gbpusd. But the eurgbp is way down the list.
The gbpusd is the third most liquid (most traded) currency pair, behind the eurusd and usdjpy.
The eurgbp does not even rank in the top 10 currency pairs by volume traded.
Your previous statements that the GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair and is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. are also incorrect.

I would have thought that a Veteran Member and poster with more than 500 posts to his name would at least know those basic facts.

 

[brettus]

Re: Have you actually placed a trade yet?

That sentence is also incorrect.
The eurusd has more liquidity than the gbpusd. But the eurgbp is way down the list.
The gbpusd is the third most liquid (most traded) currency pair, behind the eurusd and usdjpy.
The eurgbp does not even rank in the top 10 currency pairs by volume traded.
Your previous statements that the GBPUSD is more of a cross between EURGBP and EURUSD than it's own currency pair and is derived from the EURGBP and EURUSD price. are also incorrect.

I would have thought that a Veteran Member and poster with more than 500 posts to his name would at least know those basic facts.

You're such a tool. Why are you thrashing out useless nonesensical facts? Ask a bank what i asked you to. You won't have a decent enough platform to see that that eurgbp has more depth than gbpusd. Then ask yourself why that's so.