What to do…

Okay, I just wrote the whole deal in the Subject didn’t I?

Well, I found www.collective2.com just earlier this week and was intrigued. It’s basically a collection of different trading strategies and also a forum for trading discussions. You can subscribe to different strategies (some are free, but the good ones cost money) and assemble your own portfolio using several of them. One of the great parts is that you can search for strategies with low or no correlation to the ones you already have in your portfolio. This is great from a diversification perspective, which is very important to a multi-asset portfolio of course. There is a huge diversity in the strategies offered, ranging from traditional equity investments to commodities and forex trading systems. You can also setup a strategy of your own and let others use it (and charge for it if you like).

All in all it seems like a great place to find trading systems which invest in diverse assets. Some of the strategies can even be fully automated (like EAs we are all familiar with). I’m going to look into this more when I have some spare time, but that is scarce right now.

If anyone have experience of C2 already or starts now, please enlighten us with comments.

I’ve had mixed results this week, but overall my accounts have gained $144. Details below.

Alpari UK live account

The week at Alpari UK ended down by €22. EURCHF trades done by FAPT stood for €85 in losses, which is really bad I think. USDCAD did better, but only traded once with €10 gained. MD stood for the profits with €50 gained on EURUSD. I will definitely monitor FAPTs performance the coming week, if it doesn’t improve I might stop trading EURCHF here. I might even move it completely to the Jade FX account since USDCAD really have been working out great in demo there (see below for Jade FX performance live with MD Pro).

Forex.com/UK live account

Going into this week I re-added MD Pro to the Forex.com/UK account, since it seems some of the instability problems I suffered from last time have been solved with the update to v1.01. And so far so good, it hasn’t crashed. I only added three charts trading USDCHF, but I’ll add some EURUSD also for next week. I’ll continue to run non-aggressive settings as I want this account to suffer very low draw downs.

RoboMiner have performed quite good as always. All in all the account gained $90.66 for the week, with $12 from MD Pro.

Jade FX live account

This is the second week live at Jade FX for me. I only trade MD Pro right now and it is doing quite well. Total gain was $85.66. No losses this week, but a few break evens. This really seems to be a characteristic of MD Pro, if it hasn’t been able to close the position by T/P in some time (I think 1 hour) it tries to close it at break even. I don’t dislike this, but during the week all of the orders would eventually have gotten the full T/P, so it is cheating us from some profits (other weeks it might save us a fortune, so as I said, I don’t dislike this behavior).

In the two weeks I’ve run this account it has grown by 30% from $500 to $650.84, which I find quite remarkable. I am trading 0.1 lots which is minimum. It probably will be hard to sustain that kind of growth, so I am prepared for it to hit a S/L soon. But lets hope it’s not next week so the nice streak can continue

I am considering moving my FAPT license from the Alpari UK account to the Jade FX account. If I did I would only trade USDCAD to start with, which really seems to be the best pair right now. In my Jade FX demo it has done extremely well trading 21 - 01 GMT. But I am reluctant to do this right now because the VPS that I got from Jade FX isn’t doing quite as well as the performance on my account. Twice now I have been unable to log in to it, and support have been forced to reboot it to solve the issue. I still don’t like not being Administrator on it, and this is even more disturbing when it is unstable. With Administrator rights I could reboot it myself as well as run my MT4 sessions as services. If this issue isn’t solved in the coming two weeks I see no other solution than to get a different VPS to run my Jade FX trading on. But I think it would be very hard to find another one with <1 ms latency… We’ll see.

Good luck to you guys going forward. 

I got my cashback from cashbackforex.com yesterday, $123.71 for July. It was burning a hole in my Paypal account so I went out and got Forex Shocker EA.

It is a scalper that trades six pairs and I have been observing it for a while. I’m mostly interested in trading EURUSD and GPBUSD since I’ve seen other peoples’ results from those pairs. But of course I will demo trade all of them, there could be a difference with brokers and latency so the other pairs also would be interesting. I will demo on JadeFX (kind of scalpers heaven) and hopefully everything works out so I can add it live in 1-2 weeks. Scalping GBPUSD would be a welcome addition to the “regular” pairs.

Straight off I must say that I don’t like the setup too much. It is a Plimus sale, without any money back period. All sales are final. Also you only get to trade one live and one demo account. The limitation on number of demo accounts is real stupid IMHO as we all like to test different brokers before going live. Hopefully it works out nice on JadeFX thou. I am not sure what the policy is about changing accounts after a while.

You can follow my demo progress here: http://halmoore.mt4stats.com/

And you can get the EA here: http://www.forexshocker.com/

Wish me luck

Update: I still haven’t gotten the unlock / license codes from the developers, 29 hours after my purchase. I think it is real bad and not very confidence building. Now I just hope I get it up and running for Mondays trading session…

Update 2: Just recieved the codes, so I’m going to start demoing on Monday. Took about 48 hours, so do take that into consideration if buying Forex Shocker.

Another week has passed. This was the first week live on JadeFX so it has been fun to see how MD Pro has been doing there. But it has actually been a good week at Alpari UK also, quite a surprise.

Alpari UK live micro account

The week ended with a gain of €106 which is very nice. The money makers have been USDCAD with FAPT and EURUSD and USDCHF with MD Pro. I added EURGBP recently again after not having traded that one for the whole summer. That was a mistake, I took three S/L:s with it during the week. It will be removed now. Other than that I will continue with the same setup for next week.

Forex.com/UK live account

With Robominer on the Forex.com/UK account it have been quite a uneventful week, but still $57 gained, all with AUDNZD. EURCHF is going the “wrong” way now and I have six open EURCHF trades, hopefully it turns soon enough. I am considering letting MD Pro have another go at this account also, with non-aggressive low risk settings, probably only trading EURUSD and USDCHF.

JadeFX live account

The first week live with Jade FX with a total of $65 gained (which is 13% !). EURUSD and USDCHF was the moneymakers. The only loss was made with EURCHF. Not much to say other than that MD Pro really seems to like the low spreads at JadeFX. I probably will add another $500 and get FAPT trading on it soon (hopefully during next week).

So, all in all a very positive week with roughly $270 gained over the three accounts. Hope it continues next week.

I know there’s people that is interested in my progress with JadeFX, so I thought I’d just make a small update now that MD Pro have traded my small $500 account live for the first night. I got three trades all in all with one USDCHF that made full 10 pips profit and two trades that closed as break even (one each in EURCHF and EURGBP). The exact same trades was opened in my demo account (there was a difference in price on the USDCHF trade with 0.6 pips in favor of the live account), which I consider very good news.

$500 is clearly to little to trade all four pairs of MD Pro with just 1:100 leverage thou. Margin wise each 0.1 lot (the size I traded) requires $100, but MD Pro seems to have a safety feature so that it doesn’t open too many trades. It will only allow two simultaneous 0.1 lotsize trades, so we might miss some opportunities there.

The plan right now is to continue with this small “live demo” setup for the week. I will perhaps just keep two or three pairs during this time. Will analyze the performance of the demo account during August to determine which ones. USDCHF is a given thou, it is the clear winner for MD Pro. After that i probably will add another $500 or so and get another FAPT license to run on it also.

Wish me luck

I have been using MT4Stats for all my statistics publishing for the time I’ve been using the MT4 platform, and I’m sure you guys have been too (yeah I know about MT4Live, but I’ve never liked their font and general appearance…). Recently MT4Stats was updated with a lot of extras in the new Analysis tab, which I think is great additions. It is nice to see some graphs and the pie charts give a nice overview of the profitable pairs you are trading.

Last week I was made aware of a new alternative that actually looked kind of interesting called MyFXBook.com. Unlike MT4Stats and MT4Live you register one profile and then add all your MT4 accounts to that. So by just logging into the site you can see the performance of all your registered trading accounts. And it supports other platforms also, great if you have a Oanda account for example. You can choose if you want your accounts to be public or private, and if public what information to show. You could for example just show the balance and growth and hide the specific trade history. If the account is public others will be able to comment on it, just like with a blog. You can also add information about yourself in your profile that others can read and comment. The community aspect here could be very good I think, but still the site is very new and the number of people registered is small (that is not bad thou).

It also sports some other nice things like a monthly growth chart and the possibility to analyse your trading. If you are missing something there is a very good Suggestions box in the forum that is handled very good with the developers really trying to understand the suggestions. I myself left one about the possibility to use the magicnumber to sort all trades on the EA that performed it and the developers asked follow up questions to understand my idea fully. Very good, and hopefully they’ll implement it.

Right now I’m publishing my stats both to MT4Stats and MyBookFX as I think that they both complement each other (you have to use two MT4 instances trading the same account to do it). The main thing I think is better with MT4Stats is the bottom part of the page with the information about equity, floating P/L, margin and so. That information is not as easily shown at MyFxBook I think (and I haven’t even found the used and free margin information at all). Also I like the layout of taken trades better at MT4Stats.  But do check out MyFxBook, and leave suggestions about the things you don’t like so they can make the perfect tool for us in time

Quick review of the week on my live accounts.

Alpari UK live micro account

It has been mixed results that ended negative on my Alpari UK account (€22 loss). The week started nice and steady, then both FAPT and MD got lingering trades on Wednesday that went into S/L and took 12% of the account. Once again I was contemplating to close those positions when they we’re just a few pips behind, but I didn’t, as I really don’t think I’m supposed to baby sit these EAs. Once again I wish I had closed them…

I have completed my migration of Alpari UK trading to the VPS at SWTech. I haven’t noticed any problems or extra gains due to the minimal latency, but I will monitor it closely. I see about the same slippage that I have come to expect from Alpari UK (not so often, but still happens enough to be annoying). As of Tuesday this week (18th) Alpari UK will start using floating spreads, it will be interesting to see how much reqoutes / slippage that will introduce.

I probably will change the setup for FAPT a little for next week. I will add EURGBP again, with small fixed lot size to start with, and I will lower the T/P on USDCAD in order to get more profitable trades (albeit with lesser gain). I’ve seen statistics of an account with this setup that has been doing great the last weeks.

Forex.com/UK live account

Since RoboMiner is the only EA on this account now the graph above is quite uninteresting. But it has been a great week with $99.46 in profit. 9 profitable trades with AUDNZD and 1 with EURCHF. Right now I have only one open trade in AUDNZD and four in EURCHF. The good thing with open EURCHF trades is that the swap is positive, IE I make a little every day they are open.

All in all RoboMiner is really nice, it does what it is supposed to do. Of course the pairs traded have to “co-operate” with the strategy and move around a little, we won’t make money otherwise. I’m very pleased with the results as of yet at least.

Next week I hopefully have a nice graph here to show you from my live Jade FX account. Happy trading

I’ve finally gotten around to opening a MT4 ECN account. I have, for the last month or so, been actively searching for a alternative to my Alpari UK account to run scalpers on basically. I’ve been running demos loaded with FAPT (all four pairs) and MD Pro (also all four pairs) at multiple brokers and have now come to the conclusion that JadeFX offers one of the best (demo) data streams available to us mere mortals. Spread wise it is often even tighter on the majors than  DukasCopy (with the JFOREX retail platform at least). But of course, it would have been better to run this test on live accounts, but I think that isn’t possible for most of us. As for commissions JadeFX has the lowest I’ve found at 5 USD / lot.

I’ve also opted to use their VPS service. The servers running my MT4 will be in the same datacenter as Jade FX’s live (and demo) trading server. I’ve not had time to do more than log in and run a simple ping as of yet, but it is really nice with sub 1ms latency. I see one problem with the actual VPS service and that is that it is run using VMWare (ESX i presume) and that we as customers isn’t offered our own sandboxes (with full Administrator privileges). I would have preferred Virtuozzo and Datacenter edition offering containers with Virtual Servers that we ourselves can reboot and such. I’ve asked support about the possibility to run as Administrator. I really want to be able to use AlwaysUp in order to run my MT4 sessions as services, with the possibility to restart them daily to avoid memory problems. The VPS service is quite cheap at $25/month plus Paypal fees ($27 for me) and you get 1 gig of ram.

As for funding and support I must say that they are really fast. My application for the account was processed in one hour and my VPS was setup in 3 hours. Support have answered all my emails (3 as of yet) within one hour every time. Very impressive I would say, and the answers have been helpful also, not just some bonehead answers I’ve been getting from some help desks over the years… (I’ve actually worked at a Help desk back office and I know not everyone employed at such places are Einsteins or even remotely interested in their work. No offense.)

I will start with just trading MD on EURUSD on Monday on my small deposit of just $500. I see it as kind of a live test to see that everything is working before starting FAPT and MD Pro on it (and add more funds). The main reason is that I have a spare MD license (left over from my Forex.com/UK account) so it is the easiest and cheapest to setup

I am contemplating setting up a FXCBS account also as I’ve noticed that they are offering quite a lot better spreads in EURCHF during the important scalping times. In the other important pairs like EURUSD they are not as competitive (compared to JadeFX), so I would primarily run EURCHF with FAPT and MD Pro there if I go for it. As you know my strategy have been to find a few different brokers and EAs to run as a mean to diversify my currency trade operation. I think it would be wise not to put all the eggs in one basket. Remember to sign at FXCBS through cashbackforex.com if you go for it, they’ll give you 15% back (brings commission down to 0.68 USD / lot)

Oh, have I forgotten about DukasCopy and FAPT Evo? Well, I have applied for an account there and I still own the license, but I won’t be going live right now. First of all I won’t be able to fund the $10K account this fall as I first thought (because I’m going backpacking for three months instead, need the funds for that) and second FAPT Evo really haven’t impressed me that much. Original FAPT on the right broker (hopefully JadeFX) have been keeping up with it. So hence my decision to wait with it.

I’ll keep you updated on my experiences with Jade FX over the coming days / weeks.

Got a VPS package last week from SWTech.  Just been running demo accounts on it as of yet but it is planned to take over all my Alpari UK trading. Why? Well it has a 2ms latency to the Alpari UK trading servers. Some people have been suggesting that a (really) low latency like that could reduce re-quotes and slippage, which is very important when trading scalpers. And even more important when running the standard scalpers like FAPT and MD I guess, lots of similar trades for the servers to execute at the same time. If my order arrives 100 ms before the majority perhaps I am in a better position.

If it doesn’t affect trading performance it is still a very affordable VPS provider. I got the Medi package with 1.2 gig of ram for €25 / month. They offer both smaller and larger packages, but this one is perfect I think for a few MT4 sessions with RAM to spare.

If you go for it, do try AlwaysUp to run your applications as services. That way they are automatically started when ever you reboot your VPS and they will only be started once. To reduce memory usage I’ve put it to restart all the sessions at 17:00 GMT daily and reboot the entire VPS at 21:00 GMT on Sundays.

It’s been a while since I bought a EA. The last one, besides FAPT Evo (which technically isn’t even a EA), was FD2 and we all know how that went. Two weeks ago IvoryBot was the hyped one, but I didn’t get it. The people that did isn’t excited as far as I can see. If it does well, I’ll buy it, but it have to prove itself first.

I did however buy Forex Accumulator last week. Boy was that a impulse buy. Don’t even know why I got it, they have nothing to show for and so far I’m very afraid of it actually. It is way way way to risky even with the lowest possible settings imho. I’ve seen a lot of people already returning it, but I’ll demo trade it a little longer. I’ve been running optimization backtests and it is profitable but the draw downs are huge. I’ll be back with a updated post about it when all the optimization is done (probably 2-3 days left since I run back to 2006.01.01 and 2009.01.01 and do some manual comparisons. I want settings that is good both in the longer and shorter history). I really can’t see myself ever going live with it thou, the risk is to high I think. It comes with 60 days money back guarantee and was “just” $97.

There are two other EAs I’m currently looking to buy. S26 by Forex Barometer and Fractals 4 by Forex Hope. I’ve seen impressive forward tests with both of them. Both are $199 without refund possibility thou, so I probably can only buy one of them right now. It is leaning towards S26 right now, but I’ll wait a few days and see.

Update: I forgot about the Adelpha EA that is to be released today. It seems very very nice actually, but the price is $497 making it a hard buy for me. But if you have larger accounts than me to trade/play with, perhaps that price isn’t to intimidating. The backtests both for 2000-2008 and year to date (2009) looks very nice, but after all they’re just backtests. Fortunately the developers also have a mt4stats forward test going. Check it out (not sure if it is demo or live): http://adelpha.mt4stats.com/