It is that time again, called weekend, when I usually analyze the weekly performance. This time it isn’t an awful experience. It really have been a terrible few weeks, but hopefully that is behind us now and we can begin rebuilding our accounts steadily. The recovery really started with getting rid of GridBot a few weeks ago thou.
Alpari UK live account
Above is the graph for my Alpari UK micro account. €77.84 gained since last weekend. The only real loss was a USDCHF trade by MD Pro that I manually interveined with when it was in drawdown. I shouldn’t have done that, it had recovered and probably closed break even if I just had left it alone. This isn’t the first time the same thing happens, hopefully I have learned the lesson this time… I ought to since the whole point is that the Experts should be able to trade on their own.
Other than that trade it was a very nice steady week. MD had a solid week with only winners. FAPT made nice results in both EURCHF and USDCAD. Last weekend I changed the end time for FAPT to 23 GMT for both pairs, and I really think that was a good change. Most of the big losses have occurred later in the session. I will look into the starting times even more now, I probably will start several overlapping charts with FAPT with different risk taking. It is clear to me that the first trades taken is much more profitable than later in the evening, perhaps we should exploit this with higher lotsizes for the first trade… I’ll probably try a setup in demo and see what happens.
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Forex.com/UK live account
The graph for Forex.com/UK also looks nice this week. $87.49 gained in total. The bump in the beginning is the same USDCHF trade by MD Pro as above. I’ve actually removed MD Pro from the account after that trade, not because of it per se, but because of 3 crashes. One of the crashes hindered the very nice EA RoboMiner from a trade (it cost me $11). So now that account is only traded by RoboMiner, and it is doing great. I run 0.04 lots with AUDNZD and 0.03 with EURCHF. Very tempted to add even more funds and up the lotsizes.
Finally some recovery.
Last week Donna of DonnaForex.com announced in her forum that she had paid a programmer to produce a very simple EA. The strategy is to randomly place buy and sell orders, without any analysis or indicators. A simple coin flip to decide direction and then just let it ride till either T/P or S/L is hit. Then it flips the coin again and open another trade, 24 hours a day. The whole thing is supposed to be a joke. The background of course is all the EAs coming out with yet anther marvelous sales pitch promising gold, Ferrari’s and God knows what. Of course I thought it was hilarious and got a version of the EA and is beta testing it.
Sound stupid right? Well, it was supposed to be a joke. But before you dismiss it, check out my stats here (EURUSD, M5, T/P 8, S/L 60): http://patrickbateman.mt4stats.com
Insane I know. I’m a lucky guy I guess. There is some substance to the concept of course because of the small T/P (in relation to the S/L) I have chosen. This lets the EA catch small, almost Brownian, motion in price and in 50% of the cases pick the right direction in a trending market. Check out Random walk theory: http://www.investopedia.com/university/concepts/concepts5.asp or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk
Oh, the name of the EA is ScamBot 
Haha, this is getting comic. So I won’t even say anything about it…
Alpari UK live account
… well. Just that the last trade of the week, FAPT in USDCAD, lost €87. That was not a good feeling for a otherwise positive week (note that the €100 jump early in the week is the cashback I made in June that I deposited in the account). I will be evaluating FAPTs settings for this coming week. Donna announced Saturday that she will stop trading FAPT at Alpari UK after two months of not so good results, and since I am at Alpari UK I’m of course a bit worried. I will not stop trading there this week thou, but I will probably stop trading after 23 GMT on both EURCHF and USDCAD.
As for MegaDroid on Alpari UK nothing special has happened really. I turned down risk for the week early on and it haven’t traded quite as much after that.
Forex.com/UK live account
As for the account on Forex.com/UK I stopped MD completely before last week because of all the crashes. I then bought and started trading RoboMiner (II). I also enabled MD Pro with very low risk settings. Nothing spectacular on the account yet, but I almost made the $40 monthly fee of RoboMiner in the first two days. This Friday I also added another $500 (that’s the big jump in the graph above) and upped the lot sizes to 0.04 AUDNZD and 0.03 EURCHF. Hopefully this setup can make some steady progress.
As for brokers I am reviewing quite a few ECNs to take over my FAPT trading (and MD/ MD Pro with it). The favorites right now, in terms of performance on the demo trading, is JadeFX and TheCollectiveFX. Both have excellent spreads and data streams. I don’t know about the other important aspects thou (like support and not trying to rob you). FXCBS is also a real contender, however it hasn’t performed as nice in demo for me, but a lot of people are really pleased with them live. Cashbackforex.com is offering 15% back on the commissions there. The other ones I’m trying is ATC, Broco and GoMarkets.
Oh, perhaps I should say something about FAPT Evo also. I’ve been demo trading it for three weeks now, and I am very interested in starting it live. Last week it made 13% with Donnas High risk settings (that isn’t even that high risk I think). Dukascopy is a real hassle to sign up with thou with lots of paper work. Not like your average MT4 broker…
