What to do…

I’ve been out of town since last monday. In the meantime my JadeFX account have plummeted from $929 to $518. Not to funny when logging into the VPS from Irkutsk, Russia where I am now. Seems that S/Ls have hit all the EAs on the account the same nights (MD Pro, Forex Shocker and FAP Turbo). I don’t have time to check the settings right now, which is bothersome.

The Alpari UK account was also hit by the stop losses, but not as bad.

Seems I should have just stayed home…

This is perhaps the last weekly account balance update for a while. I will be traveling in Asia for the coming months (Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and possibly the Philippines). We’ll see, I’ll try and write some updates now and then.

This week have been quite good, even though some S/Ls was hit. Total gain over the three live accounts was $223.

Alpari UK Live account

Quite a nice graph, the bump in the beginning is a S/L hit by MD Pro in EURGBP. I’m starting to distrust trading that pair, perhaps I’ll disable it. Otherwise no big losses or gains, lots of break evens. FAPT isn’t making much money on this account anymore. MD Pro with EURUSD and USDCHF is the real moneymakers. Total gain was €62.55.

Forex.com/UK Live account

Really few trades on this account during the week. I removed some charts with MD Pro in order to hit fewer stop losses last week, seems to have worked out or I was simply lucky. RoboMiner have not been closing many trades either. But it can have some slow weeks now and then, no worries. Total gain was $53.67.

Jade FX Live account

This week there are some bumps in the graph unfortunately, but still a very good performance. The first bump is the same trade that hit a S/L in the Alpari UK account, MD Pro on EURGBP. The last one was by FAPT in USDCAD, for a loss of $55. It was FAP Turbos‘ second night on the live account, again my timing is impeccable. Forex Shocker have been taking 4 pips here and there at a nice pace, without any losses hit which is good news considering last week. Total gain was $80.56.

So that’s it. Hopefully this trend continues. I have been making about $250 each week now for a while. I will fund my new The Collective FX account today (I hope, don’t really have time for it right now thou). I really want another ECN so it would be great, but the $147 monthly fee is expensive if I don’t get around to trade it successfully. I’m going to use the same setup as for the Jade FX account, but in order to get at least a good way up to the 45 lots I’m paying to trade for I need to fund it considerably more than with $500. I’m thinking about $2000. We’ll see. I also have to setup a new VPS for it, since the one I use for JadeFX is really crammed (it’s the shared VPS service provided by JadeFX themselves). This is where I really don’t have time for it…

Happy trading

Update: I didn’t have time to setup up my account at The Collective FX I’m afraid. So I won’t be trading there. I really don’t like it, but there were much more pressing matters to attend to. I will be travelling in Asia for the next three months. I think I’ll add the funds that was going to the CFX account to my JadeFX account in the coming week or so. Or I’ll just spend it

If you want one of the cheapest ECN brokers, check out http://www.thecollectivefx.com/html/waiting_list.html

I expect the free slots to fill up quite quickly. I’ve signed for a Tier 9 account myself as I’ve been demo trading with the Collective for two months now with very good results. Signing with one or two more good brokers is part of my business plan. Spread wise they are very competitive, comparable to JadeFX, but clearly with another liquidity provider since it isn’t exactly the same prices.

As a Tier 9 I will pay $147 per month to trade up to 45 round lots, that is about 3.2 USD / lot which is very good. (JadeFX charges 5 USD / lot).

Update: They filled the available slots in 1.5 hours. So now it is closed I guess. I’ll fund my account and hopefully get it started before I leave for Moscow on Monday afternoon.

Almost a new week already so I better wrap this one up. All in all a positive one, but it had a few bumps. Total gain over all accounts was $284.

Alpari UK Live account

The week worked out nicely at Alpari, the only bump was in the early hours on Friday when two MD Pro trades (in EURUSD) hit stop losses with just a few pips to go before the price reversed. Bad luck I guess. Total gained €99.46, which is great, even thou it was up another €30 before the losses.

Forex.com/UK live account

Another week where MD Pro hits stop losses to break the nice streak of RoboMiner profits. For some reason this seems to happen more often on Forex.com/UK than Alpari UK, don’t know why. Total gain for the week was $59.82. The two MD Pro losses was $73 in total, so it is quite bad for the account.

Jade FX live account

Another great week at JadeFX, now with the addition of Forex Shocker trading EURUSD, GBPUSD and USDCHF. Unfortunately it hit two stop losses in GBPUSD and lost $64 in the first night live. But overall the gain was still $83.30. This account managed to avoid the stop losses from MD Pro. Can’t quite figure out why, scalpers just seems to work better here than at Alpari and Forex.com. After four weeks live the account has grown 58.5% which is really impressive. Unfortunately I won’t be able to trade MD Pro on it going forward, so it will be regular Megadroid and Forex Shocker next week. Strongly considering getting another FAP Turbo license for it also, but then I probably should add another $500 or so.

I just couldn’t justify having $599 software on the shelf, not knowing if I ever was going to use it. Liquidity on DukasCopy have been very low and the last few weeks (3-4) FAPT Evo have been performing badly. Lots of rejected orders and huge slippage. Nothing like the scalpers heaven promoted by the FAP team (that called MT4 child play). I’m sure that performance will pick up during the fall as the liquidity in the markets increase, but as I don’t see it performing better than regular FAP Turbo at a good ECN MT4 broker I still can’t justify the cost (you get four FAP Turbo licenses for the price of one Evo).

Also, the $10000 minimum have kept me from starting to trade at DukasCopy. At the MT4 broker you can chose to start at a much lower level and you can trade $100K contracts at ECN brokers (and 0.01 lots at non-ECN). At DukasCopy you had to trade $1000K contracts as minimum.

The real sad part about the refund is that I will lose MegaDroid Pro. I have enjoyed being able to trade more pairs, but not even this “bonus” can justify the price of $599. EURUSD is still the moneymaker (with addition of USDCHF), and that is traded by regular MegaDroid for $99. I will settle for that for now. If and when MegaDroid Pro eventually is for sale I probably will get it, but not for the silly price of $699 that was stated in July. I think my limit is a $199 really, twice the price of MegaDroid. We’ll see thou.

So from this week I will replace MD Pro with MD on all my account.

I’m going to start Forex Shocker live on my JadeFX account tonight. I’ve been running it on demo for the past week, and it has been working out. So now it is time for it to graduate from demo school. Just one week might seem short, but performance wise I’m sure it is quite solid based on others live performance. I’m going to start trading it on EURUSD, GBPUSD and USDCHF with 0.1 lots during 21-23 GMT+1 (JadeFX time). This actually works out great because, at least in the demo, the trades have been quite quick and should be done by the time MD Pro’s main trading hours come around (which is 23-1 GMT+1). All pairs have behaved, but the three chosen have made the most per trade. EURCHF is actually the one that has made both most trades and pips, but I feel that profit per open trade should be premiered right now (since the account still is quite small and margin is limited).

MT4Stats is still down so I’ve moved my stats over to MyFxBook right now, and I quite like it. They tweak it now and then and it is getting better and better every day really. You can check the Forex Shocker JadeFX demo below.

Update: Of course Forex Shocker hits the first S/Ls since July the first night I’m live. Two stops hit with double GBPUSD trades for a total damage of $64. Fortunately Forex Shocker on EURUSD and USDCHF got one winner each and MD Pro got several so I still gained $8 for the day

Normally I really don’t pay attention to the, almost daily, releases of new EAs. There just have been too many that have been so disappointing lately (and I don’t think it is going to decrease either). However today there actually is a release that I kind of look forward to. I’ve for some time been looking at the Fractals 4 EA from Forex-hope.com. It is the fourth incarnation and it have proven it self in both backward and forward tests over the last few months (think it was released in June). I’ve been looking to buy it since it isn’t a scalper, but rather a break out system, but I haven’t had $199 from the EA budget to invest in it.

Today Forex hope releases a new product thou, called Forex Bling (I know, the name… yeah). It isn’t one EA, but a number of EAs that are meant to be traded together in a portfolio. There’s a scalper (actually four different, but they are probably based on the same code, that trade different pairs), a trend follower, a break out system and a grid trader. I’ve seen the affiliate report as well as some live MT4 stats and I must say that I am impressed. The Scalper(s) seem very good, definitely FAPT/MD class, perhaps even better. The others also are very impressive, but I think it isn’t real live, but rather demo trading. Still it looks very promising.

One of the things I like the most thou is that the package is offered as a subscription service costing $99 for three months. Considering that it, currently, comes with four different systems I would say this is very good. The facts that it is a subscription implies that they believe in the system, since they want people to keep paying for it. Also, they will be giving the first 100 sign-ups Fractals4 for free (it isn’t part of the package otherwise).

I’m going to sign-up today and start demos. In the mean time I’ve found these live stats pages, they are for the scalpers called ThunderStorm and ThunderBolt.

Another week then, I’ll just do a quick post with the graphs as usual.

Alpari UK Live account

Nothing to it this week. The removal of EURGBP and usage of custom levels in FAPT made a rather uneventful week. The moneymaker was (again) MD Pro with EURUSD and USDCHF in the lead. Total gain was €71.95.

Forex.com/UK Live account

RoboMiner keeps adding to this account at a rather steady pace. It has gone into a little deeper draw down now, but it’s still easily managable with the 1:200 leverage. If it goes down another few hundreds I’ll add more funds just to be on the safe side. As I said last week I am trading EURUSD and USDCHF on this account now with MD Pro and it unfortunatly hit a S/L with a EURUSD trade during the week for a loss of $42. Total gain in the account was still $69.11.

Jade FX Live account

Third week with JadeFX and another winning week. The losing trade in the end was my fault, I tampered with the S/L setting on a trade after London open. It hit the S/L I had set a few hours later, and then it turned another 10 pips down, with the original S/L level the trade would have been closed at least at break even by MD. I really shouldn’t interfere, but there where high impact news planned, so I thought it was worth it, but there is no way in knowing of course. Total gained was $58.35 (would have been another $16 at least if the last trade hadn’t hit my S/L). All in all this account is up $209 now in three weeks for a gain of 41%. Looks very good.

The week in total then ended at $229 which is quite good I think. Next week I might start trading a bit more on the JadeFX account with the addition of another EA besides MD Pro.

Recently I read a great piece of advise in a forum (I’m someguy over at Donnas forum) regarding what kind of “standards” we, as a automated trading community, should require before forking over hard earned dollar/euros/skulls for the latest and greatest piece of software that is being spammed to us from professional affiliates (I hate spammers and scamsters). It isn’t brain surgery of course, but now and then a EA comes along that actually looks promising and the developers are saying that they only will sell a few hundred copies (I like restricted releases, but hate when it isn’t enforced after the 100 copies are clearly already sold). That is when we need this “checklist”. Right now I think there actually is a few EAs for MT4 that live up to the standard, but even some of them use the marketing lingo of the scamsters (come on FAP and MD teams, redo your websites).

After this I started to think about my own expectations on the performance of my automated strategies. I think I need a better game plan. Right now I don’t think I am aware enough. I need to make a model for the risk I’m willing to take and base it on % risked per trade and also try to limit total exposure by limiting the number of concurrent open positions. I’ve just started thinking about it, so it is a work in progress. I think I will basically use my current model for my more “traditional” portfolio where I do monthly reviews and redistribute the funds according to previous months winners (basically what is sometimes called a rotation system, where you bet on your winners). For forex I’m thinking that I should demo trade a lot of different EAs and pairs and choose (on a weekly and monthly basis) the top 5 performers and just trade them. For example right now that setup would probably be: 1/ MD Pro EURUSD 2/ MD Pro USDCHF 3/ FAPT USDCAD 4/ Forex Shocker EURCHF and possibly 5/ Forex Shocker GBPUSD. I should bet on the proven winners (and perhaps even bet more on the # 1 strategy than the #5, say a ratio of twice the lot size for #1 compared to #5 and 2-4 somewhere in between.

I’ve also come to realize that I need to include my forex trading in my total portfolio. Right now I really treat it as a side project (that is taking more time than my “real” multi-asset portfolio, simply because I enjoy it more).  But as the correlation between my forex trading performance and the other asset classes in my portfolio strategy is basically zero of course it should be treated as a great addition and I think it should be a new asset class. I’m thinking even that it should be split up in sub-classes of scalpers and more long-term strategies. FAPT/MDPro/FS is a completely different case than RoboMiner.

As for the risk taking I think I should try not just to maximize my weekly/monthly gains of course. I have always tried to choose setups that take risks I can live with (IE to limit draw downs to levels I don’t feel sick about). But I need a better calculated model here also. I think I will base it on total exposure and historical draw down (in %), not on the gained/lost sum of money (if it is losing of course after some time it will be “rotated” out of the portfolio by the rules above) for the scalper class. For the more long term forex asset class (that right now only would include RoboMiner) I will just try to make the most and not risk margin calls I think. For RoboMiner that would mean that I would use a conservative lot size and just let it ride, it will make what it makes (the developers state 4-8% a month using default values I think). Other long term strategies could include systems like LMT or carry trades I think, but I’m not doing that right now.

I’m really looking forward to do some more math on this.