Another week has passed and this was quite a good one actually. Perhaps it has something to do with that I basically turned of the FAP Turbo scalper last week? Well, it has actually made good trades on my Alpari UK account with 0.01 lots during the week. I keep trading that small just for observation. I recently started to trade the FAP Turbo long term strategy (in EURUSD) thou, and it has made a lot of pips in the downwards move this week. I’m very cautious with it thou and runs it with microlots also. Read more…
Yeah, I’m selling a lot of my equities right now. The markets was amazing last year, we all know that. I was very skeptical in the beginning months, thinking that it was too early for recovery. But I went along for the ride, and I am glad that I did. Now I’m beginning to worry again, primarily because of the extreme recovery made, is it really sustainable? I’m thinking that it probably isn’t, so I have begun to sell holdings, starting with the ones in emerging markets. Brazil, Russia, India and China was truly amazing last year, but a lot of it (at least in the case of B and R) was fueled by increasing commodity prices, something that China in large part have been the driving force behind by buying and stockpiling a lot of resources. Now there’s rumors that China has enough and will stop buying, immediately leading to lower prices.
In the end my idea is to reduce my equities to about 25% of what I was holding yesterday. I will buy some gold, but I’m not a real gold bug, it’s more of a hedge.
So, what will I do with the money? I will switch it over the long term forex trading. I’ve been running RoboMiner for 6 months now, and made about 80% over that time (really depends how you calculate since I’ve been adding funds now and then, but MyFXBook has gotten it to 80% gain and 50% absolute gain). That is amazing I think. But I think that EA could have done better still with some changes (the Pro version adds a few things like ability to trade all currencies and the shift-function). So I’ve been working on my own grid trader again, that actually is getting quite nice I think. I’m about to start demo trading it seriously at different brokers right now, but in a month I hope I’m confident enough to put it live on a rather big account. I’m really pleased with the backtest performance, which in the case of a long term grid trader is quite precise.
I will start the live test on my existing Alpari UK account and look into opening others. I’m thinking about starting a $10000 account at Forex.com/UK (but perhaps in euros, since I already have a USD account, again to hedge a bit) to get the Pro spreads and five decimal pricing. I’m also looking at FXCM UK. I really would like at least 1:200 and favorable swaps. Well see. It is fun to code EAs again at least 
Like I predicted in a blog posting in the beginning of the week (”To scalp or not to scalp…“) it was just a matter of time before FAPT USDCHF, the latest and greatest pair with that particular EA, blows up. It happened just one day later. There was a jump in price when the results from the election in Massachusetts was revealed. I must admit that I wasn’t enough informed about this event (I’m a Swede and it really haven’t gotten any coverage here), had I known I probably wouldn’t have traded the USD pairs that night. But that’s scalping for you… Read more…
Just a quick post about the performance of Forex Shocker v1.1 and v2.0 year to date. When v2.0 came out I stopped v1.1 on my demo account, but started it again week 1 this year because I wanted to see if it really was better than the earlier version.
Here’s the trades of V1.1 since 2010-01-04:
Currency Trades Pips Profit($)
GBPUSD 15 75.0 75.00
USDCAD 5 23.8 23.06
EURCHF 21 13.8 13.20
EURGBP 17 69.4 112.18
USDCHF 18 81.4 79.76
EURUSD 15 76.9 76.90
and V2 the same period:
Currency Trades Pips Profit($)
GBPUSD 12 41.8 41.80
USDCAD 11 32.0 30.90
EURCHF 29 19.9 19.21
EURGBP 10 -7.5 -12.79
USDCHF 10 42.9 41.94
EURUSD 10 42.5 42.50
As you can see it is quite a different picture, especially for EURGBP, but overall V1.1 trades much better than v2.0 (the only pair that v2.0 have an advantage in seems to be USDCAD, but I wouldn’t trade that pair on either version anyway). This is on a demo account, of course the performance live won’t be as good, but slippage effects both versions so I still think the comparison is valid.
So, my plan is to enable V1.1 on my live account again and let it trade EURGBP, USDCHF, EURUSD and GBPUSD. I will also keep v2.0 live trading USDCHF, EURUSD and GBPUSD as before, because as far as I can see it is very rare that they actually take the same trades. Just in case I will put them on max 1 open trade each.
Oh yeah, I know I wrote about being tired of scalpers yesterday. I still am, but during my analysis of their performance I spotted this. If you want to analyze it further yourself you can look at my demo account (click the graph above). It trades both version with default settings with fixed lotsize of 0.1 at JadeFX Demo.
Well, that really is the question on my mind right now. I enjoy some aspects of the scalpers I employ (FAP Turbo, MegaDroid and Forex Shocker), but I hate others. I really enjoy checking the nights’ progress in the morning. I live in Sweden and most of the trading is done after my bedtime, so the first glance at the accounts in the morning is quite exciting. Since the scalpers actually make money most days it is something that motivates me to spring out of bed, I need that. It is great to see that your EAs have successfully scalped away pips throughout the night. I especially like when they’ve made successful scalps in both directions, from the top and the bottom of the range they’ve established. It really can be a beauty to see (perhaps a twisted preference).
Well, the backside to the scalpers cannot be news to anyone. They blow up now and then. Like last Thursday when several of my traded pairs broke out of their ranges and made my scalpers positions go into deep drawdown only to hit stoplosses during the Friday. It really can make you sick to see. The whole point of scalping is to grab quick pips, not to go into deep drawdown and keep the positions during the day.
So what to do? I don’t know. But reality is that RoboMiner, by far, is my most profitable strategy (not a scalper, rather a long term grid trader). The scalpers used on my JadeFX account can really make magic for a while, like it nearly doubled in the first six weeks from $500 to $929. But after that it totally broke down to $217 in just a few weeks. Since then the account have been going upwards quickly only to get beaten down again. It’s exciting, but probably not the best investment…
My JadeFX account to date.
I’ll have to think some more, I’ll be back when I have made a decision. For now I keep running the scalpers.
I had a terrible Thursday this week with stoplosses hit on all accounts actually. The Alpari UK account took the worst beating. Read more…
The first week of the year was a very good one actually. If this continues I will be rich by the end of 2010. Read more…
But act fast, they’re likely to fill the available slots today at least. I’ve signed and this time I will fund the account. In September when they last was open for new members I had no time to start the account before going away backpacking for three months.
The real benefit with CFX (as I will call them at least) is ECN spreads with low commission. I will pay $147 each month to trade 45 lots. That is a lot (pun intended) for me, I probably won’t trade that much to start with. So the first months I will pay a little more for each trade, but still hopefully this will be better long term. I haven’t decided exactly on how much to deposit and what EAs to run, but somewhere in the range of $2-3000 and it is very likely that I will use MegaDroid (my favorite) on the account. Possibly I will deploy Forex Bling in there instead of at Forex.com/UK as planned, that way I give the ThunderBolt and ThunderStorm scalpers a nice environment to trade in. But I haven’t run the Bling package on demo at CFX, so I will have to start with that.
Well, this was news to me just a few days ago. DukasCopy, one of the biggest institutional brokers in the World, is implementing MetaTrader4 as trading platform, in parallel with their current offerings. Right now they’re offering what they call a “temporary beta demo”. I downloaded and started four MD charts (+2,+4,+6,+8) yesterday. It have done very well actually, better than JadeFX demo with the same setup for example (of course no guarantee for live performance).
Good news also is that they allow accounts with minimum $5000 (lowered from $50K to $10K and now lowered again). Minimum lot size is currently 0.1 of a million, but there’s a rumor that they will allow trading micro lots soon. That could be very interesting.
Even if you’re not interested in opening an account there, check out their history center. Excellent for backtesting on M1 way way back. I ran a 10 year MD backtest yesterday with 90% modeling quality. Not like your average ECN, who often don’t offer more than days of M1 history. The best would have been tick data of course, but MT4 doesn’t offer this possibility.
Check it out yourselves: http://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/english/forex/trading_login/marketplace_demo_login/ (at the bottom of the page)
I’ve been trading the Forex Bling package in demo since September, with mixed results. Some of the EAs really haven’t been working out for me before the last update (912), and certainly not with all the pairs they’re capable of trading. But as long as you choose your EAs and currency pairs correctly I think this is a great addition to further minimize my dependency on a small number of EAs (read FAPT and MD).
The ones I’m considering putting live first is Evolution2 EURUSD, Fractals4 GBPUSD, Fractals4 EURGBP and possibly Freedom EURJPY. These have been rather consistent and even with the lowest possible lot size (I use fixed lotsizes instead of risk% money management) have made 15% over three months together (the Freedom EA have been a bit unstable though, hopefully version 912 performs better than 909 and 911). This is of course not amazing, but since they’re not scalpers they will hopefully have little or no correlation with the other EAs I trade live. I think I will put them on my Forex.com/UK account, since it’s the biggest I have and currently only trades RoboMiner and MegaDroid.
The updated ThunderBolt and ThunderStorm scalpers in the Bling package actually is performing very well also, but I probably won’t put them live right now. I already have FAPT and MD scalping in my accounts. And I really would like to put them on a ECN account like JadeFX if I decide to trade them, but that isn’t possible if I want the other EAs to trade micro lots.
I’ve started a demo this week with the new GridSpecialist EA on the recommended pairs. The developers accounts using this EA have been very impressive, but I want to verify myself of course. The last time I traded something with Grid in the name (read GridBot) it didn’t end up well… I will definitely be careful with this one.
All in all Forex Bling is a great package I think. $99 for three months is okay for the six different EAs / strategies you get considering all of them actually seems profitable.
