What to do…

I got spammed by Alpari UK about something they call the Gold account. I thought it would be kind of a VIP thing requiring $25,000 or something like that, but I was surprised to see that it actually was something quite interesting. Basically it is a normal micro or standard account using Gold (XAUUSD/1000) as base currency. I have accounts now based on USD and EUR (and have been thinking about starting a GBP based one also) as a strategy against risk associated with using just one currency.  A gold account would actually fit quite nicely. It is basically a negative correlation currency against the USD.

Check it out. As far as I can see it will behave exactly like a normal Alpari UK account other than deposits and withdraws are converted to/from XAUUSD/1000. If you are a gold bug this would fit perfectly.

http://www.alpari.co.uk/en/gold_as_currency/

Almost three months ago I started a demo at FinFX, a Finnish ECN broker. I haven’t been paying too much attention to it since, but today I checked in and realized that it have been performing very well indeed.  The strategy is a optimized Channel Scalper trading EURGBP.

MyFXBook chart of FinFX demo

I wish I had started a few more demo accounts at other brokers with the same setup for reference, but of course I didn’t… But I’ve been checking it against a JadeFX demo account with the same setup and the FinFX demo is actually a little bit “better”. It takes more trades and closes them quicker.

The commission is $7/lot, but Cashbackforex.com offers $1/lot back in cashback. As JadeFX nowadays take $8/lot on GBP basd pairs this is a very good level. I’m quite tempted to open an account. The minimum deposit is $2500. The only problem is that I really like the performance at JadeFX live account. There is of course no guarantee that live performance at FinFX is reflected by the demo.

It was of course inevitable, there had to be a loosing month sometime. January started of rather bad (like December ended), picked up a little and then fell through on the 24-25th. And then some more yesterday the 31st. So for a total loss of 14.53% it ended rather badly.

It is trades in EURGBP, the main currency traded that have been bad, and mostly then by The Channel Scalper. Other EAs have been small winners, with the exception of XBars MA Scalper trading GBPUSD that ended a small loser with 3 wins and 1 loss (and the ratio between TP and SL is just over 3).

When I’ve been looking at the performance day to day I can’t but see that there is some portion of “bad luck” involved here, or at least bad settings.

This picture is from yesterdays session. First off we can see of course that it started trading a little too early. The market was drifting upwards the entire session though, so the trades should have been taken “badly” either way. The really unlucky part is in the timeout value of 4 hours thou, when if 4h30min would have been used instead all trades would have taken profit instead of closing for about three times the TP in losses. Three positions survived the peak and took profit here. One EA, trading with a experimental SL of just 11, just exactly hit that before the reversal.

4 hours instead of 4,5 is a little better in backtests thou, so I will stick with it. Hopefully the Market will behave more like I expect it the coming month.

There have been even some more bad news for this account thou, as JadeFX have announced a 33% increase in commission for GBP based pairs. As 85% or so of my trading on the account is in EURGBP and a few more percent is GBPUSD this is really bad news. The commission on these will be $8/lot starting February 14th. Perhaps it is time to look at some of the alternative brokers, which are quite few, but perhaps worthy of testing out either way. FinFX is a ECN broker that I’ve been demotrading with successfully. They have about the same spread as JadeFX and they will after this change have lower commission. A HotForex Currenex account is another possibility, this one has the advantage of requiring just $500 to start out live testing with.

But I really like JadeFX and the setup I have there with their ultra low latency VPS. We’ll see, I won’t make any hasty decisions.