What to do…

Just a short update with the trading result for October at JadeFX. The setup used is basically the same as the previous months, but I have been experimenting a little with timeout values (testing a change of TP to 0 pip after 150 minutes, which is still under evaluation).

18.65% up over the month with just one big negative day, Oct 7th, of -153 pips. So I must say that I’m pleased with this performance. It is very much inline with the two previous months (of 16% and 17% equity growth).

I don’t know I really meant to but it seems as if I publish monthly performance of my scalper account at JadeFX somewhat regularly now, so why not continue. It was quite a rocky month, with two big drawdowns (one huge at about 11% lost equity), but overall this account managed to grow 16.62%. I am very happy with this result since I have been taking less risk that in July and August and still managed to match the performance of August (in July the account grew 37%, that will be hard to beat for sure).

The scalpers traded on the account is MegaDroid, Forex Shocker, FAP Turbo, The Channel Scalper and RSI MA Scalper. The main moneymaker is still The Channel Scalper on EURGBP (both v1.12 and v1.13 with different sets), but RSI MA Scalper on EURUSD is doing very good also. I hope to introduce XBars MA Scalper on GBPUSD and EURUSD this month, they are demo trading still. Main focus of my scalping is on the low spread pairs with good execution like EURUSD, EURGBP, GBPUSD and USDCHF. I have dropped EURCHF and GBPCHF, the spread and execution is not as good as the others.

Just woke up and excitingly checked my EAs performance during the night. Found this (on both my JadeFX and The Collective FX accounts):

That is some seriously unlucky stoplosses. Out of the 9 positions that were taken 7 just hit their stoplosses before EURGBP returned to make the remaining two positions take profit. If this had happened at a non-ECN (and just one) I would be very tempted to think about stophunting. But as it happened at all my brokers I guess I was just very very unlucky.

So, 10% lost of the JadeFX account, resetting the account to 0% growth during September.

Quick update on the performance on my main scalper account at JadeFX during August. I’ve previously posted about the excellent results during July. August was also good, but I had one day that basically all trades went to stoploss for a negative hit of 551 pips or about 15% of the account (which also corresponded to my risk-appetite right then). It was inevitable to happen of course, and it will happen again. I didn’t change any settings after the “crash” and the losses was made up the coming 10 trading days. Excellent.

Other than the massive losing day (17th of August) I had two more days with negative pips. Overall the account made 742 pips which amounted to 18%. I am very pleased with that, considering that the maximum loss scenario was realized.

Going forward I have changed the setup a little. During July and August I have been experimenting somewhat by running three different setups of the main moneymaker EA here. Now it is clear which setup I will use going forward. It is very stable (if I had only used that one on the 17th the drawdown would have been much smaller).

I have also introduced a new EA from the Funyoo forum on my live account on the 1st of September that I’ve been optimizing with Dukascopy tickdata. I’ve been trading it with great results on demo for the past two weeks, and so far it seems as good on my live account (only had two trading days yet, but the trades are identical with demo trades taken).

Just a quick reflection that for the past two months basically all scalpers seem to have been doing very well. I’ve re-enabled some old favorites, like FAPT50 and Forex Shocker 1.1 trading EURGBP and they’ve been doing very well. Even GBPCHF by FAPT50 have been very nice. Just watch your risk exposure, calculate the maximum you want to risk in a trade and then all EAs (possible) trades together. It is very easy to keep increasing the lot sizes in periods like this when everything is going great, leading to more risk that you actually want to take.

July at JadeFX, my main scalper account.

As you can see above July was great at JadeFX. 38% increase and just one day with negative pips (33 pips lost). The best day gave 125 pips.  All trades are by scalping EAs.

This was a great week. I was a bit afraid of the AUDNZD breaking into the 1.30 range, but it backed off and closed the week down at 1.28. Good news for my grid trader. Read more…

That was a rather stupid title to this post. Duh, it is hard to find the optimal broker, of course it is. Well, I find it increasingly hard to even find good ones when you put your demands on paper. I have recently written a EA that uses a long term grid trading strategy. It will leave positions open for months or even years, they will be heavily in loss during this time, but it will never close them. There is no stop loss. But what happens if you are forced to close them by your broker? This have recently happened with at least one broker I know of because of a switch of liquidity provider. Also, because of the long time in the market, swaps play a huge part in the performance of the system. It can deal okay with low negative swaps, but neutral or positive is of course much better. As for leverage the higher the better, but at least 1:100 but more preferable 1:200.

Spreads is not as important actually, but the tighter the better of course since price doesn’t have to move as far to take out profit. But this is not as important as swaps. Microlots is quite important for the system when account balance is below $10K, after that it isn’t as important as the EA would be close to using 0.1 lots anyhow. It is still preferable to be able to open 0.11, 0.12 and so on (LOTSTEP of 0.01 even thou MINLOT is 0.1). Of course it is impossible to run a grid system on a FIFO broker, so no NFA registered entities are good enough.

Regulation, dealing desk and deposits/withdraw handling are other factors, but they are not directly tied to the trading per se. It is however very important not to get scammed of your money of course. FSA regulation is prefered I think, and no dealing desk hopefully makes the broker less probable to be tempted to try to scam you (on slippage and such).

So this gives a checklist I’ve been trying on a few brokers (for long term strategies like my own EA or Robominer):

1. No FIFO requirement.
2. Positive swaps on pairs to be traded.
3. No future forced closing of positions.
4. Regulation by preferably FSA. Good stable company in general (the bigger the better I think).
5. At least 1:100 leverage (check that margin requirements are unchanged over the weekend).
6. Microlots.
7. Competitive spreads.
8. Low slippage (it is annoying to be slipped a few pips on entry and exit if they’re very rarely to your advantage).

I can say straight off that I haven’t found any broker that fulfills all of the above. The ones with the best trading environment (positive swaps, low spreads and low slippage) is rarely regulated and aren’t trading microlots. Also they could be forced to change liquidity providers now and then to get the best spreads (important for their scalper customers) which would force us to close positions that are negative. On the other hand are the bigger players with quite costly swaps and spreads, but at least I think you can be sure you are going to get payed by brokers like Forex.com or FXCM.

So, what to do? Since I can’t find one perfect broker I will diversify and use several. I will also trade different pairs on the selected ones. It is quite interesting that there are brokers where you have to pay 4.5 pips a day for 1 lot AUDNZD short when there’s others where you get payed 0.3 pips a day for the same position. It doesn’t quite add up for me, but that is the reality. Also the best ECN brokers give spreads in average of 5-6 pips during a day when some of the fixed spread brokers offer fixed 12 pips, a spread that the ECN offered just for a few ticks a day during news.

I have live accounts with Alpari UK, Forex.com/UK, Jade FX and The Collective FX right now. I’ve deployed my EA at Alpari UK, Forex.com/UK and The Collective FX. At Alpari UK the swaps in AUDNZD was just way to high, so I stopped that pair after just a few days realising how expensive it would be with lingering positions. I still trade EURCHF there thou. I just yesterday replaced RoboMiner on the Forex.com/UK account with my own EA and it will continue trading AUDNZD and EURCHF there. Swaps in AUDNZD is negative, but manageable. The Collective FX is by far the best broker of the bunch for AUDNZD since the swap for short positions is 0 (zero). IE you can have lingering positions without penalty. JadeFX offers the best spreads in AUDNZD, but the swap is too high there so I won’t deploy any long term strategies. Also there is talk in the forum about switching liquidity provider.

I’ve also checked out a great number of other brokers to open additional accounts with. I’ve opened but not funded an account at PrimeBankForex. They have great spreads, excellent swaps and trades microlots, but aren’t regulated. I’ll wait a few weeks before funding because I found out that they’re considering changing locality of their trading server and possibly this would force a close of open positions (I’m guessing they’re trying to get to the UK from their current NYC location because of fear for the NFA and CTFC over-regulation of the market with 1:10 leverage and FIFO).

I would like to have funds at a respectable broker like FXCM/UK, but their swaps is just to huge (in the pairs I’m considering at least) and they don’t offer microlots. The same for MIG Bank that have been getting good reviews by people I generally trust. DukasCopy have many things talking for them, but their 1:33 leverage over weekends pretty much destroys the number of open positions to a level that isn’t good for a grid system.

So this leaves me with mainly two brokers I am live with, Forex.com/UK and The Collective FX. It is good becuase they’re pretty much each others counterparts. The performance of the system is really much better at CFX, but Forex.com/UK (with Gain Capital) is a huge respectable entity. It is a very slim chance I will get scammed or forced to close positions there I think. But two brokers, when neither is perfect, is not good enough… I will desperately try to find at least two more. Suggestions are very welcome.

After 3 months of backpacking perhaps it is a bit early to say that I’m back in business already (arrived at home yesterday morning with a overnight train), but at least I’ve started to examine my live accounts and made some graphs of their performance. Doesn’t look too good, but of course it was a gamble to leave my scalpers unattended for such a long period, I knew that. I am a bit surprised by some of the losses on the JadeFX account thou, it was very very solid right up to the day I left (21st of September) and then it really have been struggling the whole time.

Alpari-UK live account w39-w52

In total the loss over this 3 month period is -€138 at Alpari UK. As you can see in the graph it is somewhat controlled losses, thou the maximum drawdown was 40% (in both the downturns basically). The main offender is MegaDroid (with tweaked trading hours) with a loss of €258. Definitely have too look deeper into that. USDCAD traded by FAP Turbo was the best with a profit of €231.

Forex.com/UK live account w39-w52

As you can see in the graph I added funds to this account ($1000) in order to keep RoboMiners open positions safe margin wise. I knew this could be needed since I traded with a little to small account. The performance have been very good thou with a steady gain of $828. The small bumps in the upward trend is losing trades by MegaDroid, but overall MD is up $208, so it have been doing well on Forex.com/UK (especially well compared to my other accounts).

JadeFX live account w39-w52

Well this really is sad. Basically the account crashed during October, from $929 to $216, a 77% drawdown. All EAs and pairs were doing terrible. Then it started to produce winners again and more than doubled the account in the beginning of November to $457 before starting trading bad again. The real disappointing thing was just in the last week of trading thou with two MD EURUSD trades entered by the same MD chart with stoplosses at -111 and -46 pips. Something must have gone wrong there, I’ve never seen such a high stoploss by MD before. After that the account is once again decimated. $197 is left of the $929 (which was built up from a $500 deposit). I haven’t really gotten into the details but it seems MD have been performing very bad on JadeFX the past three months, for some reason. The best performer have been Forex Shocker, with the new 2.0 version being even a little better than the 1.1 that have made most of the trades this fall.

If you add up the three accounts profits and losses the total loss is $42 over the last three months (or gained about $400 if you count the cashback I’ve been receiving). I will make adjustments to all accounts the coming days (will post details later), and begin trading scalpers again on the 4th of January on selected pairs. Right now I only have RoboMiner active.

I probably will add funds to the JadeFX account and enable just a few EAs and pairs (some non-aggressive MD charts, FS2 USDCHF and FAPT USDCAD perhaps) and hopefully I will be able to turn the account around again.

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…

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.