What to do…

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…

It is incredible but another week has flown by. I’ve been extremely busy this one since I’ve been working on my new EA. I’ve been yanking out code and got a new VPS at SWVPS.com for demo trading it. Currently 18 different demos running there, but I couldn’t really resist putting it live also, so it’s live on my Alpari UK and The Collective FX (CFX) accounts as of middle this week. Read more…

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…

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…

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…

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 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.

Quick review of the week on my live accounts.

Alpari UK live micro account

It has been mixed results that ended negative on my Alpari UK account (€22 loss). The week started nice and steady, then both FAPT and MD got lingering trades on Wednesday that went into S/L and took 12% of the account. Once again I was contemplating to close those positions when they we’re just a few pips behind, but I didn’t, as I really don’t think I’m supposed to baby sit these EAs. Once again I wish I had closed them…

I have completed my migration of Alpari UK trading to the VPS at SWTech. I haven’t noticed any problems or extra gains due to the minimal latency, but I will monitor it closely. I see about the same slippage that I have come to expect from Alpari UK (not so often, but still happens enough to be annoying). As of Tuesday this week (18th) Alpari UK will start using floating spreads, it will be interesting to see how much reqoutes / slippage that will introduce.

I probably will change the setup for FAPT a little for next week. I will add EURGBP again, with small fixed lot size to start with, and I will lower the T/P on USDCAD in order to get more profitable trades (albeit with lesser gain). I’ve seen statistics of an account with this setup that has been doing great the last weeks.

Forex.com/UK live account

Since RoboMiner is the only EA on this account now the graph above is quite uninteresting. But it has been a great week with $99.46 in profit. 9 profitable trades with AUDNZD and 1 with EURCHF. Right now I have only one open trade in AUDNZD and four in EURCHF. The good thing with open EURCHF trades is that the swap is positive, IE I make a little every day they are open.

All in all RoboMiner is really nice, it does what it is supposed to do. Of course the pairs traded have to “co-operate” with the strategy and move around a little, we won’t make money otherwise. I’m very pleased with the results as of yet at least.

Next week I hopefully have a nice graph here to show you from my live Jade FX account. Happy trading

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.