What to do…

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.

Haha, this is getting comic. So I won’t even say anything about it…

Alpari UK live account

… well. Just that the last trade of the week, FAPT in USDCAD, lost €87. That was not a good feeling for a otherwise positive week (note that the €100 jump early in the week is the cashback I made in June that I deposited in the account). I will be evaluating FAPTs settings for this coming week. Donna announced Saturday that she will stop trading FAPT at Alpari UK after two months of not so good results, and since I am at Alpari UK I’m of course a bit worried. I will not stop trading there this week thou, but I will probably stop trading after 23 GMT on both EURCHF and USDCAD.

As for MegaDroid on Alpari UK nothing special has happened really. I turned down risk for the week early on and it haven’t traded quite as much after that.

Forex.com/UK live account

As for the account on Forex.com/UK I stopped MD completely before last week because of all the crashes. I then bought and started trading RoboMiner (II). I also enabled MD Pro with very low risk settings. Nothing spectacular on the account yet, but I almost made the $40 monthly fee of RoboMiner in the first two days. This Friday I also added another $500 (that’s the big jump in the graph above) and upped the lot sizes to 0.04 AUDNZD and 0.03 EURCHF. Hopefully this setup can make some steady progress.

As for brokers I am reviewing quite a few ECNs to take over my FAPT trading (and MD/ MD Pro with it). The favorites right now, in terms of performance on the demo trading, is JadeFX and TheCollectiveFX. Both have excellent spreads and data streams. I don’t know about the other important aspects thou (like support and not trying to rob you). FXCBS is also a real contender, however it hasn’t performed as nice in demo for me, but a lot of people are really pleased with them live. Cashbackforex.com is offering 15% back on the commissions there. The other ones I’m trying is ATC, Broco and GoMarkets.

Oh, perhaps I should say something about FAPT Evo also. I’ve been demo trading it for three weeks now, and I am very interested in starting it live. Last week it made 13% with Donnas High risk settings (that isn’t even that high risk I think). Dukascopy is a real hassle to sign up with thou with lots of paper work. Not like your average MT4 broker…

I’ve been demo trading RoboMiner since beginning of June with very nice results (this of course depends heavily on the movement in AUDNZD). I’ve signed up for the subscription service since the price for the full license is just way to much money to invest. $40 a month also adds up of course but at least that can be taken from monthly profits I hope

I have started it on my existing Forex.com/UK account trading 0.03 lots in AUDNZD and 0.01 lots in EURCHF. I’m prepared to add more funds if needed to weather out draw downs. I might also add more and up the lot sizes depending on other investments fall out or not. We’ll see.

Cashbackforex.com offers 15% rebate on purchases of RoboMiner, so check them out if interested.

The new version of GridBot was released a week ago. I was not impressed. After running backtests the entire weekend trying to find anything good with it I put it on demo accounts and hoped that the backtests we’re wrong. Well, it didn’t end well and I finally went for the refund. The money hit my Paypal yesterday. I’ve lost quite a lot of money and time on this bot. I really think it is possible to make a profitable grid trader (just look at Robominer), but not this one. Very disappointed actually since the developers are very inactive in their own forum also, not answering questions. (I still wonder where the hedge function in the new version is… I never saw a hedge of any sort).

FAPT Evolution is still running on demo, or at least I think it is, I’m not getting it to trade much at all. Reading forums the Dukascopy demo server really seems to give different performance for most of us. It is quite worrisome I think as they’ve stated that it should give very close to 100% matching performance with their live server (difference of course being the liquidity). The ones running it live seems to have a smoother ride although EURGBP apparently hit a S/L this week. I’m looking forward to Donnas update this weekend as I tend to use her settings for both regular FAPT and Evolution. She is very knowledgeable about these products.

As for MD Pro I put it up on a demo Forex.com/UK account and it has traded quite a bit (compared to regular MD), but is actually a few dollars behind for the week. EURGBP is the main culprit. Perhaps this pair isn’t really working out for scalping at all right now (as it is the same with FAPT and FAPT evo). The other pairs have done well. I’m thinking of replacing my regular MD on Forex.com/UK live account with the Pro version for next week. I still experience daily crashes with regular MD. The Pro version at least haven’t crashed the demo account once running it without MT4 restart all week.

After running Robominer on demo since June 1st I must, again, just state how impressive it is. They just released a new version that is updated to work with NFA regulated brokers after the new rules about FIFO is enforced, and they state that is is even more profitable with these new changes. Sounds good. I must buy it now and put it on a account somewhere. The developers are currently recommending Forex.com/UK, I have a account there already of course. I am also considering FXCM/UK bacause of their advantage in lower spreads. However they only allow trade with 0.1 lots, Forex.com/UK trades 0.01 lot size. The smaller lot size of course allows lower risk taking, but I’m so confident in this bot now I’m considering trading it at 0.1 anyway (think they recommend a account size of $35000 (updated see comments) to do this, but as long as you have funds to put in there in case of a sustained DD you can fund a smaller amount to start with).

Received spam email from FAPT Steve yesterday about a new bot they’re impressed with (they’ve promoted MegaDroid apart from FAPT before, and some manual systems) called IvyBot. It’ll be released next week and have a webinar planned for Monday. I’ll check it out. Could be something, but there’s so many new bots being released I just don’t know

Oh, I almost forgot. The Joury EA bot I’ve written about have been found to be a free EA by a guy called TrendChaser. The developer himself doesn’t consider it to be a good strategy (it can work for a few months only to wipe the account he says). So hope no one bought it. It is available free if you want to play with it, I’m thinking about doing so a little this weekend, just for giggles.

I’m going to make charts for my live accounts later tonight or tomorrow for the weekly update. I can just say that it doesn’t look good now, and that the Alpari UK account have been doing much better than the Forex.com/UK account. The markets have really punished MD yesterday and today.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly looking for new robots to make me money. Lately this have reversed a little (since FD2 burned me), but there are two EAs I am considering to buy right now, besides the not yet released FAP Turbo Swiss (should be out by July 14th). They are RoboMiner and Joury EA.

I have run RoboMiner in a Alpari US demo for 6 weeks and at one point I really didn’t think it was working out for along time. It constantly had 10-12 trailing orders with quite large losses accumulated (at one point more than 25% of the account). But the market have reversed and RoboMiner have had a serious payday. During June (in the demo account) it made 38 trades in AUDNZD with profit and had one lingering with a running loss of €20. The total profit was around €800, or close to 15%. RoboMiner is a grid trader and it opens orders without stop loss. This can seem scary, but the thing is that the pair it trades, AUDNZD, is very range bound. The economies of Australia and New Zeeland are both very commodity heavy and they usually follow the same economic swings. This makes there currencies very nice to trade with a grid system (I’ve been trading it with GridBot EA also). The down side is the spread, at Alpari UK it is 20 pips. There are other brokers with lower, but I haven’t found anything lower than 14 pips. A very nice thing is that you can demo RoboMiner (and its bigger brother GT-Shadow) for free. The price is a whopping $495, but you can subscribe to it for $40 a month if you want. I’m considering the subscription. As for broker I think I’m going with Alpari UK because of the 1:500 leverge, with just 1:100 the margin is perhaps a bit to tight to fully trade this EA.

Joury EA is a quite different being than the slow and careful RoboMiner. I haven’t demo traded it but I have gotten input from people who do and who also trade it live. It is a completely mad system that takes many small positions, sometimes hedges them when the free margin is small and sometimes even re-hedge the hedge (like I said crazy). But it seems to work out. The gains are small but quite even. It can trade many pairs but the ones most profitable are GBPJPY, GBPUSD and CADUSD as I understand it. The cost is $197 and it is not a ClickBank product. This is actually why I haven’t bought it yet, I really enjoy the possibility to demo trade during the refund period and have the possibility to return the product if it doesn’t perform well.