What to do…

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.

I’ve had mixed results this week, but overall my accounts have gained $144. Details below.

Alpari UK live account

The week at Alpari UK ended down by €22. EURCHF trades done by FAPT stood for €85 in losses, which is really bad I think. USDCAD did better, but only traded once with €10 gained. MD stood for the profits with €50 gained on EURUSD. I will definitely monitor FAPTs performance the coming week, if it doesn’t improve I might stop trading EURCHF here. I might even move it completely to the Jade FX account since USDCAD really have been working out great in demo there (see below for Jade FX performance live with MD Pro).

Forex.com/UK live account

Going into this week I re-added MD Pro to the Forex.com/UK account, since it seems some of the instability problems I suffered from last time have been solved with the update to v1.01. And so far so good, it hasn’t crashed. I only added three charts trading USDCHF, but I’ll add some EURUSD also for next week. I’ll continue to run non-aggressive settings as I want this account to suffer very low draw downs.

RoboMiner have performed quite good as always. All in all the account gained $90.66 for the week, with $12 from MD Pro.

Jade FX live account

This is the second week live at Jade FX for me. I only trade MD Pro right now and it is doing quite well. Total gain was $85.66. No losses this week, but a few break evens. This really seems to be a characteristic of MD Pro, if it hasn’t been able to close the position by T/P in some time (I think 1 hour) it tries to close it at break even. I don’t dislike this, but during the week all of the orders would eventually have gotten the full T/P, so it is cheating us from some profits (other weeks it might save us a fortune, so as I said, I don’t dislike this behavior).

In the two weeks I’ve run this account it has grown by 30% from $500 to $650.84, which I find quite remarkable. I am trading 0.1 lots which is minimum. It probably will be hard to sustain that kind of growth, so I am prepared for it to hit a S/L soon. But lets hope it’s not next week so the nice streak can continue

I am considering moving my FAPT license from the Alpari UK account to the Jade FX account. If I did I would only trade USDCAD to start with, which really seems to be the best pair right now. In my Jade FX demo it has done extremely well trading 21 - 01 GMT. But I am reluctant to do this right now because the VPS that I got from Jade FX isn’t doing quite as well as the performance on my account. Twice now I have been unable to log in to it, and support have been forced to reboot it to solve the issue. I still don’t like not being Administrator on it, and this is even more disturbing when it is unstable. With Administrator rights I could reboot it myself as well as run my MT4 sessions as services. If this issue isn’t solved in the coming two weeks I see no other solution than to get a different VPS to run my Jade FX trading on. But I think it would be very hard to find another one with <1 ms latency… We’ll see.

Good luck to you guys going forward. 

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.

_

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…

Okay, this is really getting annoying. Third week in a row ends bad. But this time there’s really a huge difference in the results between my live accounts. Enough to just stop MD on Forex.com/UK now. It still crashes almost daily and now it isn’t even doing as well as Alpari UK when it doesn’t crash.

Alpari UK live account

As you can see the week started of nicely with about a 10% gain up til Thursday night. The problems started when MD had open positions during the day and the trend was going the wrong way. If I had manually intervened and closed the positions early Friday morning the account would have made a profit of about €40 instead of a loss of €20. But I don’t want to close orders opened by EAs, that’s their job. I’ve also learned now that MD closes order after exactly 12 hours if still open, regardless of the current profit/loss. Had I known that I would probably have put a trailing stop on it say and hour before… Perhaps I should do that in the future.

FAP Turbo didn’t do much at all this week. It just managed to break even. It was MD that did all the trading in the account.

Forex.com/UK live account

This is we’re the real losses start. For some reason MD did much much worse on this account than on Alpari UK, with the exact same settings. I am running it without Stealth mode since MD crashes so frequently. I am not saying that the broker have used this information to manipulate prices to hit S/L:s, but there is definitely something going on here. I am going to stop trading MD on this account. As I have been demo’ing MD Pro on a Forex.com/UK account without crashes I will try out Pro on this account starting next week. I will trade EURUSD, EURCHF and USDCHF. If that doesn’t work either I don’t know about this broker…

So all in all, terrible week, again. Third in a row. Starting to loose faith in these bots… On the bright side thou, cashbackforex.com paid me my cashback for Alpari UK account this week. $144 free that I wouldn’t have gotten unless I used them as affiliate. Great stuff. When running bad it softens the blow, and when running good it’s just extra money. Don’t trade on accounts without rebates when they’re available

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.

Another disappointing week, this time with huge losses with S/L:s hit by both FAP Turbo and MegaDroid.

Alpari UK

In total the week at Alpari UK stopped at a loss of €162. The biggest single loss was a EURCHF trade by FAP Turbo with -€105. MegaDroid had a biggest loss of -€56. Terrible when bad trades happen almost at the same time like this.

Forex.com/UK

On Forex.com/UK I lost $194 in total, with the biggest loss (ever) of $279 on one MD trade. So, if that trade hadn’t been took the account would have made a huge week. But it is still good to see that the other trades where doing so well generally.

So, I’m still positive. I have made some changes to the setup the last days (turned on OneTrade on FAPT on both EURCHF and USDCAD for example) and I will make more tune ups tomorrow when I’ve hopefully completed my backtests of MD (Pro) and EURUSD.

Took out detailed reports for the week from my live accounts at Alpari UK (sporting FAP Turbo, MegaDroid and GridBot) and Forex.com/UK (only running MegaDroid). Not as nice as I hoped, with losses yesterday and today.

All in all, Alpari UK finished at a loss of €44.87 and Forex.com/UK at a profit of $66.87. That is basically a break even if you add it up… What a waste

Alpari UK live account

Forex.com/UK live account

So, MegaDroid did well on both accounts. FAP Turbo did well on Alpari UK. So what is left? Well GridBot didn’t do well… Again it loses me money. I will really stop trading it this time thou. Next week I expect them to release the new version (2.9) and then I’ll test it again.