What to do…

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. 

Another week has passed. This was the first week live on JadeFX so it has been fun to see how MD Pro has been doing there. But it has actually been a good week at Alpari UK also, quite a surprise.

Alpari UK live micro account

The week ended with a gain of €106 which is very nice. The money makers have been USDCAD with FAPT and EURUSD and USDCHF with MD Pro. I added EURGBP recently again after not having traded that one for the whole summer. That was a mistake, I took three S/L:s with it during the week. It will be removed now. Other than that I will continue with the same setup for next week.

Forex.com/UK live account

With Robominer on the Forex.com/UK account it have been quite a uneventful week, but still $57 gained, all with AUDNZD. EURCHF is going the “wrong” way now and I have six open EURCHF trades, hopefully it turns soon enough. I am considering letting MD Pro have another go at this account also, with non-aggressive low risk settings, probably only trading EURUSD and USDCHF.

JadeFX live account

The first week live with Jade FX with a total of $65 gained (which is 13% !). EURUSD and USDCHF was the moneymakers. The only loss was made with EURCHF. Not much to say other than that MD Pro really seems to like the low spreads at JadeFX. I probably will add another $500 and get FAPT trading on it soon (hopefully during next week).

So, all in all a very positive week with roughly $270 gained over the three accounts. Hope it continues next week.

I know there’s people that is interested in my progress with JadeFX, so I thought I’d just make a small update now that MD Pro have traded my small $500 account live for the first night. I got three trades all in all with one USDCHF that made full 10 pips profit and two trades that closed as break even (one each in EURCHF and EURGBP). The exact same trades was opened in my demo account (there was a difference in price on the USDCHF trade with 0.6 pips in favor of the live account), which I consider very good news.

$500 is clearly to little to trade all four pairs of MD Pro with just 1:100 leverage thou. Margin wise each 0.1 lot (the size I traded) requires $100, but MD Pro seems to have a safety feature so that it doesn’t open too many trades. It will only allow two simultaneous 0.1 lotsize trades, so we might miss some opportunities there.

The plan right now is to continue with this small “live demo” setup for the week. I will perhaps just keep two or three pairs during this time. Will analyze the performance of the demo account during August to determine which ones. USDCHF is a given thou, it is the clear winner for MD Pro. After that i probably will add another $500 or so and get another FAPT license to run on it also.

Wish me luck

I’ve finally gotten around to opening a MT4 ECN account. I have, for the last month or so, been actively searching for a alternative to my Alpari UK account to run scalpers on basically. I’ve been running demos loaded with FAPT (all four pairs) and MD Pro (also all four pairs) at multiple brokers and have now come to the conclusion that JadeFX offers one of the best (demo) data streams available to us mere mortals. Spread wise it is often even tighter on the majors than  DukasCopy (with the JFOREX retail platform at least). But of course, it would have been better to run this test on live accounts, but I think that isn’t possible for most of us. As for commissions JadeFX has the lowest I’ve found at 5 USD / lot.

I’ve also opted to use their VPS service. The servers running my MT4 will be in the same datacenter as Jade FX’s live (and demo) trading server. I’ve not had time to do more than log in and run a simple ping as of yet, but it is really nice with sub 1ms latency. I see one problem with the actual VPS service and that is that it is run using VMWare (ESX i presume) and that we as customers isn’t offered our own sandboxes (with full Administrator privileges). I would have preferred Virtuozzo and Datacenter edition offering containers with Virtual Servers that we ourselves can reboot and such. I’ve asked support about the possibility to run as Administrator. I really want to be able to use AlwaysUp in order to run my MT4 sessions as services, with the possibility to restart them daily to avoid memory problems. The VPS service is quite cheap at $25/month plus Paypal fees ($27 for me) and you get 1 gig of ram.

As for funding and support I must say that they are really fast. My application for the account was processed in one hour and my VPS was setup in 3 hours. Support have answered all my emails (3 as of yet) within one hour every time. Very impressive I would say, and the answers have been helpful also, not just some bonehead answers I’ve been getting from some help desks over the years… (I’ve actually worked at a Help desk back office and I know not everyone employed at such places are Einsteins or even remotely interested in their work. No offense.)

I will start with just trading MD on EURUSD on Monday on my small deposit of just $500. I see it as kind of a live test to see that everything is working before starting FAPT and MD Pro on it (and add more funds). The main reason is that I have a spare MD license (left over from my Forex.com/UK account) so it is the easiest and cheapest to setup

I am contemplating setting up a FXCBS account also as I’ve noticed that they are offering quite a lot better spreads in EURCHF during the important scalping times. In the other important pairs like EURUSD they are not as competitive (compared to JadeFX), so I would primarily run EURCHF with FAPT and MD Pro there if I go for it. As you know my strategy have been to find a few different brokers and EAs to run as a mean to diversify my currency trade operation. I think it would be wise not to put all the eggs in one basket. Remember to sign at FXCBS through cashbackforex.com if you go for it, they’ll give you 15% back (brings commission down to 0.68 USD / lot)

Oh, have I forgotten about DukasCopy and FAPT Evo? Well, I have applied for an account there and I still own the license, but I won’t be going live right now. First of all I won’t be able to fund the $10K account this fall as I first thought (because I’m going backpacking for three months instead, need the funds for that) and second FAPT Evo really haven’t impressed me that much. Original FAPT on the right broker (hopefully JadeFX) have been keeping up with it. So hence my decision to wait with it.

I’ll keep you updated on my experiences with Jade FX over the coming days / weeks.