What to do…

Just a short recommendation if you like MQL4 programming or at least running long optimization runs in MT4. Join the private “elite” section of Funyoo’s forum over at tradingsystemsforex.com. It is $99 per year and gives you access to a section on the forum with over 280 different EAs. The huge number is both a great thing and the biggest problem with the forum. There are actually too many to handle. Many are made by Funyoo on request by members and never make any profit, but there are a few really good ones actually.

I’ve been a member for two months  and my poor CPU is working hard on optimization runs all the time now

Are you interested? Seems to be some openings in freelance MQL4 programming. The funny thing really is that these guys want you to do all the work; including coming up with the strategy, implementing it, writing the manual, providing snapshots of trades and even making a video of a live trade. Then they proceed and make a fantastic website with the usual bullshit and set a $99-$499 price I guess.

This one is even better I think. They just want nice backtests. No mention of that the strategy should work for live trading. Perhaps nice backtests is all you need to sell a few copies… I actually have a strategy that backtests extremely well, but can’t make money even in demo trading. Perhaps I should sell it

I check the MetaTrader / MQL4 listings at Freelancer.com now and then. I could actually see myself taking smaller assignments (say 8-20 hours of work), but so far I haven’t come across anything interesting enough to bid on. Ideally I’d like to make implementations of already manually tested strategies / systems or implementation of indicators. Generally I think the pay is low for this. If you want a decent $/hr ratio you really have to stress the implementation, it won’t be high quality. There seems to be a lot of “low cost” countries represented in the bidding thou, for a Chinese programmer $400 is a big deal of course.

I haven’t really been paying to much attention to all the hoards of EAs released this spring, especially not scalpers, but this one really caught my attention by showing extremely good performance in scalping exotic pairs (like GBPCAD, CHFJPY and others). It is called Primeval EA and is actually a collection of strategies, but personally the scalper is what I’m interested in (there’s also a hedger, gridtrader and some kind of martingale strategy. They might be alright but the scalper is on fire).

There’s tons of backtests on the site, that obviously look good (why would anyone publish them otherwise?), but there’s also verified accounts at MyFXBook (2 demos and 1 live account at FXCBS).

Here’s the live account: http://www.myfxbook.com/members/primevalea/primeval-ea-v21-live-fxcbs/34374

Yeah it has made 45%, but the drawdown is a bit to much for my taste. I would lower the lotsize to 0.1 or even lower with this small account. But still, the pips taken is impressive and the maximum loss is survivable (38 pips, the SL is set at 36, but I guess there was some slippage).

The demos are doing even better, which is sad of course, but very common. Blame the brokers for not offering fair demo environments.

http://www.myfxbook.com/members/primevalea/primeval-ea-v21-fxcbs-demo/34377

http://www.myfxbook.com/members/primevalea/primeval-ea-v21-alpari-uk/34379

What are the downsides? Well, it is a scalper. They tend to work well, bring steady profits and then brake down now and then. It has happened with all other scalpers I’ve tried. But with proper risk management this can be handled of course. A good thing with this one is that it trades so many pairs profitable, which brings down risk somewhat if one or two stops working. But like most of us know, many pairs are quite correlated and a stoploss in one pair seldom comes alone.

The other downside is the price. It is $600. Yeah, four to six times the usual $99 - $149. But, really, if it keeps performing this well, it is worth it. There is a 45 day money back guarantee (and since it is a Plimus product it is very likely that you actually get your money back if not satisfied, that has been my experience with some priors at least).

So, I’m leaning towards a buy. I’ll keep you posted of course. If anyone else takes the plunge, let me know.

Check it out. Primeval EA.

Update: Oh yeah, you can use it on 2 live accounts per license, which is a added perk of course (and suits me great, I would put them on my existing JadeFX and The Collective FX accounts.)

Seems MetaQuotes is going to run their championship (ATC) again this year, now on the new MetaTrader 5 platform exclusively. It will run from October 4th to December 24th and it is possible to register already. They will host and run all EAs at their servers. There will be prizes for $80,000 in total.

So why is this competition better than the awful Forex Robot World Cup (FRWC) that some affiliate spamsters organized this winter? (I warned you about it before hand). Well, MetaQuotes is doing this to promote their platform, not to get access to EAs to sell for profit after the competition. That was the main reason to run the FRWC of course. Oh, and as I predicted the EAs that performed best during the two month competition have failed since. This is really the problem that I see with the ATC also, it is too short. Sure it is a few weeks longer than FRWC, but it is still too short to give any significant results. I would have loved seeing a 6+ month competition. That would weed out all the boom-bust strategies and perhaps reveal some more stable ones.

None the less, I will try to enter the competition. I have just started experimenting with MT5, but I must say I like it a lot as of yet. MQL5 is refreshing and the Strategy runner in MT5 is so improved it hurts whenever I go back to MT4 to test a EA.

Check it out: http://championship.mql5.com/2010/en

Alpari UK have launched their MT5 demo platform recently, check that out too: http://www.alpari.co.uk/en/cnews/show/id/570/

Seems like there’s a increasing interest in trading the gap in Forex between Friday close and Sunday open prices. As I’ve written about earlier I have bought one product with this strategy earlier this spring. I can’t really say that it has been working out great. So far I’m behind $100 in total, out of which EURUSD stands for $175 of losses. All other pairs are in profit. Clearly the SL of Forex Harvester is way way to big in relation to the profit it takes. The developer is now stating that there is a second version coming for free for current customers. In the mean time I’ve disabled the EURUSD pair.

I was just made aware of another commercial EA trading the same strategy, but it really seems to be better programmed. It opens just one trade (per traded pair) and it uses a much tighter stoploss. I haven’t gotten it, but perhaps I will. Check it out yourselves, it’s called Forex Gap Robot.

Even thou these implementations are different and the details is unknown to me it is a very nice addition to a portfolio I think. I’m a bit tempted to code a EA myself to be in total control of the logic used. The strategy is very simple, and it have been used for years in different markets (most other markets have gaps every day). One thing to remember is that the results are very broker sensitive as different brokers use different end and start times. Also the spread can be very wide in the beginning hour(s) of the Sydney session.

I’ve been doing the same format of weekly updates for quite a while, and I feel now that it perhaps is best not to continue. I’ve been getting some negative attention from unwanted direction, and as I trade more and more manually (some weeks at least) there is no purpose to keep posting account balances I think.

I’ll keep posting of course, but I’ll try to write more specifically about a select EA or strategy and analyze its performance over time. Like this post about Forex Shocker.

This week, again, was dominated by news about the Greek debt situation and the crisis package presented by the Euro countries. I have long positions in EURCHF that is in deep drawdown now. I have actually hedged them to a large degree because the situation is so volatile. It seems the SNB is trying to defend the CHF at 1.40, but if history repeats itself this will be hard to sustain for them as EURUSD is going down still. They have tried to fix price at other levels before this spring.

Other than EURCHF it has been a good week with nice results from scalpers and AUDZND trades. Total gain was $1230.37.

Read more…

I just found that I apparently have a demo account  trading Green that actually stretches back to almost the first version (it started trading v1.01).  I upgraded it to v1.16 last week which introduces quite a lot of extra bells and whistles, but the main strategy is completely untouched of course. Nice to see that it has been making small but steady gains through out this very difficult time. AUDNZD breached its 10 year historical high with about 250 pips at the same time that EURCHF was around it lowest in 10 years. Since then AUDNZD have backed down, but EURCHF of course kept on falling as the Greek turmoil escalated. When prices where around or out of the extremes it didn’t make much of course, but as you can see it has made up for it as AUDNZD have recovered.

One thing I’ve actually learned here is that you should take time and set up proper demo accounts trading your EAs from the first moment and then make an effort to upgrade them along the way. I’ve traded a lot of demos of course during the development of Green, but most have been experiments with different settings and pairs. Some also have been closed because they were time limited by the Broker (annoying thing). So, for future projects I will focus on setting up proper demos, and also I will setup more on Green using other brokers and other pairs (it trades any pair, but a AUDNZD / AUDCAD / EURCHF combination is what I think is the best).

Oh, and as a side note, I am thinking of selling Green EA somehow. I don’t have a plan ready thou, and I don’t really have time to support it as I’m working a regular job as well as other projects… We’ll see what happens

Boy this was a turbulent week. I’ve come out on top for now in my manual trades and Green really have been helped by the decline in AUDNZD that followed the rate decision from the RBA on Tuesday. The huge drop in EURCHF as SNB stopped selling CHF at a fixed rate sure didn’t thou. Two of my accounts (Alpari UK and Forex.com/UK) is in deep drawdown now with a majority from it in long EURCHF and some is trapped in EURCHF hedges put in too late (IE price have reversed since opened).

Total gain over the week was $2033.47.

Read more…

I took the plunge three weeks ago and got myself a shiny new “smartphone”, a first for me. I’m not a huge Apple fan so I got a HTC Desire with Android 2.1. It is very impressive. Since the first hour I just can’t understand how I managed before. It is very responsive and the screen is very bright and sharp. The browser works great on all the Forex and news sites I frequent regularly, even MyFXBook works great. All in all everything is better than I expected.

There is one thing I kind of miss thou, a mobile edition of MetaTrader. There is one, but it only runs on Windows phones (not even iPhones, weird decision by MetaQuotes if you ask me). There is a third party application at http://metatraderandroid.com/ but it isn’t a full replacement by any means.

My solution for mobile trading have been to setup a special VPS account to log in to with Remote RDP app (available for free in Android Market with limited, but good enough features). In the VPS I have MT4 sessions for all my accounts running. With 2X zoom level steering regular MT4 is quite easy. A problem is that the Remote app keeps showing the virtual keyboard as soon as a text input field is active, it can become quite irritating, but after a while you know when it is going to pop up so you can close it quickly. Using this setup I can check in on my accounts where ever I am and I can open/close trades easily. One bonus also is that I can use all the indicators and EAs available for the regular MetaTrader, something that is not possible on the mobile solutions. The drawback is that the interface isn’t optimized for touchscreen use and that RDP is heavier on your Internet communications (no biggie if your on WLAN or have unlimited 3G data plan).

MT4 session on VPS accessed via RDP on the HTC Desire

I’ve been looking for some simple chart software to run on the phone, but I haven’t found any good ones. Google have a app called Stocks, but it is only useful for stocks on NYSE and NASDAQ, nothing for international investors or Forex traders. There are numerous apps that are called something with Forex or Currency, but they’re all just simple currency converters. Hardly useful for traders, just tourists. I’ve also been trying to find a app to easily access the Forex Factory calendar (I use it all the time in the browser), but it seems no one else have needed it. I would like it setup as a widget that shows upcoming events and even sounds an alarm on certain select ones.

As for MyFXBook I’ve been looking for a app or widget accessing their information more easily than via the browser, but it seems no one has taken the time to write it yet. There is a API to use so it should be quite straight forward. I’m thinking of giving it a go myself. Would be great to be able to see all my live accounts in one screen I think, with just the most important stuff like balance, free equity and open positions. The problem of course is that the spare time I actually have available for coding is spent on coding EAs

If anyone has some other tips I’d be delighted to hear about them. Android Market is huge as it is and I probably have missed some goodies.

Hopefully MetaQuotes will deliver a Android version of MetaTrader 5 this year. If they get it out the door soon…