What to do…

The first week of the year was a very good one actually. If this continues I will be rich by the end of 2010. Read more…

But act fast, they’re likely to fill the available slots today at least. I’ve signed and this time I will fund the account. In September when they last was open for new members I had no time to start the account before going away backpacking for three months.

The real benefit with CFX (as I will call them at least) is ECN spreads with low commission. I will pay $147 each month to trade 45 lots. That is a lot (pun intended) for me,  I probably won’t trade that much to start with. So the first months I will pay a little more for each trade, but still hopefully this will be better long term. I haven’t decided exactly on how much to deposit and what EAs to run, but somewhere in the range of $2-3000 and it is very likely that I will use MegaDroid (my favorite) on the account. Possibly I will deploy Forex Bling in there instead of at Forex.com/UK as planned, that way I give the ThunderBolt and ThunderStorm scalpers a nice environment to trade in. But I haven’t run the Bling package on demo at CFX, so I will have to start with that.

Well, this was news to me just a few days ago. DukasCopy, one of the biggest institutional brokers in the World, is implementing MetaTrader4 as trading platform, in parallel with their current offerings. Right now they’re offering what they call a “temporary beta demo”. I downloaded and started four MD charts (+2,+4,+6,+8) yesterday. It have done very well actually, better than JadeFX demo with the same setup for example (of course no guarantee for live performance).

Good news also is that they allow accounts with minimum $5000 (lowered from $50K to $10K and now lowered again). Minimum lot size is currently 0.1 of a million, but there’s a rumor that they will allow trading micro lots soon. That could be very interesting.

Even if you’re not interested in opening an account there, check out their history center. Excellent for backtesting on M1 way way back. I ran a 10 year MD backtest yesterday with 90% modeling quality. Not like your average ECN, who often don’t offer more than days of M1 history. The best would have been tick data of course, but MT4 doesn’t offer this possibility.

Check it out yourselves: http://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/english/forex/trading_login/marketplace_demo_login/ (at the bottom of the page)

I’ve been trading the Forex Bling package in demo since September, with mixed results. Some of the EAs really haven’t been working out for me before the last update (912), and certainly not with all the pairs they’re capable of trading. But as long as you choose your EAs and currency pairs correctly I think this is a great addition to further minimize my dependency on a small number of EAs (read FAPT and MD).

The ones I’m considering putting live first is Evolution2 EURUSD, Fractals4 GBPUSD, Fractals4 EURGBP and possibly Freedom EURJPY. These have been rather consistent and even with the lowest possible lot size (I use fixed lotsizes instead of risk% money management) have made 15% over three months together (the Freedom EA have been a bit unstable though, hopefully version 912 performs better than 909 and 911). This is of course not amazing, but since they’re not scalpers they will hopefully have little or no correlation with the other EAs I trade live. I think I will put them on my Forex.com/UK account, since it’s the biggest I have and currently only trades RoboMiner and MegaDroid.

The updated ThunderBolt and ThunderStorm scalpers in the Bling package actually is performing very well also, but I probably won’t put them live right now. I already have FAPT and MD scalping in my accounts. And I really would like to put them on a ECN account like JadeFX if I decide to trade them, but that isn’t possible if I want the other EAs to trade micro lots.

I’ve started a demo this week with the new GridSpecialist EA on the recommended pairs. The developers accounts using this EA have been very impressive, but I want to verify myself of course. The last time I traded something with Grid in the name (read GridBot) it didn’t end up well… I will definitely be careful with this one.

All in all Forex Bling is a great package I think. $99 for three months is okay for the six different EAs / strategies you get considering all of them actually seems profitable.

I just checked out my Paypal history for last year to see what I used it for. Mostly Forex related stuff actually. Buying robots, paying for VPS services and getting cashback. It’s the last one I just now fully realized how big of a deal it is (or can be atleast). During last year, since April 26th when I opened my Alpari UK live micro account, I’ve recieved $909.31 from Forexcashback.com in cashback. That is awesome for a account that currently holds just about €1000 (about $1430 today). Also, I had recieved $141.24 from the Aslan Group for my Forex.com/UK account, but that isn’t quite as impressive of course because that account right now have a balance of $3600. For my ECN broker JadeFX I have no cashback, since they don’t accept IBs (Introducing Brokers, or partners like Cashbackforex.com). But on the other hand they have very low spreads and charge just $5 / lot in commission.

So, unless you trade a low-cost ECN broker like JadeFX you should definitely secure a cashback deal. Currently Cashbackforex.com offers 14 different MetaTrader 4 deals with most of the big names, even some ECNs like GoMarkets and FXCBS.

True to form I usually publish these on the weekend, but this week I’ve only had RoboMiner active so there isn’t too much to show. But I’ll do it anyway.

Forex.com/UK Live account

A small profit of $38.35 was realized by RoboMiner during the last week of the year. All closed trades where in AUDNZD (like most of the 5 months I’ve been trading RM). EURCHF is currently going lower and RM keeps adding long positions, 7 in total during December. I’ve increased the lot size to 0.02 since EURCHF  is approaching it’s historical low, and I don’t expect it to hang around these regions that long.

The bump in the graph is a AUDNZD trade that had more negative swap than the profit it made of the 40 pips. Not good at all. I’ve changed the magicnumber of RM AUDNZD and changed the T/P value of the open trades so that they actually will make a profit when closed. One of the changed ones where closed this week for a gain of 80 pips.

Perhaps this isn’t news to you, but I’ve just been discovering all the wonderful new functions that the guys (or girls?) at MyFxBook.com have been adding this fall. The most valuable being the custom analysis on magicnumbers. I don’t want to get to pesky, but guess who made that suggestion to them? I’m very glad they understood my idea and implemented it quickly for us all to enjoy. I’ve been updating all my accounts with the MyFXBook EA and been registering the magicnumbers. It is so simple to analyze a single EAs performance in a multi-strategy account now.

Example view of MegaDroids trades on my Forex.com/UK account this fall (from October 19th) above. You can easily see that the chart with a GMT offset of 6 have been the best (on this account all the charts are non-aggressive so there is only the S1 magicnumber to display).

Okay, I’ll stop ranting about this now. Do check MyFXBook.com out thou, it is the best tool out there. There’s even nice widgets like the one below (also for my Forex.com/UK account, trading RoboMiner and MegaDroid). I would like a little more customizable widgets thou, will make that suggestion also…

With the upcoming release of MetaTrader 5 I’ve actually started investigating alternatives to the good and old MetaTrader 4. Why, isn’t MT5 good you say? Well, after running the Beta for just a day basically, I can say that it feels almost the same as MT4 and that it probably is very good. MQL5 seems good, but why MQL4 isn’t still supported I can’t understand. It would have been nice being able to use old EAs and indicators. Unfortunately the strategy tester isn’t activated in the Beta, so I can’t test that yet, but it is said to be multi-threaded and able to test multi-asset strategies, good stuff. Also there’s a order depth function (and view) now, which makes MT5 much more equities-trader friendly of course.

There is a change to the way positions are handled that I don’t think should be enforced by the platform though, and this is my gripe with MT5. It seems the NFA really have scared the Russians at Metaquotes into submission, so there is no hedging possibilities and a strict FIFO order execution in MT5. This isn’t good for anyone I think, and especially not for us that run multiple strategies (EAs) on the same account. Also, grid traders like RoboMiner is effectively hindered (luckily RoboMiner have a different strategy for NFA brokers with today’s MT4 that should work with MT5).

I’ve mailed my brokers (Alpari UK, Forex.com/UK and JadeFX) with questions about their plans about the upgrade, and the possibility to stay with MT4 (or even run both in parallel). We’ll see what they say, if they know themselves. I would like to use MT5 for trading equities and futures, and I really think this is what MetaQuotes have been focusing on.

Hopefully I won’t need another platform, perhaps the non-NFA regulated brokers can get a different version with hedging and free order close order, but just in case I’ve started looking around a bit. I already have experience from the JFOREX platform used by DukasCopy (as used by FAP Turbo Evolution), but I never liked it. Also the minimum accounts at DC is $10000 and the minimum contract size is $1M. That is too much for me, so it isn’t a alternative.

Another quite popular product is the NinjaTrader (current version is 6.5, but 7.0 is in beta). I’ve downloaded and started fiddling with it. NT works with quite a few different brokers, including Forex.com that I already have an account with. There’s also a few ECN brokers like PFG and MBT. First impressions is that it is a good product, not quite as intuitive as MT4/5, but very manageable. The scripting language seems great.

So, is there any other alternatives?  I’m looking for free platforms (or at least platforms that the brokers pay the fee for) with small deposit limits ($1000 or so) and regular lot sizes (0.1 lot for ECNs and 0.01 for bucketshops). Of course it has to be possible to run automated strategies. Any tips?

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’m still traveling (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia right now), so I really don’t spend as much time researching and testing as I use to at home, but I’ve at least updated to FAP Turbo v49 and Forex Shocker 2.0 on my live accounts now. I’ve been running them on demo for a week with good results. FAP Turbo v49 of course added USDCHF as a possible pair to trade, and I have chosen to do so, it seems very good (since I lost my MD Pro license I’ve really missed good USDCHF trades, even thou Forex Shocker is quite good at that pair).

My accounts was hit hard in October all over the board, but the account at Jade FX was really decimated with a draw down of 77%. Since then it has recovered very nicely thou, from the low of just $216 to $457 right now. If I was at home of course I would have stopped the trading well before, but I wasn’t and I know it is a risk of course to leave these small programs live without supervision for weeks. But at least it is very exciting when checking in to see how they’re doing. RoboMiner on my Forex.com/UK account is doing good, but it is in a draw down that forced me to add $1000 to keep it safe margin-wise (I trade a little over the recommended lot sizes).

When I get back I’ll pick up my testing and the blog again. Until then I just pray that Octobers performance isn’t repeated.