What to do…

I just couldn’t justify having $599 software on the shelf, not knowing if I ever was going to use it. Liquidity on DukasCopy have been very low and the last few weeks (3-4) FAPT Evo have been performing badly. Lots of rejected orders and huge slippage. Nothing like the scalpers heaven promoted by the FAP team (that called MT4 child play). I’m sure that performance will pick up during the fall as the liquidity in the markets increase, but as I don’t see it performing better than regular FAP Turbo at a good ECN MT4 broker I still can’t justify the cost (you get four FAP Turbo licenses for the price of one Evo).

Also, the $10000 minimum have kept me from starting to trade at DukasCopy. At the MT4 broker you can chose to start at a much lower level and you can trade $100K contracts at ECN brokers (and 0.01 lots at non-ECN). At DukasCopy you had to trade $1000K contracts as minimum.

The real sad part about the refund is that I will lose MegaDroid Pro. I have enjoyed being able to trade more pairs, but not even this “bonus” can justify the price of $599. EURUSD is still the moneymaker (with addition of USDCHF), and that is traded by regular MegaDroid for $99. I will settle for that for now. If and when MegaDroid Pro eventually is for sale I probably will get it, but not for the silly price of $699 that was stated in July. I think my limit is a $199 really, twice the price of MegaDroid. We’ll see thou.

So from this week I will replace MD Pro with MD on all my account.

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…

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.

So, it has been two days since the release of FAPT Evolution. It is currently off the market, it was taken out before the 2000 copies was sold because of indications that Dukascopy was getting swamped with questions and applications. Strange that they didn’t anticipate it I think. I ended up with buying two copies, so if you want one, buy it from me for a “nice” price. I’m kidding, I will probably return one. Then it will be resold on the site I think.

So, how is it doing? Well, nothing fancy yet. I’m trading all the pairs (the regular four from old FAPT, EURCHF / EURGBP / GBPCHF / USDCAD) and the first day I didn’t have a trade. Yesterday I had two, one in GBPCHF and one in EURGBP. Both were small losers. So perhaps not the most convincing start. The weird thing is that other people seem to get more trades and winners also. I thought the JFOREX platform where supposed to be much more consistent in trading results (compared to MT4). We’ll see…

I also bought the bridge software now called Trade Converter but I haven’t really tested it yet. Want to focus on FAPT Evolution the first days. It could be very nice though as spreads on the majors at Dukascopy is very tight (EURUSD, GBPUSD and USDJPY most often is 1 pip or less). I’m of course thinking of using it with MegaDroid (Pro or regular) and perhaps GridBot. The problem I think is that we have to find a MT4 broker that has a stream that as much as possible matches that of Dukascopy. Of course it has too be a true ECN. I really think the absolute best thing would have been that the MT4 EAs where fed the ticks from the Dukascopy stream, or even that they would have written a emulator platform inside JFOREX that we would load the EA too (wouldn’t even need MT4 running). But we’ll see how it works out.

Time for a update since the release date of the new creation from FAP Turbo team is approaching, fast. It was called FAP Turbo Swiss the last time I wrote about it, now it is renamed FAP Turbo Evolution. It will be limited to 2000 copies. And it will be released on July 14th at 9am EST (that is 15:00 GMT I think…). The broker is still DukasCopy in Switzerland, which is currently accepting accounts with minimum of $10000 (or equivalent, say €7300 if you prefer the EUR). The price of the software is $599.

So, I will try to get a copy. It is four times the price of the most expensive EA I have bought and the deposit requirement is 7 times what I have put up yet, so it is quite a step up for my Forex “operation”. Hopefully it will meet my expectations…

As a side note I yesterday recieved a email from the MegaDroid team stating that everyone who use their link to buy FAPT Evolution will be getting a new EA from them, for free. It is a new version of the MegaDroid called MegaDroid PRO, and get this, it trades three currencies 24/5! I don’t know if I am more excited about that piece of news or the FAPT Evolution even! MegaDroid is a very stable performer, and I would love to be able to trade it on more than EURUSD. Also, because I currently am trading it 12 hours a day myself by tricking it, I know it can be profitable during more than the dead hours between NY close and Tokyo open. I don’t know if MD Pro is using MT4 or JFOREX platform thou… Would love it even more if it also ran JFOREX at DukasCopy.

Oh, and I almost forgot. There is a war going on between some sites online that offer rebates on the Dukascopy commissions. The top offer right now (and possibly this is where the limit is) is 40% back. Wow, that is quite a lot. Cashbackforex.com is currently “only” offering 35%, but their reputation perhaps make up the 5% they keep. I actually think so, and probably will sign with them.