What to do…

Quick update on the performance on my main scalper account at JadeFX during August. I’ve previously posted about the excellent results during July. August was also good, but I had one day that basically all trades went to stoploss for a negative hit of 551 pips or about 15% of the account (which also corresponded to my risk-appetite right then). It was inevitable to happen of course, and it will happen again. I didn’t change any settings after the “crash” and the losses was made up the coming 10 trading days. Excellent.

Other than the massive losing day (17th of August) I had two more days with negative pips. Overall the account made 742 pips which amounted to 18%. I am very pleased with that, considering that the maximum loss scenario was realized.

Going forward I have changed the setup a little. During July and August I have been experimenting somewhat by running three different setups of the main moneymaker EA here. Now it is clear which setup I will use going forward. It is very stable (if I had only used that one on the 17th the drawdown would have been much smaller).

I have also introduced a new EA from the Funyoo forum on my live account on the 1st of September that I’ve been optimizing with Dukascopy tickdata. I’ve been trading it with great results on demo for the past two weeks, and so far it seems as good on my live account (only had two trading days yet, but the trades are identical with demo trades taken).

http://www.freelancer.com/projects/NET-C-Sharp-Programming/Prepare-Forex-Statmeents.html

Totally sick. Even crazier that people want to help the moron.

I just asked myself that question as its been a few days since I started backtesting with tickdata from Dukascopy. Even short runs take a lot of time… Optimizations of a few parameters can take weeks. I just aborted a optimization run that was supposed to  take 1800 hours (that is 11 weeks roughly).

So, naturally I started thinking that maybe it is time that my 3 year old Intel Q6600 is replaced by a faster part. I must say that it have performed absolutely excellent, especially since I’ve overclocked it to 3GHz all the time I’ve had it. It is a quad core CPU, but sadly MT4 is a single threaded application, so only one of them is used at a time. I usually solve this by running four instances of the same test with one of the parameters range cut in four, but it is a hassle. MT5 solves all this as it not only is able to use all available cores in the host system it is able to out-source processing to agents running on other computers. But reality right now is that MT4 still is the main platform, and it probably will remain so for at least another 6-12 months.

I’ve googled for benchmarks, but I can’t find any. Sure it is a niche, but I really expected at least some results for MT4. I thought surely someone had bought a new computer sometime and tested it by running the same backtest on both. I know I would, but it seems I’m alone in this. Can’t find any benchmarks for either MT4 or MT5.

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Just a quick reflection that for the past two months basically all scalpers seem to have been doing very well. I’ve re-enabled some old favorites, like FAPT50 and Forex Shocker 1.1 trading EURGBP and they’ve been doing very well. Even GBPCHF by FAPT50 have been very nice. Just watch your risk exposure, calculate the maximum you want to risk in a trade and then all EAs (possible) trades together. It is very easy to keep increasing the lot sizes in periods like this when everything is going great, leading to more risk that you actually want to take.

July at JadeFX, my main scalper account.

As you can see above July was great at JadeFX. 38% increase and just one day with negative pips (33 pips lost). The best day gave 125 pips.  All trades are by scalping EAs.

I found a great (old) article about getting optimal data for backtests in MT4. I personally usually use history data from JadeFX because that’s the broker I, mainly, use scalping strategies at, but it is full of errors and rarely gives even 90% quality.

Check it out: http://eareview.net/tick-data

I’m gonna test this as soon as I get a hour or two over… IE hopefully on Saturday.

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.