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.

Another week then, I’ll just do a quick post with the graphs as usual.

Alpari UK Live account

Nothing to it this week. The removal of EURGBP and usage of custom levels in FAPT made a rather uneventful week. The moneymaker was (again) MD Pro with EURUSD and USDCHF in the lead. Total gain was €71.95.

Forex.com/UK Live account

RoboMiner keeps adding to this account at a rather steady pace. It has gone into a little deeper draw down now, but it’s still easily managable with the 1:200 leverage. If it goes down another few hundreds I’ll add more funds just to be on the safe side. As I said last week I am trading EURUSD and USDCHF on this account now with MD Pro and it unfortunatly hit a S/L with a EURUSD trade during the week for a loss of $42. Total gain in the account was still $69.11.

Jade FX Live account

Third week with JadeFX and another winning week. The losing trade in the end was my fault, I tampered with the S/L setting on a trade after London open. It hit the S/L I had set a few hours later, and then it turned another 10 pips down, with the original S/L level the trade would have been closed at least at break even by MD. I really shouldn’t interfere, but there where high impact news planned, so I thought it was worth it, but there is no way in knowing of course. Total gained was $58.35 (would have been another $16 at least if the last trade hadn’t hit my S/L). All in all this account is up $209 now in three weeks for a gain of 41%. Looks very good.

The week in total then ended at $229 which is quite good I think. Next week I might start trading a bit more on the JadeFX account with the addition of another EA besides MD Pro.

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. 

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

It is that time again, called weekend, when I usually analyze the weekly performance. This time it isn’t an awful experience. It really have been a terrible few weeks, but hopefully that is behind us now and we can begin rebuilding our accounts steadily. The recovery really started with getting rid of GridBot a few weeks ago thou.

Alpari UK live account

Above is the graph for my Alpari UK micro account. €77.84 gained since last weekend. The only real loss was a USDCHF trade by MD Pro that I manually interveined with when it was in drawdown. I shouldn’t have done that, it had recovered and probably closed break even if I just had left it alone. This isn’t the first time the same thing happens, hopefully I have learned the lesson this time… I ought to since the whole point is that the Experts should be able to trade on their own.

Other than that trade it was a very nice steady week. MD had a solid week with only winners. FAPT made nice results in both EURCHF and USDCAD. Last weekend I changed the end time for FAPT to 23 GMT for both pairs, and I really think that was a good change. Most of the big losses have occurred later in the session. I will look into the starting times even more now, I probably will start several overlapping charts with FAPT with different risk taking. It is clear to me that the first trades taken is much more profitable than later in the evening, perhaps we should exploit this with higher lotsizes for the first trade… I’ll probably try a setup in demo and see what happens.

_

Forex.com/UK live account

The graph for Forex.com/UK also looks nice this week. $87.49 gained in total. The bump in the beginning is the same USDCHF trade by MD Pro as above. I’ve actually removed MD Pro from the account after that trade, not because of it per se, but because of 3 crashes. One of the crashes hindered the very nice EA RoboMiner from a trade (it cost me $11). So now that account is only traded by RoboMiner, and it is doing great.  I run 0.04 lots with AUDNZD and 0.03 with EURCHF. Very tempted to add even more funds and up the lotsizes.

Finally some recovery.

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.

I know I stated that I would post my backtest findings for MD Pro this weekend (Sunday). I’m sorry, but it is taking forever to get the backtests done because of constant crashes on MT4. I haven’t experienced this type of instability before. Funny thing is that it was working for several hours straight Sunday morning (I could complete EURUSD and EURCHF optimization runs then), then it went back to it’s normal crashes. So the situation right now is that EURGBP with aggressive=false isn’t tested at all. I have run optimization runs for all the other pairs both with and without the aggressive setting.

The method I’m using is to run a optimization run YTD (2009.01.01) to find the good prospects. I am focusing on settings that give a profit factor of more than 1.5 with no more than 10% DD YTD, so if a setting is profitable, but gives say 20% DD, I adjust the risk down to give 10%. If a setting is giving less than 10% I don’t turn risk up. Then I backtest that setting since 2008.01.01 also, just as a verification. I really wanted to run the full 10 year test, but so far the crashes have hindered me.

So far I have found all pairs to be profitable. EURCHF is really good actually, even better than EURUSD I would say. The DD is real low with risk setting 0.1. USDCHF seems to be the weakest, but still profitable with the right settings. The weirdest thing is that EURGBP (with aggressive settings) is clearly the winner YTD. It more than triples the account with very low DD (and this is with risk 0.1). It is so amazing that I can’t really believe the result.

It is clear that the spread on your broker is a very very important piece of the puzzle here. I have been using Alpari UK history in the backtests. Of course backtests are only indictive. Forward tests on a demo account is better, but even that isn’t quite like a live account. When I’m done with the tests and the evaluation of the results, I will setup demos at a few different brokers I think. Probably throw in the usual suspects of Alpari UK, Forex.com/UK and FXCM UK together with some ECNs. Suggestions of good ECN MT4 brokers is happily accepted. Of course all suggestions of good brokers are accepted, regardless of type. I am really looking for new ones.

Finally we are able to run MegaDroid on more than EURUSD. The added pairs are EURCHF, EURGBP and USDCHF. I was very surprised that GBPUSD wasn’t one of the new ones. EURCHF and EURGBP is of course also traded by FAP Turbo, but USDCHF is a new pair for me (it is scalped by Forex Shocker, an EA that seems quite nice also). Otherwise nothing is different from MD v1.11. Oh, the font of the info text shown on charts is new (and uglier).

I’ve added MD Pro to two demo accounts and am currently busy running backtests. I will post results as soon as I have something nice to show.

Update: Fixed a mt4stats account for the Forex.com/UK demo account I’m using for MD Pro. It has the default settings other than that I turned of recovery mode. It has traded quite a few trades already. Link: http://johnrambo.mt4stats.com/

This is probably the worst start of a week possible. First FAPT screwed up and left a EURCHF sell position open for 14 hours yesterday, closed with a loss €105 on my Alpari UK account. Luckily Megadroid did well yesterday and recovered most of that loss. Also MD made very nice returns on my Forex.com/UK account.

Well, today is another story… FAPT haven’t made anything basically (well, two orders with €3 profit…) but Megadroid, boy oh boy. It lost me €207 on Alpari UK and $356 (!!!) on Forex.com/UK. It will take weeks of good results to get this back. Crap.

So, other than loosing money it also seems that I lost MD Pro. For some reason I’m not connected to Donnaforex as a affiliate on my FAPT Evolution purchase yesterday (even thou I used her link). So right now it seems I’m not getting MD Pro. I’m talking to ClickBank and Donna. If this doesn’t get settled with me getting MD Pro I’m refunding. So tired of crap like this.

To sum it up. Right now I feel like just running RoboMiner (perhaps on FXCM/UK with their quite nice spreads on AUDNZD) and check in to that account once a month. Don’t even want to see a single $ loss right now. Crap.