What to do…

… and it really breaks my main accounts right now. I’ve been grid trading this pair with RoboMiner since July 09 and gradually increasing the funds traded because it seemed a solid system. AUDNZD hadn’t been above 1.30 (or 1.2967) for 10-years. During January this year I spent 80-100 hours making my own gridtrading EA based on the same principle (but with quite a few improvements I think). They both break when price moves above ~1.30 thou, and this week it did, with a bang. I put my own EA, called Green, live just one month ago with a safety margin of 200 pips, IE it wouldn’t trade as soon as there wasn’t enough equity to cover a move to 1.2967 + 200 pips = 1.3167. Right now we’re at about 1.31. IE I only have about 70 pips left of margin before the margin calls start.

So, what to do? I can’t do much I think. I won’t fund the accounts with additional funds to cover even more margin. I am contemplating a hedge trade, but I feel that I should already have done this when the range broke, but I didn’t. So I might put in a smaller hedge now (for perhaps just 1/3 of the short positions) just to extend the upper limit I can handle. If we’re lucky NZ have been catching up to AU before my margin is out or at least AU have released some news that shows their growth have declined. The next high impact news out of NZ is scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday, but analyst doesn’t really anticipate any improvements.

So what was my main fault? I didn’t diversify enough and went in with to much money into the same, somewhat flawed, strategy. Again. Also my timing was awful. Just one month ago I funded my CFX account and started trading the AUDNZD range. Had I waited just one month I wouldn’t have an additional $7000 on the line right now. What I should have done, and really was my original idea, was to trade multiple pairs with low correlation and I should have started out with smaller amounts. But the growth curve of trading the AUDNZD compared to the other pairs was too tempting.

So what does this mean for the future of AUDNZD range trading? I don’t know yet. If NZ catches up quick enough price should move down again and perhaps the cycle will continue for years to come, but with a higher historical high. Perhaps they don’t catch up and price goes up a bit more and starts ranging at a considerable higher range. It really shows that there is a need for more safety margin than 200 pips also, but when simulating with 500 pips the profits really isn’t to impressive anymore. One thing is for sure, next time I will be more careful.

Last week started out rather bad with SL:s hit by MegaDroid on GMT+6 at basically all accounts on Monday. I probably shouldn’t have traded right after the NFP. I think I will make that a rule actually, no scalping the day before or after the NFP from here on. Lets check the curves out. Read more…

It is incredible but another week has flown by. I’ve been extremely busy this one since I’ve been working on my new EA. I’ve been yanking out code and got a new VPS at SWVPS.com for demo trading it. Currently 18 different demos running there, but I couldn’t really resist putting it live also, so it’s live on my Alpari UK and The Collective FX (CFX) accounts as of middle this week. Read more…

Another week has passed and this was quite a good one actually. Perhaps it has something to do with that I basically turned of the FAP Turbo scalper last week? Well, it has actually made good trades on my Alpari UK account with 0.01 lots during the week. I keep trading that small just for observation. I recently started to trade the FAP Turbo long term strategy (in EURUSD) thou, and it has made a lot of pips in the downwards move this week. I’m very cautious with it thou and runs it with microlots also. Read more…

I had a terrible Thursday this week with stoplosses hit on all accounts actually. The Alpari UK account took the worst beating. Read more…

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…

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.

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.

Quick review of the week on my live accounts.

Alpari UK live micro account

It has been mixed results that ended negative on my Alpari UK account (€22 loss). The week started nice and steady, then both FAPT and MD got lingering trades on Wednesday that went into S/L and took 12% of the account. Once again I was contemplating to close those positions when they we’re just a few pips behind, but I didn’t, as I really don’t think I’m supposed to baby sit these EAs. Once again I wish I had closed them…

I have completed my migration of Alpari UK trading to the VPS at SWTech. I haven’t noticed any problems or extra gains due to the minimal latency, but I will monitor it closely. I see about the same slippage that I have come to expect from Alpari UK (not so often, but still happens enough to be annoying). As of Tuesday this week (18th) Alpari UK will start using floating spreads, it will be interesting to see how much reqoutes / slippage that will introduce.

I probably will change the setup for FAPT a little for next week. I will add EURGBP again, with small fixed lot size to start with, and I will lower the T/P on USDCAD in order to get more profitable trades (albeit with lesser gain). I’ve seen statistics of an account with this setup that has been doing great the last weeks.

Forex.com/UK live account

Since RoboMiner is the only EA on this account now the graph above is quite uninteresting. But it has been a great week with $99.46 in profit. 9 profitable trades with AUDNZD and 1 with EURCHF. Right now I have only one open trade in AUDNZD and four in EURCHF. The good thing with open EURCHF trades is that the swap is positive, IE I make a little every day they are open.

All in all RoboMiner is really nice, it does what it is supposed to do. Of course the pairs traded have to “co-operate” with the strategy and move around a little, we won’t make money otherwise. I’m very pleased with the results as of yet at least.

Next week I hopefully have a nice graph here to show you from my live Jade FX account. Happy trading