Like i said before, I stopped all my EAs on eve of 18th December, and re-run them at January 11th… I wish I would listen to my own advice, and pause them earlier, as Megadroid suffered a stop-loss in my last active week of December, which lowered the overall great EA’s performance (July-) at doubling my account (with very non-agressive settings)…

But all is well in the EA land so far in January. MegaDroid EA is performing well, and I currently added some new EAs to my demo account. I thought about re-adding FAP Turbo to my active robots list, but decided against it, and rather took on some better performing (with hard evidence) trading signals from RAS. I wish this good performance from robots will continue in short term future, although there are strong oscillations in EURUSD… All in all i anticipate EUR will get weaker, which is something European exporters are pushing for, but which might be difficult to obtain as US exporters feel the same + they are willing to print as much money as necessary to keep the dollar cheap. We’ll see.

I must admit that in November/December time frame I was a bit distant from my Forex accounts, and I relied solely on my long manual positions (sell EURUSD) and my MegaDroid account – all on my VPS/virtualbox virtual machine running on my server invisibly to my day-to-day operations…

Several times per year, forex traders enter a period of high risk trading. Christmas and New Year are considered to be less appropriate forex trading times, as in this time period a lot of professionals retreat from the market to enjoy the holidays. As more and more traders leave the markets, the volatility goes up. For the end of year trading high caution is advised! Depending on your risk tolerance whole month of December can be considered risky.

Because of the lower number of traders markets become more and more unpredictable. A strong trend/counter trend move might move the market much more than it had strength to move it months before. This is especially true on difficult markets (rare currency pairs) and outside of major trading hours (Asian session, scalping)…

Some forex trading robots are particularly sensitive to higher volatility (like FAPTurbo, Megadroid (read review here), IvyBot and any other scalping EAs). And running them during riskier time frame could mean that multiple stop losses could be hit – reducing your total account balance severely. But also manual trading behaves differently than before, and this includes automated forex trade signal trading – consider stopping them for this period. Therefore infrequent and newbie traders be advised, and consider taking your EA robots off the market for this period.

If you are very conservative, and want to be on the safe side, then you may want to stop trading at the end of first week of December (or earlier if there are major financial announcements scheduled for start of month). You can schedule your return to markets around 10th day of January and onwards.

More on Warning: High Risk Forex Trading Times Ahead!

There are plenty of forex trade signals services out there. This means that they provide “sell” or “buy” signals on various currency pairs, for some subscription fee. So instead of doing your own analytics, charting and brainstorming you rely on their knowledge, experience, technical analysis (and honesty) to do the work for you. 

Some services provide plain signals (sent to subscribers either via email or short text messages– sms), upon which you have to act manually. Others provide integration directly to your trading platform, so signal automatically triggers a new order in your fx trading software.

These services are many, and while some of them target big forex managed accounts with account balances of $100.000+, and charge a fat monthly fee; some others are offered by brokers themselves -  for an extended pip spread cost. So you directly pay nothing for signal, but every time you enter/exit trade this costs you few pips more than usually if you trade on your own (case with Alpari’s  Systematic which I do not like – as signal providers get paid from that pip spread, so they are encouraged to make as many trades as possible. And this translates to conflict of interest in my book). If you are not into own trading, and your account is too small for managed forex trading, then signals might be the thing for you.

Lately I’ve seen several forex signals commercials even on CNN, so I guess topic is hot. But every forex signal software or service I checked in last few months has some disadvantage (like - it is either expensive, does not work with MT4, requires manual work). You see - as many other part time forex traders I use a discount broker with MetaTrader4 platform (the same platform that allows all the expert advisors – forex robots to work). And there are not many forex signal providers that offer integration with Metatrader platform (and I do not have time or nerves to open trades manually once I get email/sms). But then 4 months ago I read on forex trading forum about new service called Rent A Signal. This is open platform, where you can either buy or sell a signal. All you have to do is install their EA to metatrader, and link it to selected signal. And on their web page you can see live – forward testing of every signal that is on the market. Everything, with complete history, statistics, graphs, down drawn…

More on Automated Forex Trade Signal for Metatrader platform!

On end of august, Alpari-UK changed its fixed spread policy to dynamic spread. Alpari UK was best known for their small spread of 1.8 pips on EUR/USD, which is also the most popular currency pair for scalp trading in night/asian session.

So, as Alpari-UK is one of my two brokers where I have live account, I was interested on how this change effects EAs designed for scalp trading at night. Especially how this influences two most popular forex trading robots Mega Droid EA and FAPturbo available for metatrader trading platform.

With simple MT4 script I was logging spreads from august 21 to end of august, and here finally I had time to do all the calculations.

I was also interested whether now with dynamic spreads Alpari UK is better regarding price re-quotes which ware quite frequent before.

Although I did spread logging for several currency pairs (all that MegaDroid Pro is using: EURUSD, EURCHF, EURGBP,GBPUSD and USDCHF) I just finished analyzing the most frequent pair EURUSD.

When I opened account with Alpari-UK it had only one fixed rate for each currency pair, but later on it changed its spreads to daily and night regime. But I guess that did not benefit them, as they still needed good spread on EURUSD to be competitive, and most of scalping was done at night when their actual cost and risk was higher… Before the change to dynamic spread AlpariUK had the following fixed spreads:

EURUSD  1.8 pips    1.8 pips
USDCHF  4 pips    4 pips
USDJPY  2.8 pips    2.8 pips
GBPUSD 3 pips    3 pips
AUDUSD  3 pips    5 pips
USDCAD  4 pips    4 pips
EURGBP  3 pips    5 pips
EURCHF  3 pips    5 pips
EURJPY  3.8 pips    3.8 pips
GBPJPY  7 pips    10 pips
GBPCHF  7 pips    10 pips
EURCAD  8 pips    12 pips
EURAUD  10 pips    14 pips
USDSGD  10 pips    12 pips
NZDUSD  7 pips    10 pips
CHFJPY  7 pips    9 pips
EURNZD  20 pips    20 pips
AUDJPY 7 pips    9 pips
AUDNZD  20 pips    20 pips
AUDCAD 10 pips    10 pips
AUDCHF  8 pips    10 pips
CADCHF  8 pips    8 pips
CADJPY  6 pips    6 pips
NZDJPY  10 pips    10 pips
USDDKK  40 pips    40 pips
USDNOK  75 pips    75 pips
USDSEK  100 pips    100 pips
USDHKD  7 pips    7 pips
SGDJPY 6 pips    6 pips

With change to dynamic spreads Alpari UK was promising even faster execution and more competitive spreads, especially on most popular currency pairs. For USD they are promising 16-23 pip spread…

More on Is Alpari-UK with dynamic spreads still good for scalping EAs?

My long awaited review of mega droid EA is available here. I took my time to test this baby through and through, and I publish my findings on it.

I hate doing just marketing and take profits from affiliate sales. I only recommend things that I personally use, and I am happy using, which means good results! And I stand behind my words.

To sum it up – mega droid is far from perfect – especially far from what authors would like you to believe regarding their sale’s page. But still – at the end of the day it is still the only forex EA robot I know of, that is consistently profitable.

I also mention my settings and some advance tricks to use on this EA (that authors are not disclosing), to make it even more profitable with even less risk to your account! And please, when you read my review, forget the “official” results, as back testing is known to produce wrong results which you can not put any fate on to! Only forward testing is good indicator whether something works or not, so here it is – after three months of forward testing and tweaking…

I am using it since may, and i’ve seen over 90% of profitable trades! So, go read my critical megadroid review.

I just finished four day test on lowering the memory usage of my numerous metatrader instances… I've managed to almost halve the memory usage, while not changing any of MT4 functions needed for EA trading. This is a great success! Lowering memory usage of MT4 will lower your needed memory on rented VPS… You can read my in-depth report on how to do it, and why in the article titled how to optimize metatrader 4 for low memory usage suitable for VPS.

To give you a fast recap - I run many copies of MT4 software from various brokers, each with many EAs active at same time. It you run expert advisors like MegaDroid, which can be configured to trade frequently, then you most likely do it and enjoy the extra profits. The holy grail of successful fx currency trading is low risk and preservation of capital. So many EAs, many times, each with small risk. Small gains are still summed to bigger amount at end of the month…. But more on my strategy some other time

Let me just say, that I managed to lower memory usage from around 350 megz to around 200 megz, while still running over 20 EAs at the same time! So can you! And this means paying less for VPS at the end of the month. Happy fx online trading!

I’ve expressed my happiness with MegaDroid EA a couple of times already… But as this IS profitable forex robot EA, it sometimes MegaDroid does not trade every day, and for many users this is hard to watch and wait… They scream madly over forums: “My MegaDroid is not trading every day!”.

Recently I came across Benjami R. Cook’s Advanced Droid Tactics e-book (ADT) on how to get more pips out of MegaDroid by driving MegaDroid to the next level.

ADT includes a lot of settings, two new strategies and A LOT of back/forward testing that confirms Benjamin’s findings and validity of two strategies he is proposing. He also has a member’s area for all customers of his e-book, where he shares some custom coded MetaTrader indicators, that he developed for MegaDroid users. I feel that wealth and value of this information is way higher than $40 he is charging for it, so I recommend it.

Why? If you have a $500 forex account with megadroid EA trading it, and you use only 10% risk, then in a good week MegaDroid can earn you ~$50 … But, in a low profile week you can only see $5 … But in my last week since I am testing ADT, number of trades was up from 4 to 12, and 11 of these were profitable. So i nearly doubled my MegaDroid’s average week income. That paid for ADT in first 4 days!

Since MegaDroid is simple, I will not lie to you – ADT is something you can do yourself with trying & tweaking MegaDroid EA settings and being creative… But that takes time… And a lot of testing. And results differ between forex brokers… Out of respect for author I will not go into details on how to do it, so please don’t even ask. As time is money, for me ADT brought a lot of value + Benjamin is keeping me as his customer updated with his latest findings and is improving his strategies… Since Benjamin is one man band, he also does customer support for his customers, and yet he is very responsive. But this is also the reason he is keeping number of customers limited so he can manage it… ADT was closed for last few days, but now it is open again, and Benjamin revisited his guide and settings in guide v4.1!

If you spent $100 on MegaDroid, then do yourself a favor and spend these $40 for ADT. I promise that you will be glad you did! And be sure to leave a comment below, what you thought of it. You can get ADT here (thru my affil link), or without it directly here.

If you do not have MegaDroid yet, you can check it out/buy it here (thru my affil link, with my thanks), or without it directly here.

One of newest additions on the market of automated forex trading with expert advisors (EA) for MetaTrader 4 (MT4), IvyBot, is underperforming…

Although I am using MegaDroid EA, which did very good for me in last 70 days since I bought it, I managed to resist (very good) marketing campaign and sales letter of IvyBot. And now I am happy I did so (as I am happy I stopped using FAP Turbo EA, which did good for me in first few weeks, but has lately been struggling to stay in black numbers).

I’ve been following IvyBot’s discussions on many forex related forums, and now, 2 weeks since IvyBot’s release, majority of users have negative balance as a result of using IvyBot. The other problem is that IvyBot is trading very very rarely, so there is already a joke spreading around forums that “IvyBot is protecting your account balance by not trading”. Of course normally I would agree, that 2 weeks are not even close enough to show EA’s performance, but for an EA that boasts with “best on market”, “the only that adopts to market”, “protecting your account’s balance”, “double money in 1 month” this is obviously a disappointment.

So where did all that nice equity growth graphs published on IvyBot’s web page came from? Answer is simulated history performance. As you know backward testing is not even a good way, nor proper way to evaluate EA, so the only  way to do it is by using EA on a demo account and forward test it. People who jumped right into live trading with real money are now bumping on their heads. You can see one of IvyBot’s real live account statistics here, and I will try to find few more (I invite you to submit them if you know of any).

So, is IvyBot just having a bad weeks, or is the problem deeper? Worse – is IvyBot a scam? Although I am not supporting illegal use of EAs, I am following few eastern forums, where users decompile EAs (and share them). I found IvyBot available there, but when reading user’s responses in same thread to my surprise most of them were negative. As a total shock, the forum administrators (the hackers) “officially” disapproved IvyBot by these words exactly:

More on IvyBot is a disappointment…

I’ve been studying forex trading for some time now, and while playing with demo trading stations and platforms is safe and nice, it is far away from the real thing. Everything is so easy on demo, and since there is no fear, there is no greed… So I had no problem sticking with my trading scenario and I made more profitable trades than not. So I thought – you are ready for the real thing…

Choosing a forex broker where I opened a live account is a story on its own, so I will leave it for one of the next posts, but let’s just say that a bit over one month ago, I opened a live account. On purpose I only wired in $400, as this was my first live account with forex (i do have 7 years of experience trading stock and options). I chose 100:1 leverage, and I noticed that broker only lets me trade mini lot size (0,1 lot – meaning every pip move is $1). I wanted to trade micro lots (0,01 lots – pip move translates to $0,1) but somehow i didn’t change that…

And so it began. On the next day my total was $480. Over 20% in 24 hours! I was thrilled and so proud on myself. Maybe trading mini lots is just a right thing! Why should I bother with micro trading – it will take too much time to make me a rich man I thought somewhere back in my head… Third day was when disaster began!

I left two buy EURUSD positions open over night, setting nice trailing stop/loss.. But during the night positions went against me, and  my broker closed my positions as I reached my margin limit! In the morning i see EURUSD where i wanted it, but – what’s that? my account total is just $370! Aaargh!

More on How I quit demo and opened a live forex account…

I recently bought a expert advisor trading robot for Metatrader 4 (MT4) and put it to a test in InvestTechFX live account. Account size was US 5000, and I was trading with robot’s default settings (i  am in GMT+1 timezone) from mid march to end of march. First week performance was amazing, as robot managed to raise account by 10%. Then there was a sharp drop, but recovered next day… I transferred FAPturbo to smaller $250 account at GOforex.com, due to smaller spreads in Asian trading sessions (FAPturbo is scalping robot, so it is very important when it trades and how big the spread is). Also take care and start small and smart – I heard that with several brokers FAPturbo was trading fine with demo currency demo trading accounts, but when switched to live accounts performance was much worse, and robots started to eat the account!

Overall I must say that I am impressed, and will keep using it, but since it is very volatile, I will limit potential damage in smaller account… Will keep you posted

START 5000 ACCT - default faptrader
————–
thurstday  -6,88 4993,12
friday   78,77 5071,89
—
monday   +106,05 –> 5177,94 
tuesday   +66,72 –> 5244,66
wednesday * not trading - (my wmvware crashed)
thurstday +270,56 –> 5515,22
friday  -39,61 –> 5472,61
—
monday   +140,87 –> 5613,48
tuesday   +147,36 –> 5760,84
wednesday +192,90 –> 5953,74
thurstday –568,34 –> 5385,40
friday   +309,53 –> 5694,93

Looks like EA robots are becoming better and better, and I recommend you take a look at http://www.forex-tsd.com since they have some nice EAs there free to download and try out! I will test drive several of them and report my findings. What about FAPturbo? Do you need to have it? If you think it will double your account fast, then it is probably better to stay away – read here why.

If you read all the facts and above article as well, and wish to give FAPturbo a try, you can buy it here (thru my affiliate link - as a thank you I will send you my settings to put you on fasttrack to profits), or directly here.

More on FAPturbo Review – FAPturbo put to the test in real live trading