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:

This Ivy bot is MOD disapproved. Do not waste your time on it.
1) it has many variables with nice names, including variables that hint on various strategies, but the catch is that these variables are never used. It has bad code! It defines global variables, but they are only used locally…

2) The core strategy of this bot is to buy when MA3 starts to turn up, and ADX is between 35-55. It sells when MA3 turns down and ADX is between 35-55.

3) IvyBot runs without stop loss. And it exit signal is: Sell if the profit range is not reached within 16000 seconds. This is a very dangerous strategy (if you can call it a strategy).

4) It’s checking for authorization is pathetic. It searches for “CBCINTVALUE” in the whole string of clickbank-code (Click Bank Code Integer VALUE), which again hints at very unmature code.

Do not waste your time on it, this one goes to waste bin.

Interesting ah? If people who know MT4 coding inside-out tell people around them to not use this (and either way they don’t get anything off it), this raises a red flag in my book. But of course, I might be mistaken as well… If you want to check IvyBot out (there might be new version that fixes this behavior out since august 11th as i write this), you can follow this link (my affiliate code in it), or go there directly (either way they offer 60 days money back guarantee).