PUBLIC LECTURE by Dr Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Details of the lecture are as follows:

Title: When will we ever learn? Has Malaysia learnt the correct lessons from past crises?
Date: Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Hotel Singgahsana, Persiaran Barat, off Jalan Sultan, 46760 Petaling Jaya (next to Taman Jaya LRT Station)
Admission: FREE

The Topic
The world is still struggling to emerge from the longest and deepest financial crisis in six decades. For every piece of optimistic news about recovery there are stories of setbacks and worsening downturns. Asia has been here before. A decade ago, the Asian financial crisis swept across the region. It not only prompted some rethinking of how to manage financial crises but also stimulated some serious rethinking about the character of the development model in Asia. Lessons were learnt and new policy and institutional frameworks were put into place. But the severity of the current crisis begs a question: did politicians and policymakers really learn the right lessons from ten years ago? This is the burning question that is addressed in Jomos important public talk.

The Speaker
Jomo is one of the worlds leading thinkers on questions of development -- not just development economics but also the policy commitments and institutional frameworks for international cooperation that are necessary to deliver both reform and sustainability. From his position at the United Nations he is able to shape debates and influence their outcomes. At the same time, he remains profoundly committed to building longstanding solutions to the most pressing problems that face the world today - environmental degradation and climate change, financial disorder and continuing uneven development. Come and listen to him offer important reflections on what has gone wrong and what might be done to advance a progressive agenda.

Diposting oleh Unknown 18.15 0 komentar

Bogie NN v8 Expert Advisor by William Boatright a Review

Today I decided to write a review about an ea that has been around for a while and has attracted the attention of many forex traders. The expert advisor I am talking about is the Bogie-NN-8v advisor developed by William Boatright. This ea is said to be neural network based and has managed to get profits in excess of 50% on some months.

Well, first of all, let me tell you, in my opinion, what Bogie is and what Bogie is not. Bogie is an automated trading system based on an indicator developed using a neural network approach, Bogie is not a neural network. What does this mean ? A neural network is supposed to optimize itself continously, that means, with each new tick, the expert should reevaluate and reoptimize itself to better adapt to current market conditions. A neural network, in analogy to your brain, should be able to "learn" from past experiences and therefore increase its possibilities of trading the market profitably.

Bogie does not do this, the expert advisor does not continuously optimize itself but is based on an indicator developed months ago which is now, most probably, obsolete due to changes in the way market conditions have changed. To compensate for this, Bogie has to be optimized, that is, some parameters have to be changed in order to adapt the ea to current market conditions. The problem, as you may infer, is that the ea is always being adapted to some period of time before the present which may or may not represent current market conditions.

In essence, trading Bogie is like flipping a coin, if your parameters are aligned with current market conditions you will make money, if you dont you will lose (very volatile, you can expect +/-50%). This type of approach for an expert advisor is unreliable as it is true that expert advisors can remain profitable without constant optimization, which is, anyway, like guessing current market conditions. When do you reoptimize ? How do you know it works ? You cant know.

Furthermore, the use of the NN indicator is completely pointless since it can be replaced by any other market indicator. You can always optimize a variation in any indicator and correlate it with price as you would with the Bogie indicator.

In my opinion, although Williams intentions with this ea are good and I believe him to be an honest person with the retail trader in mind, the expert advisor simply does not work, its approach is flawed by design since the ea is not really a neural network and the optimizations needed are not guaranteed to improve the experts performance. If you want to see how Bogie has performed on forward testing and learn more about reliable and profitable commercial and free expert advisors please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 06.01 0 komentar

The Gods Gift ATR Challenge Testing by Third Parties

One of the great challenges of any automated trading system out there is to be robust, reliable and profitable. Since I want the gods gift ATR expert advisor to become the most well documented expert advisor out there I have decided to take several steps to make this automated trading systems characteristics very well documented, examined and tested. For me, an expert advisor that is truly long term profitable should fulfill a small set of characteristics that demonstrate its capacities :

• Trading Platform Independence
• Broker Independence
• Extensive Live Testing (1 year at least)
• Third Party Live testing

Since up until now all tests on this ea have been done by me (one year of forward testing of the main strategy plus 4 months of live testing on 4 different live accounts) I have decided to ask some of my newsletter subscribers to participate in what I have called "the gods gift ATR challenge". What I seek with this challenge is to have third parties test the expert advisor on live accounts under agreed conditions that guarantee that the ea testing is well done and comparable to my personal tests. The use of different brokers, different vps providers and money amounts should provide us with a wide amount of information about this experts profitability. The people participating on this challenge are aware that past performance does not guarantee future results and they do this testing under their own free will with no promise of profitability. They run the ea on personal live accounts to which I only have read-only passwords. However the people running the tests must fulfill some conditions :

• Expert advisor must be run 24/7 on a reliable vps provider
  
• Expert must be run alone on a live account with a minimum of 100 USD (10,000 contract) or 1000 USD (100,000 contract)
• A read-only investor password MUST be provided
• The ea must be run for at least 2 years, regardless of performance (people must agree to do this or their testing will not be taken into account)
• Settings, currency pairs and timeframe are to be provided by me and cannot in anyway be changed by the third party if results are to be comparable

If you are participating on the Gods Gift ATR challenge please make sure you fulfill the above requirements and then send me an email. Please include your read-only password as well as the contract size of the account you are running, broker, account size and one of this three risk levels : Conservative, Moderate or Agressive. I will then send you settings as well as metatrader publisher instructions so that your results can be updated live to my ftp so that we can all share the test results.

Up until now more than 5 people have expressed a strong interest in doing this testing so if everything goes as planned, in a year from now we will have extensive reliable testing about this expert advisor and we will learn a lot about how it trades, how robust it is against market conditions changing and how we can improve it.

If you would like to learn more about this and other expert advisors I have tested and reviewed please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article

Diposting oleh Unknown 04.00 0 komentar