Gods Gift EA 2 months finally A loss !

First of all let me apologize for the diminished amount of posts I have published for the past month. I have been very busy with other projects so I havent taken much time to write articles, on the other hand, I dont have many experts to review as I currently have only 2 in forward testing.

Now to the Gods Gift expert advisor results... I have to say, I like this expert advisor a little bit more every day that I see it trade. It caught twelve profitable trades in a row, over a little bit less than two months. It has shown great accuracy with its trades, only risking a moderate amount of pips (70) on each trade.

The ea attained its first loss yesterday when it hit a stoploss on the GBP/USD after taking a dramatically wrong sell order just before 5 consecutive positive hours for the pound. I have to say, I am in part relieved by the expert starting to take some loses, I really want to see if the expert can live up to its back testing results and provide a maximum draw down smaller than 15%. Currently, maximum draw down is 3.9%.

Well, I will review this expert again the following month when I hope we will have a better idea on the amount of draw down. If it exceeds 15% I will stop the expert advisor, if it does not, I will continue forward testing it until it does or until we have 2 years of forward testing. Best luck to you all on your trading !

Diposting oleh Unknown 08.16 0 komentar

Forex Expert Advisors Forex UltraBot an Unbiased Review

During my yesterdays search for new trading systems I found the Forex Ultrabot expert advisor. Todays post will focus on the review of this trading system. As always I will focus on the evidence provided by the authors as well as the claims made on the website. This analysis will let us know if the expert advisor is able to live up to its claims or if it is simply another over-hyped worthless trading system like most of the expert advisors sold on the internet. In the end I will also give you my analysis about the possible long term profitability of this system and whether or not I consider it worth buying and testing.

From a first look, the UltraBot Forex expert advisor seems to give a good impression. You have 10 years of backtesting data with an almost 1:1 risk to reward ratio and an SL and TP in the 50-200 pip range. The UltraBot system also uses volatility adjusted exit mechanisms which should provide it with an edge against changes in market conditions (if it is implemented as the authors say). From an analysis of the backtesting statements we can see that the SL and TP definitely change as the market changes which speaks about and adaptive implementation. However the fact that lot sizes are not adapted against volatility could make the systems adaptability worthless since it is very important to adjust both position sizing and the exit mechanisms against volatility since both must work in unison. Failing to adapt one while adapting the other does not generally have a positive outcome as I demonstrated on my November 2009 article in Currency Trader Magazine.

However is this evidence enough to backup the websites claims about profitability and high trading accuracy ? Sadly, no. The problem is that the ultrabot authors provide evidence only in the form of backtesting statements. In reality we cannot simply rule out the fact that profitability in backtesting can simply be "made up", meaning that the trading system could have simply been made with the benefit of hindsight to use certain curve-fitted results on certain dates or other similar tactics. The fact that the 15 minute time frame is used could also points out to large broker dependency and modeling quality problems because of the reduced number of reference points available per bar.

From what we are shown on the website, all the results of the ultrabot expert advisor could simply be the result of hindsight and the exploitation of backtesting faults. Why isnt a live test of the trading system done ? With only a few sales the authors could open a few micro live accounts to show us live-updated performance of their trading system. Why isnt this evidence provided ? Why isnt there a live tests ? What are the creators trying to hide ? It is undeniable that the lack of live testing clearly means "we are hiding something" since live tests of this system could be made from even 100 USD per live account. Why would you ever risk to use a trading system which the authors do NOT care to use ? Clearly you should not.

Due to the lack of live trading evidence and the fact that the trading systems backtests could simply be the product of hindsight and curve-fitting I consider this trading system NOT worth buying or testing. If live trading evidence with investor access is made available I will be glad to rewrite this review to consider the newly available evidence. Meanwhile, this is simply another over-hyped expert advisor with no proven live/back testing consistency and a big probability of just being a worthless trading system.

If you would like to learn more about trading system design and how you too can learn how a likely long term profitable system is made and traded please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 22.30 0 komentar

The FxReviews Trading Group

Recently it has come to my attention that many people are interested in manual trading systems for either trading or increasing their knowledge about the forex market significantly. On a recent post, I made a proposal to create a forex trading group in which we could research more about manual trading systems and further enrich our experience within the forex market by acting together. My idea with this post is to provide further insight in what the group would be about and what I would expect from people wanting to join.

The main idea is to meet once every trading day at about 9-10 p.m EST time (via skype)(if you cant make it everyday it is not a problem but most days is a must). We would evaluate the market at that time as well as discuss the ways in which we would enter or exit market positions at the current time or at other times during the day. The idea is to evaluate different manual trading systems and avoid common trading mistakes that are inherent to trading by yourself. If you are new to the forex market this will be a great opportunity to avoid wiping your first account as well as getting to know other forex traders better.

If any of you would like to join (free to join but of course, space is limited) the trading group, please send me an email to ekans_ at hotmail.com or leave a message in the chat located at the left side of your screen with your email address (this is not recorded by bots so your email is safe there). The first systems we will test are systems I have been using for some time, such as Fibonacci trading, candlestick pattern trading and Murrey Math trading.

If manual trading is not your thing and you are more interested in gaining profits with automated trading systems 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 13.00 0 komentar

The Simple Daily System Likely Profitable Forex Free Expert Advisor

Three months ago, I wrote a post about the Simple Daily System expert advisor. This free system was doing very good at that time proving to be a profitable and reliable trading system. Now, after four months of forward testing, there are several things I would like to share with you about this free automated trading system.

The SDS ea went smoothly through the rangy period at the end of 2008 and gracefully entered 2009 with profits above 50%. After four months of forward testing, the expert currently stands at a very profitable more than 70% capital increase with a low maximum draw down. (Below the forward testing equity graph of this expert from November 2008 to February 2009)
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The simple daily system is a clear example of a high quality expert advisor that can be traded for free. It is excellent at following and capturing profits from daily trends (captured more than 1000 pips on an uptrend at the end of 2008). and staying on the sidelines on ranging markets. Needless to say, the simple daily system now qualifies as a likely profitable expert advisor for me and will be considered profitable after it succeeds at 6 months of live trading with profitable results. A live account will be tested from the first week of March.

If you would like to learn more about the Simple Daily Systems results and settings 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 04.30 0 komentar

Forex Expert Advisors Forex Ironman an Unbiased Review

Continuing with the reviewing of automated trading systems that were recently released today I will be writing about a new trading system called Forex Ironman. This expert advisor claims to make a 308% profit in less than 17 months with minimal risk to your trading account. On todays reviewI will analyze the evidence provided by the author of this EA and I will tell you if this evidence is enough to backup the expert advisors claims of profitability. After this I will also go through the experts trading evidence and tell you my opinion about the experts trading tactic and its potential for long term profitability. Finally I will end this review by telling you my opinion about whether or not the Forex Ironman is worth buying and testing.

The Forex Ironman starts its website with some very bold claims of profitability as well as an obvious and unethical breach of Marvel Copyright. I understand that it is a good marketing technique to use a currently "fashionable" name to sell a product but in doing so and using imagery which reminds you of the movie the author is in fact in infringement of copyright laws (at least in the US).

However lets go back to what we care about. The authors of the Forex Ironman then attempt to show us what they call "evidence of profitability", what we have here is a set of backtesting results, partial cuts from backtesting statements and pictures of hand-picked trades which may or may not be a real part of the backtesting results. In reality we have seen many times how expert advisor sellers include pictures of trades that would have been actually never taken by the system just to make it look more profitable or with a better risk to reward ratio.

The backtesting evidence of the Forex Ironman is very limited, with 2 years of backtesting results at most showing us that a very good chunk of backtesting that could have been done from 2000-2008 was avoided for some reason. Why do you think an EA seller would avoid showing some backtesting results ? The absence of backtesting periods usually means that the system under performed under those market conditions or that the data was curve-fitted to show excellent results during the past few years of trading. This means that the system is inherently flawd and has no adaptation to changes in market conditions. Additionally the complete lack of any live testing evidence points to the fact that the creators of this trading system dont trust it enough to use it themselves. Why isnt there an investor-access verified live testing statement ?

The fact is that the Forex Ironman just shows us backtesting results which are probably curve-fitted and unreliable (plus a very unsound 10:1 risk to reward ratio). If the expert was able to adapt to changes in market conditions and succeed under varied markets then the sellers wouldnt have had any problem to show us 10 year backtests and live trading results. It is very important to note here that the absence of live trading results points to the fact that this expert is probably not going to perform in the same way as it does in backtesting. Again, if their system was so good, why wouldnt they test it first ?

Overall the Forex Ironman is just another attempt of the people at Next Generation to sell an overhyped system that lacks any reliable evidence of long term profitability. Backtests can be easily curve fitted and manipulated and therefore live/back testing consistency is always needed to prove the profitability of any trading system. If this people really care about their customers they should show 10 years of backtesting results with an investor-access verified live account. Meanwhile, due to the obvious lack of evidence and what seems to be intentional limitation and fitting of backtesting results, I consider this trading system NOT worth buying and testing. Remember that the burden of proof is always on the EA seller NOT on your live accounts !

If you would like to know more about automated trading and how you too can design reliable systems that can adapt to changes in market conditions please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 19.45 1 komentar

The Effect of Spreads on Expert Advisors

One of the most important characteristic of any expert advisor is the effect spreads have on the profitability of the trading system. This is a matter that is often neglected by people when they are searching for an expert advisor and it is a vital issue as an expert advisor that is very sensitive to spread values will most likely fail or have a drastically reduced profitability when you trade it on the real market.

The spread, as you may know, is just the difference between the bid and the ask price of a given currency pair. This is in reality what the broker charges as a "commission" given the fact that the broker always keeps this price difference as profit. Every time you enter the market you give the broker the spread as payment.

So how do you know the spread cost and the sensibility of a given strategy to market spreads ? The first factor that affects this is the number of trades taken. If a given ea takes 1 trade each month, then the cost we have to pay for trades is very small, while the cost we have if we take 10 trades a day is quiet high. The more you trade, the more your ea is working for the broker and not for you.

The second and most important factor is the average profit in pips of each trade you take. If your ea has a fixed take profit which is less than 5 times the spread, then changes in the spread will drastically affect the amount of profit you get with each trade. So if you have a 10 pip take profit and a spread of 2, then the expert might be totally unprofitable with a spread of 5.This is specially true if the risk to reward ratio is higher than 1, that is, if the stoploss is bigger than the takeprofit since not only are you working against the spread, you are also risking much more than you make in any trade. This is a pretty unsound strategy but it is used by most of the hyped commercial expert advisors (like fapturbo, robominer, piptronic, etc).

Now pay a lot of attention to the currency pair your expert advisor trades. Most of these expert advisors that aim for small profits are now targeting currency pairs that are characterized by high levels of volatility and range trading (like the EUR/GBP and the EUR/CHF) their pip value is also higher than that of USD based pairs so the profit they can get in dollars for every pip is higher. The drawback is that this pairs tend to have very variable spreads and all of these experts are bound to be unprofitable when traded in the real market. That is a reality.

If you would like to learn about more commercial and free expert advisors, as well as experts I have programmed for our long term stable profit portfolio 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 10.01 0 komentar

Forex Expert Advisor FAQ

There are many people new to the forex market and many more new to the world of automated trading. For this reason, I have put together this general frequently asked questions section. To help anyone who needs to gain a deeper understanding of this subject.

What is a forex expert advisor ?

An expert advisor is basically a program written in the metaquotes language that trades automatically using the metatrader platform.

What is an expert advisors objective ?

The objective of an ea (expert advisor) is to take trading decisions away from the human trader. Alternatively expert advisors can be used to just do money management, loss control or other similar jobs which can be automatized in forex trading.

What are an experts advantages and disadvantages over manual trading ?

An expert advisor has the advantage of being emotionless. Expert advisors feel no fear or greed and operate purely based on mathematical logic. They also have the advantage of letting a person trade without the stress of being constantly on top of the market. A person does not have to worry about monitoring indicators and charts many times a day. An expert advisor can also monitor a wide range of indicators given its computational basis. Something which would be extremely hard for a person.

An expert advisor has many disadvantages though. The main disadvantage is that an expert advisor has a limited logic. It only has a certain amount of rules incorporated into it, making it vulnerable to market changes, while humans can adapt relatively easily. They are also limited by the amount of data they can access. An ea has no knowledge of fundamentals or news. This makes his vision of the market somehow limited as it cannot anticipate moves based on economical factors.

Is trading with a forex expert advisor profitable ?

This one is probably the biggest frequently asked question. Well, to be completely honest, the technology is rather new. They are not any commercial expert advisors (to the best of my knowledge) that have a track record which is long enough to support long term profit making. An even though we may be lacking direct evidence I am inclined to suggest that expert advisor trading can be profitable, probably to a lesser extent than a professional forex trader. I strongly believe though, that the perfect setup for expert advisors is in combination with other experts in a well made portfolio (like the ones being tested on this website).

What characteristics should I look for in a successful ea ?

Successful expert advisors are a very hard thing to find. This is mainly because the market is plagued with people that sell expert advisors that simply do not work. For me, inferring from my experience, a profitable ea has at least the following characteristics.

- It has great money management which obviously includes a stoploss
- It has given positive results at least in 2 months of forward testing
- Does not produce more than 5-10% monthly profit
- It has positive reviews from unbiased people (this means non affiliate, non friends with creator,etc)

These are characteristics which I consider necessary but not sufficient. An expert advisor must have the above to be successful but a loosing ea can have them and still be a bad ea. This at least, discards the experts that lack them.

I am new to the forex market. Is this a way for me to trade ?

Please be very very careful. Although expert advisor trading is promoted as a way for the forex newbie to make money, I strongly recommend caution. Expert advisor trading is a very competitive market with many people out there waiting to get the forex newbies money with the promess of financial success. Sure, a newbie can be successful with the right expert and the right market conditions but again, you need the knowledge and understanding of the forex market to be successful. To understand which experts to buy and to understand when they are unprofitable and should not be trading. I advice you read a lot of reviews and investigate experts you want to buy very deeply.

Are free expert advisors a waste of time ?

Many people think that if an ea is not commercial it is doomed simply by virtue of the market getting efficient to the experts modus operandi. This is a plausible very hard to test hypothesis because it would require a profitable expert advisor which becomes unprofitable by simple virtue of it being used. This is very unlikely. Most likely, free experts become unprofitable because of rigidity. Their logic is to stiff to adapt to ever changing market conditions. My solution would be to use many, and their rigid logics would become plastic with combination. This is the idea behind combining them in a portfolio.

This I think, covers many of the general questions people have about expert advisor trading. This will be completed in the near future with another section which will treat logistic questions (such as broker, installation, etc).

Diposting oleh Unknown 00.30 0 komentar