Forex Robots - legit or scam?

[pilbara]

a site doing live tests of 4 of the most marketed EAs:

started with $250 in an account on Dec1

1st Place: Forex Tracer
Current equity = $260.90
Last week equity growth = -2.9%
All-contest equity growth (since Dec03 2008) = 4.4%

2rd Place: Forex Auto Pilot
Current equity = $253.93
Last week equity growth = -7.0%
All-contest equity growth (since Dec03, 2008) = 1.6%

3rd Place: 10PipsPro
Current equity = $189.44
Last week equity growth = 1.6%
All-contest equity growth (since Dec03, 2008) = -24.2%

4th Place: Steinitz HAS MTF
Current equity = $59.16
Last week equity growth = -32.2%
All-contest equity growth (since Dec03, 2008) = -76.3%


none look particularly good.

what performance levels are you aiming for with your robot?
I'm trying to develop a robot to achieve:
(a) profit: average of 500 pips a week (100 per day),
(b) longevity: trading EUR/USD continuously throughout the forex 24/5 week,
(c) drawdown: target of some down days but no down weeks.

 

[fapturbo]

does MB trading offer that?

Yes it is one I am monitoring.

http://www.mbtrading.com/forexCommissionRates.aspx

There is a company here in Australia based in sydney that claim to do STP and make money from commissions. I have installed the demo and they claim that it is exactly the same feed as the live platform. Time to give Go Markets the flick. Unless they can sort out their liquidity problems. It appears they are mostly taking the other side of trades and cannot effectively hedge winning trades into interbank market

 

[white_goodman]

Yes it is one I am monitoring.

http://www.mbtrading.com/forexCommissionRates.aspx

There is a company here in Australia based in sydney that claim to do STP and make money from commissions. I have installed the demo and they claim that it is exactly the same feed as the live platform. Time to give Go Markets the flick. Unless they can sort out their liquidity problems. It appears they are mostly taking the other side of trades and cannot effectively hedge winning trades into interbank market

all depends what timeframe i guess, ive still got my GO account for my 4hr and daily timeframe trades... if you need liquidity and reliable spreads and not have ur broker working against you the mb may be the way to go... lots of interest in MB over on forexfactory

 

[fapturbo]

This company looks like the Real Deal.

http://www.forexfs.com/

I have spoken to these guys on the phone and have openned an account.

Minimum Starting Balance is 10k

First trade must be 5 full lot trade

Commission is $22.00 per full lot or $2.20 per 0.1 lot

Scalping EA are allowed

They want volume customers who have experience

Relatively young company only about 18months.

Money is in NAB accounts.

They claim to pass all orders to the Interbank Market and not run a bucket shop.

They already have customers running a paticular EA that trades the asian market times.

What do you think....

 

[Stormin_Norman]

spread of 3 pips on the euro + commission??

Commission is $22.00 per full lot or $2.20 per 0.1 lot

does that mean $5.20+ per trade on the eurousd? ie about 5 pips?!

They claim to pass all orders to the Interbank Market and not run a bucket shop.

there are very few bucketshops left in FX. if you understand the FX markets properly you should realise every player worth their salt matches trades and hedges exposure to another player.

 

[Stormin_Norman]

what performance levels are you aiming for with your robot?
I'm trying to develop a robot to achieve:
(a) profit: average of 500 pips a week (100 per day),
(b) longevity: trading EUR/USD continuously throughout the forex 24/5 week,
(c) drawdown: target of some down days but no down weeks.

a. profit = as much as we can achieve.

b. longevity = yes, i dont see the point of baby sitting a EA. might as well trade myself. we will however program the EAs to target sessions and avoid news times using data drawn from online calanders.

c. drawdown = i dont mind drawdown, as long as the returns are there to justify it. low draw down methods can have their lot sizes ramped up. but as long as the drawdown (risk) and the profit (reward) are in good ratio then with sound funds management it should be ok.

eg this screenshot of one of our EAs which is quite aggressive. we have done many new versions of it to improve its risk and i think we're almost there to run it live. in 5 months of testing we've busted only 3 accounts and each time made it less risky as a result of lessons learnt. this is running it on a low balance with a high lot size. atm it can cope with 350 pip movements without a retrace. with more initial funds (or lower lot sizes) it could cope with incrementally more.

 

[fapturbo]

spread of 3 pips on the euro + commission??



does that mean $5.20+ per trade on the eurousd? ie about 5 pips?!



there are very few bucketshops left in FX. if you understand the FX markets properly you should realise every player worth their salt matches trades and hedges exposure to another player.

Well someone has to take the order, problem with go markets is they say they cannot effectively enter the orders into the liquidity provider quickly or efficiently enough. For whatever reason. Be it true or not it is irrelevant.

Go Markets claim to be a STP provider which they may well be. However the technical issue of not being able to get orders filled could be because the liquidity provider is not filling their orders or it just could be because there are too many orders to get filled at the time this paticular EA wants to put an order in.

Forex FS claim to be STP also. Which appears to be true. I don't know what sort of liquidity problems they may face. However time will tell.

 

[Stormin_Norman]

program your own EA and theyll take it no dramas.

i rang them up to ask about some EAs we've been doing. some can be quite short term.

i got told, not a drama, as long as theyre not widely available commercial EAs because they mess with their systems when they attempt to pass through trades. which i fully understand why and how they do.

 

[Wysiwyg]

Notice your lot sizes all different storm.Without revealing too much, why is this done and what initiates or determines lot size please?

 

[fapturbo]

program your own EA and theyll take it no dramas.

i rang them up to ask about some EAs we've been doing. some can be quite short term.

i got told, not a drama, as long as theyre not widely available commercial EAs because they mess with their systems when they attempt to pass through trades. which i fully understand why and how they do.

I would if I knew how.

I've got quite a few ideas from my testing in equities.

Most important thing is profit to open drawdown ratio.

 

[pilbara]

Without revealing too much, why is this done and what initiates or determines lot size please?

With the systems I'm developing, I start with the same initial position, which is increased as the profit targets are met, and gets increased whenever additional entry signals are generated. It's important to be aggressive with your capital when things are going your way.

 

[pilbara]

a. profit = as much as we can achieve.

yep that's a good plan, especially since you've tested your systems over a long period of time, and have a good idea of what they can do.

 

[fapturbo]

With the systems I'm developing, I start with the same initial position, which is increased as the profit targets are met, and gets increased whenever additional entry signals are generated. It's important to be aggressive with your capital when things are going your way.

What sort of optimizations can you run in Strategy Tester?

Can you run multiple optimizations on the one test?

For example setting a range of variables to test for say example 20-100 Pt Trailing Stops in increments of say 5?

 

[Wysiwyg]

With the systems I'm developing, I start with the same initial position, which is increased as the profit targets are met, and gets increased whenever additional entry signals are generated. It's important to be aggressive with your capital when things are going your way.

Good on you.Pyramiding into winning positions is all fine and dandy until the sudden reversal!

 

[pilbara]

Good on you.Pyramiding into winning positions is all fine and dandy until the sudden reversal!

my modelling is based on tick-by-tick data gathered live from the broker, so I think it reflects real market conditions. It seems to me that there's plenty of time (for a computer) to decide to get out of a trade, even if this time is less than a minute when the market is moving very fast. Still there needs to be a stop loss order placed for protection at zero profit, just in case the computer or robot crashes while a large sized position is open.

 

[tayser]

This company looks like the Real Deal.

http://www.forexfs.com/

I have spoken to these guys on the phone and have openned an account.

Minimum Starting Balance is 10k

First trade must be 5 full lot trade

Commission is $22.00 per full lot or $2.20 per 0.1 lot

Scalping EA are allowed

They want volume customers who have experience

Relatively young company only about 18months.

Money is in NAB accounts.

They claim to pass all orders to the Interbank Market and not run a bucket shop.

They already have customers running a paticular EA that trades the asian market times.

What do you think....

MBT Charge $5USD per every $100,000USD traded, so a round trip will cost you $10USD if you trade 100,000 USD/JPY for instance. At the moment, that's roughly 1.35 pips commission to trade EUR/USD, 0.6 pips to trade AUD/USD and 1 pip to trade USD/JPY. This is generally considered borderline "expensive" compared to other broker commission models.

$22 per 100,000 = a very bad joke (worse if it's $22 per 100,000 traded (i.e just to open a position - but remember you have to trade the same amount to close the position)...

I've been saying it for over a year now, Australia is a backwater for FX brokers, if you want to get low commissions, low spreads and high liquidity you have to use an off-shore broker - FX in Australia is still very much a big boy's (NAB, ANZ, CBA, WBC and MBL) game.

 

[pilbara]

What sort of optimizations can you run in Strategy Tester?

Can you run multiple optimizations on the one test?

For example setting a range of variables to test for say example 20-100 Pt Trailing Stops in increments of say 5?

I'm writing java systems to analyze the data I have recorded, which allows a forward-test simulation.

For example with trailing stops, I first simulate what would happen if there were no stops at all, and let the trade fully develop to maximum then back down to zero. Then for each trade I know the maximum potential, so I try to model an exit strategy that captures a good part of the potential without holding back the growth of profitable positions.

 

[Fatcat]

Hi
From reading the posts there are obviously some very experienced forex traders out there. Forex is an area I would very much like to learn more about. There appears to be a heap of books and courses out there....many of which I'm sure are rubbish. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could kindly recommend some worthwhile courses/reading on the subject.
Thanks for your assistance.

 

[tayser]

Start here: http://www.moneybags.com.au/default.asp?d=0&t=1&id=5016&c=0&a=74

 

[macca]

Hi Fatcat,

Good site to learn is

http://www.babypips.com/

there are also specialised forums for Forex, just Google