FOREX REVIEWS

After five weeks of trading the Pointbreak expert advisor and looking closely at the way it closes and opens trades I have just one opinion, for me, c'est finit , it is finished. Last week I wrote a post which was fairly optimistic about the trading of the Pointbreak expert advisor. I said that I was convinced about the trading strategy, it's closing and opening mechanisms, etc. But well, to err is human . The expert advisor itself has shown me this week how all I believed it was supposed to d o was incorrect. I had the following notions about Pointbreak (maybe you have them too) . I though that the expert : - should make profits when there is a strong trend - was supposed to keep draw down at a low level (below 7% at least) - is supposed to give a 10% annual return - controls draw down effectively This week, Pointbreak showed me how a ll of them (except the 10% annual return which I did not prove or disprove) are - in my opinion - not entirely correct . The expert advisor m...

Please do not consider this review as a recommendation to buy forex killer, I wrote it to help people who have already purchased the product and want to get something out of it but the software is barely of any more use than most of the freely available indicators out there. You can get the same or better results with simple indicator based systems ! I was looking at several forex trading systems the other day - mainly expert advisors - when I realized that my whole focus has always been on automated trading systems. I thought - maybe I'm missing on some opportunities - so I decided to take a look at some of the most broadly known forex trading systems . I mean, the mass marketed, almost scam looking, forex systems. The ones with the testimonial filled selling pages where you are almost pushed to buy. One almost instantly caught my attention due to the enormous amount of positive "reviews" available online. I say "reviews" because almost all of the web pages ar...

The objective of this post is just to get your opinion about something I have been thinking about for the past two weeks. I have had the idea of writing an ebook about automated trading. This including my personal experience with several experts, my backtesting and forward testing results (with analysis of course), my views on free experts, commercial experts, setup explanations and profit/loss potential. The idea would be to guide someone completely new to automated forex trading towards the best free and commercial experts as well as explain the real profit or loss possibilities in forex automated trading. I would like to make it concise, about 20 pages, but very informative to novice traders who want to consider automated trading seriously. As always I would maintain my non-affiliate status with all commercial expert makers to remain unbiased throughout the whole process. My questions for you are very simple. Would you be interested in paying for this ebook ? How much would you be w...

This week has been a very bumpy one for the free expert advisor portfolio 2 . As I have also had some time, I have paid close attention to almost all of it's trades, understanding what it has for it and what it has against it. This week saw a major surge in profit with a gain up to 15,000 which stands at the 50% profit line. Then it dropped (as I would have expected) to more discrete levels at 13,000 which is a modest profit of 30%. Up until now, the portfolio has showed us it can deliver a 15% average monthly profit , it has also survived almost two months of forward testing , which I say, cannot be said for about 90% of all the expert advisors out there (and probably not about the individual experts in the portfolio by themselves). I have also seen that the portfolio has both strengths and weaknesses. The portfolio is strongest in trending markets, being very oscillating around moderately ranging markets . Ichimoku5 seems to take trades permanently while Moneymaker v2 is more pe...

As I mentioned on my last post about the Pointbreak expert advisor, I was concerned about the possibility of massive large open draw down with this expert . I even made a comparison between Pointbreak and a grid trading system which was the feeling Pointbreak was giving me at the time. Now I have to say, Pointbreak is really nothing like a grid system . I have watched the expert closely this week, focusing on the way it opened and closed it's positions. The expert knows when it has a large draw down and acts accordingly. When the ea was facing a nearly 5-10% open draw down last week, I was a bit concerned about it being killed by the ranging market. Although my concerns were quiet well founded, I have to say that they don't exist anymore . This week has showed me how Pointbreak behaves in "dark times" and the behavior has been what I had been told. Pointbreak will indeed suffer in ranging markets, but it is designed to survive them and ride trends thereafter . Pointb...

The post I wrote about the God's Gift expert advisor got a lot of attention from my readers. Unfortunately I have not been able to publish any reviews about this ea due to the lack of trades . Apparently this expert advisor is a really infrequent trader, trading only every two or three weeks . Today, after two weeks of forward testing, the ea finally decided to perform a trade on the GBP/USD . The expert advisor executed a buy order which resulted in a 98 dollar profit, which is about 1% of our balance. I like infrequent traders better than frequent ones, this because I always get the feeling that they aim for higher probability trades (but this is just a feeling it might or might not be the case). It seems that due to the nature of this expert advisor, it makes no sense to review it every week, therefore I will do it every month so that we can accumulate a fair amount of trades before each post. I decided to host the trading statement here , if you which to see it. You can also s...

As many of you may already know, the Metatrader 4 trading platform has a strategy tester whose objective is to evaluate a strategy based on historical data, rather than executing an expert advisor for an extended period of time . But the question for many remains, is it reliable ? This question is of the highest importance as many decisions could be based on this feature of the program . Someone who believes in the backtester being accurate will have no problem in using it as a filter for his expert advisors and also using it as a measure of an unknown strategy. First of all, we have to be very clear. There is only one way to test the accuracy of the strategy tester in Metratrader 4. First, we need to run an expert advisor in a demo account for a given period of time, second, we must backtest this exact same expert in that exact same period of time. The comparison between trades taken in both settings will let us know if the backtester is or is NOT accurate. Many people say backtest...

This week has been very interesting for the Free expert advisor portfolio. The portfolio has managed to keep profits above the 20% mark which seemed to be very hard only a few weeks ago. I just came in from a small vacation near my hometown and was extremely pleased with the results I found for this very neat combination of experts. As always, the most active experts have proven to be Ichimoku5 and Moneymaker, with the ADXCrosstrader also making profits this week (probably due to all the activity on the EUR/USD pair). I have to say, this portfolio has gone way beyond what I thought it could achieve . Sustaining profit throughout almost 2 complete months of forex trading, including holiday trading which is by far the toughest. The portfolio has also managed not to increase it's maximum or relative draw downs keeping them near a 25% level which I think is relatively acceptable for a 10% monthly profit margin. As always the trading statement can be seen here .

This week has not been very exiting for out expert advisor portfolio. Every expert advisor traded throughout the week, with all of them loosing and winning at somehow the same phase. The expert advisor portfolio remains in profit, above the 10% profit threshold . With ichimoku5 and moneymaker trading the higher bulk of trades. I also noticed that the portfolio didn't go below the initial deposit of 10,000 which means that we may now be above our initial condition and heading towards steady profits. This however, is sadly only speculation. Although this portfolio has managed to keep up, we still have several months of forwards testing before we can say "It works" . As always the trading statement is available here .

This week I traded Doubleplay v 4.0 live . The results were what I would have expected for doubleplay. Hitting one stoploss and managing to get 3 small wins which amount to a small loss for my mini account (about 4 dollars). This of course, due to the fact that EUR/USD was ranging the whole time which I have found out through experience, is not a suitable scenario for Doubleplay . The reason I have stopped Doubleplay's live trading is not because of the expert's performance but because of a flaw (I think) I found . Doubleplay started to open trades as soon as it closed another one. This should not happen as the dl function should delay further order openings for at least an hour. This according to the value at which dl is set, 3600. I have emailed Hal and I hope he can tell me if there is something wrong with the coding of my personal ea or if this is a change made between v 3.5 and v 4.0. I hope I can resume live trading next week !

Throughout all my Pointbreak reviews I have clearly stated that Pointbreak is a trend following expert advisor . It does extremely well in trending markets , always locking in profit when such a market setup occurs. And then ranges happen. Pointbreak does very poorly in ranging markets as we would have expected from both the ea logic and the information given to us by the expert's creators . This week has been clearly very rangy in the EUR/USD pair and of course, Pointbreak has accumulated significant draw down. I have to say it does not surprise me as I had been warned before about the temporary draw down on this kind of market. This week or weeks are likely to be an endurance test for this expert advisor . We will see how pointbreak handles ranging markets and we will see if it amounts to draw down below the 10% threshold which would be unacceptable for such conservative trading. Well, the EUR/USD is mainly a trending pair so we will most likely see the ea come back to life whe...

For the past two weeks I have searched relentlessly for a profitable free expert advisor to fill the void left by the free expert advisor portfolio I stopped trading. As you may know, finding free profitable expert advisors is very difficult given the fact that they are many of them, with limited information on their workings and objective. At the end, I think I found a light at the end of the tunnel. This expert advisor I found named Gods Gift v7c coded by Matt Edmonds seems to be the answer to my prayers. The way I discriminated this expert from the rest was by back testing . And yes, we all feel the same way about it (does not work very good, I know it) but it is nevertheless a tool to separate possibly profitable experts from unprofitable ones , not to say that every expert resulting profitable in back testing would be in forward testing. The back testing results are very good . After optimizing some of the parameters associated with this expert, I managed to get, using Alpari ...

For the past six months I have been very intrigued by who and what drives the prices up and down in the forex market. It is quiet obvious that retail traders hold just a small portion of the cake while funds, banks, exporters, importers and the like hold a much bigger chunk. I have also asked myself if this people drive prices in a mechanical way. Is it predictable ? One of the most important questions for retail traders. Can we predict the direction of the market ? Or more specifically, can we consistently predict the direction of the market ? The answer - I think - is a shade of yes . Even though we all have different opinions on the technicals and fundamentals of currency pairs, we all know what we all expect. I mean, for example in the case of a non farm payrolls release, we all think it will be say 100k, then it is 70k, there will unmistakably be a hike in the EUR/USD pair. It is all not because 70k is "good" or "bad" for the economy - although this may be a...

Earlier this week when I published the review for my other free expert advisor portfolio I still had hopes that this portfolio would remain in profit. Unfortunately the expert advisors succumbed to rough market conditions caused, perhaps, by the non farm payroll release this Friday. I analyzed the results obtained so far quiet throughly. I noticed that all the expert advisors were quiet active, except myfxovereasy - which despite my every try - didn't start any trades whatsoever. The other experts, Phoenix, Artificial Intelligenge, Binario and Framework, managed to get a 40% combined maximal draw down with actual losses that amount to about 20% of the account's balance. I didn't like the way these experts traded together . They seemed to counteract each others moves excessively to the point that the equity curve looks like a sinusoidal wave. I have then stopped forward testing this expert portfolio as no one would ever want to trade a portfolio with a 40% draw down . Als...

Last week I was very disappointed with the performance of both of my free expert advisor portfolios with both of them reporting loses. I apologize for not making two separate posts - one for each portfolio - as I was busy with new year's eve, etc. The first month has ended for the second expert advisor portfolio . The debuting experts being Ichimoku5, Moneymaker, ADXCrossTrader and UniversalMACross. The rest of the settings are available in earlier posts about this portfolio. The credit goes primarily to Ichimoku5 and Moneymaker both contributing almost every trade . The UniversalMACross has done one trade, which took profit and the ADXCrossTrader has done almost 10 trades with most of them going out at breakeven and one of them taking a loss. I was happily surprised when I saw that this portfolio has recovered all of it's draw down and is now hovering above a 10% profit. With a maximal draw down of 25% it is still not as bad as the first portfolio which has managed to get to...

I have just started the forward testing of Doubleplay v 4.0 on one of my live accounts . I will rely solely on the trading made by Doubleplay to profit. The account I am testing the expert on is a mini IBFX account so I have set the mini variable to true. I have kept all further settings at their default value with a 5% risk factor. Since live testing results made by Hal himself and other traders (link at the bottom of the left column) have shown this expert to be profitable (and I have found Doubleplay v 3.5 to be profitable also) I find it reasonable to give this expert a chance in forward testing. As usual, statements and results will be commented weekly. I hope this expert delivers as much as its predecessor !

When we all get serious about using expert advisors for trading, one of our first absolute needs becomes finding a reliable vps . A vps or virtual private server is a computer server in which you load your metatrader program and your expert advisors, the server stays on almost all the time , having a 99,99% uptime is required for trading . I searched a lot for a decent, cheap, reliable vps service. Finally, I found exactly what I was looking for. At vpsland.com, for the small price of 25 USD a month, you get a fully configurable and installed virtual private server . You can use enough RAM to load about 7 instances of metatrader while your expert advisors and your resources are limited to about 25% of the actual servers (which are quad core, dual processor, Xeons). This setup is so good, it was good enough for performing quantum chemical calculations which are very computationally demanding. I have been with them for about 4 months and they have not disappointed me once . Their supp...