FOREX REVIEWS

Today it's a very important day, not because of the release of another automated trading strategy or some other achievement related to Asirikuy or the development of expert advisors but because today I will be taking a huge step for this blog and - hopefully- my online presence in general. Through the past 3 years 1usdyen.blogspot.com has been the home of my forex blogging efforts and after more than 500 articles and a lot of modifications it has now become evident for me that this blog and its potential have exceeded the limitations of what the blogger platform has to offer. Today I am taking a step forward and sharing with you this blog's new url : http://www.mechanicalforex.com . Within the following paragraphs I will also share with you the reasons why I decided to take this important decision and why I consider this a very important move for the development of this website. Although blogger has been a very friendly, rewarding and robust blogging solution its limitations be...

The internet is filled with people who advice and give their opinion about how others can succeed in forex trading. Many times this advice is extremely vague and does not have any practical implications with it that can actually help newer traders succeed. One of the most common examples of this is how more experienced traders tend to tell people new to the market to "treat forex like a business" while they give absolutely no specific advice on how you are supposed to do this. Sure, for successful traders this is obvious and the advice needs no further explanation - since they are already treating forex like a business - but for new traders the advice is totally meaningless since they do not know how to trade forex like a business or the steps they need to take to make this a reality. On today's post I want to share with you 10 practical things you need to do to treat your forex trading like a business, after you do these ten things you will find that your trading will be...

The subject of Virtual Private server hosting is a very sensitive one that affects all traders who want to use automated trading systems. Although it is possible to build a "home VPS" by setting up a raid backup server, a secondary internet connection and a large UPS this is not practical for most people and renting the service from a provider located within a data center seems like the best idea. Amongst the realms of shared VPS servers - where a single computer is shared as a host between different servers - Thrust VPS comes out as a new, fresh and reliable service that can be used by forex traders to host their metatrader 4 platforms. There are several problems that usually happen with Virtual Private Servers that make people very reluctant to use one or another service provider. The most common complaint of traders about their VPS servers are unscheduled reboots (usually done for updates) problems accessing their platform through remote desktop and the lack of responsive...

When simulating the performance of a trading strategy using historical data within the Metatrader 4 platform there are many things that you can do which will inevitably end in bad performance and unreliable results. Many of the reasons why people regard backtesting using Metatrader as unpredictable and difficult to reproduce are a consequence of one or several technical problems which can arise due to the lack of carefulness of the trader running the evaluation. Knowing about these problems and taking action so that they do not affect simulations is something necessary to arrive at reproducible and reliable results. I have proved - within several trading strategies - that simulations can be reliable and easily reproduced if special care is taken to avoid technical pitfalls. Within the following paragraphs I will share with you the six main technical reasons why traders arrive at unreliable simulation results that greatly over or under estimate the profitability of their trading systems...

Today I am releasing the 2nd video monthly reviews of automated trading systems. In August we saw the release of many different new trading systems, most of the expert advisors released have absolutely no proof of live trading and most of them do not even give the trader a decent glimpse at simulation results. As always there is an incredible desire of EA sellers to hide information that is easily available and to make the showing of live trading results a shadowy process based on screenshots and html statements when having transparency is as simple as offering a live, investor access verified myfxbook account. This month we saw the release of forex bullet proof which was pushed hardly by affiliates with a massive amount of junk email being sent. After looking at the website we then find nothing but a very dangerous martingale system with very shadowy "evidence" of profitability that is certainly NOT reliable and makes us become very suspicious about the ability of this syste...

I think it is not a secret now that I have always believed that one of the biggest problems faced by people new to automated trading - and their general lack of success - is the almost complete absence of evaluation and the use of a system that has accurate evaluation and a real statistical edge that can be used for longer profitability. This becomes evident if you start to ask traders about the long term characteristics of the systems they use or intend to use. You will find out that the large majority of people ignore the maximum draw down the draw down period lengths, the probability to have a losing or a winning month, etc. It is easy to see then why traders switch so much between different systems and why following a system is so terribly hard. Today I want to help new traders by sharing with them a simple strategy they will be able to use everyday which is adequately evaluated and has clear long term profit and draw down expectations that have been calculated according to reliabl...

Even though there are many ways in which you can define successful automated trading systems I think that the word that describes them best is : elegant. While the large majority of traders seek systems that promise -and yet don't deliver- massive amounts of profit those few of us who succeed by using automated trading systems have done so through the creation of systems that fulfill a series of very simple characteristics that make them robust, reliable and likely to succeed as market conditions change. On today's post I want to share with you the characteristic of elegant systems and how this type of mechanical solutions are one of the many ways in which traders can actually find long term success in forex trading. What is an elegant system ? To put it simply, elegant trading systems are those which are extremely simple regarding their coding and trading logic and yet extremely rich and deep in regards to the market inefficiencies they exploit. For example Watukushay FE, a tr...

When you go online and start searching for ways in which to become profitable as a forex trader you soon realize that the internet is filled with what seems like very meaningful yet hollow advice. People around forums and educational websites will tell you several key points of advice such as "plan your trade, trade your plan", "cut your loses short" and "follow the trend" but they always fall short of telling you any practical ways in order to achieve the above mentioned objectives. This is one of the main reasons why it is so terribly hard for new traders to achieve success, there is an inherent lack of practical advice online which means that most traders have to learn how to do things from experience, a very lengthy and painful process that usually carries with it a lot of financial loss and frustration. On today's post I want to make this easier for those out there who have just started or those who are still looking for some guidance in how to be...

I consider myself an investor in the sense that I do not take decisions regarding my trading very lightly, every time I decide to run a system on one of my personal or managed accounts I always take as many steps as possible to ensure that capital preservation and low risk will be the highest priorities. Of course, many people - especially those newer to the scene - view this as being "close minded" and having problems dealing and implementing new ideas. On today's post I want to write a few paragraphs about the difference between being close minded (which refers to being unable to embrace new ideas) and being cautious (taking care of one's capital and risk taking levels). In the end I hope that you will see how both of these things are completely different and how one does not necessarily imply the other. So why do people view conservative traders as being "close minded" ? The answer to this questions is actually not that complex and goes into the way in wh...

Every time someone asks me what I consider to be the minimum necessary period to evaluate a trading system to know if it has a chance of being profitable under future market conditions I unequivocally say "five years". However - although I have explained vaguely in the past why - I have never written a precise explanation that tells people exactly why this is the case and why systems evaluated over at least 5 years have a better chance of surviving than those evaluated over a 1 or a 2 year period. Through the following paragraphs I will tell you the reasons why this is the case and why using this as a minimum period of evaluation guarantees that systems will have a certain degree of adaptability and the possibility to survive to future market conditions. The first thing we need to ask to understand the 5 years argument is : What changes when market conditions change ? When you analyze any trading instrument and look for changes in the different quantitative characteristics of...

Today we have started the month of September, a month which is usually filled with interesting and decisive economic movements that have very important consequences in the long term for the world's largest economies. What is so special about the month of September ? What is the "September effect" market analysts talk about ? On today's post I will talk a little bit about September trading and the movements that usually take place within this month, I will explain what the September effect is and what it means to the regular world citizen and - more importantly - to the professional forex trader. September has many unique characteristics that make it an important month, above all others its most important quality seems to be that it is the first month after summer trading and the first month of the last quarter of the year. This means that a combination of factors happen within September that are not present in any other month. First of all, this month starts right aft...