i managed to stop FX-Bandit v1.31 when all the trades were closed about 15 hours ago.  FX-Bandit v1.3 (fxbandit2) has been left running. 

as for DoublePlay, there was a profitable trade that was > +20 pips in profit earlier…. so i waited for it to close by itself since the 20 pips trailing stop would have ensured some profits anyway.  however, when i logged in to check moments ago, that profitable trade had been closed and a new one had been entered. 

ideally, i would have disabled DoublePlay due to the FOMC statement that should be coming out in about 3 hrs time.  so… just take note that the existing trade should not be there.  however, i’ll leave that trade alone just to see what happens… maybe we can derive some learning points from it :O)

[ update : 2 nov 2007, 2:30pm GMT... NFP was about 2 hrs ago ]

sorry for the confusing starting and stopping of the various Expert Advisors… i think i managed to confuse myself too :O)

DoublePlay ran through the FOMC and NFP… disaster!!  3 stop-losses in a row.  lesson learnt : stay out of news and events with DoublePlay!!

the 2nd run of FX-Bandit (ie. fxbandit2) was running with a bug with the stops… so please ignore the results and concentrate on the 3rd run which is running in version 1.31 (ie. fxbandit3)  i’ll archive fxbandit and fxbandit2 away shortly and focus on fxbandit3 -> FX-Bandit v1.31

i had disabled FX-Bandit v1.31 late tuesday to avoid the FOMC statement that was due on wednesday… and i left it disabled, thinking that there’s not much point it letting it run for just 1 day (thursday) and then stopping it again for friday’s NFP.  i figured i might as well stay out all the way until monday.

then on thursday, something happened.  Bill (creator of FX-Bandit) sent me an email and told me that his demo clocked 8 winners over the FOMC announcement and asked why mine was not running.  since Bill was sounding confident about it, i told myself…. “ok.  let’s let it run over the NFP and see what happens.”  if this Expert Advisor can profit through a FOMC announcement and NFP, i would be quite impressed.  and now with the NFP over, see what FX-Bandit did : http://www.ckowyong.com/blog/statements/fxbandit3/statement.htm

FX-Bandit closed 4 winners over the NFP… not bad at all :O)  i have not had a look at the trades that Bill mentioned during the FOMC… but i definitely will this weekend to see if it’s really that good.

the ther contestants : PipForia is almost break-even after 11 days… will be writing to them to seek their advise.  KISS and PipBoxer seems to be getting nowhere… i’m thinking maybe we should retire them as well.  will analyse their trades and make a decision by this weekend.  Steinitz continues to do amazingly well… slowly chugging along on the GBPUSD.  i’ve posted a review of Steinitz a few days back.  the link to it is on the right panel.

- ck

ps : check out Milton Waddams‘ blog! (linked on the right)  he’s the current leader of the 2007 Automated Trading Championships.  thanks fo Google, i managed to find his blog… almost by chance :O)

new developments!!  the gentleman behind FX-Bandit contacted me after realising that i’m reviewing his Expert Advisor last week.  and he was kind enough to send me an improved version of FX-Bandit that is now tested here : http://www.ckowyong.com/blog/statements/fxbandit3

not much information now as i am still awaiting the new manual which will document the improvements in v1.31.  but in a nutshell, the stop mechanisms have been refined to work better.  if this is real, i think we may be testing a better optimised version than the one he’s running in the 2007 Automated Trading Championships!! :O)  *sweet*

only time will tell if v1..31 is better… but i’m liking what i see so far :O)  3 winners and account is up +45 pips… and best of all, no floating loss this time! :O)

this is getting exciting!!  :O)

ps : i would like to urge viewers of the blog to join my mailing list.  how would you benefit from it?… you can find out more here >> http://ckowyong.com/blog/?page_id=31 :O)

this must have been one of the more exciting weeks since the start of the blog :O)  after a catastrophic 2 weeks where we saw DoublePlay and RobinHood hitting several stop-losses, this week’s activity offered some kind of consolation.  DoublePlay ended the week with a +32 pips profit, and FX-Bandit and PipForia’s Hedged Grid generated some really interesting results.  sadly, we will be retiring RobinHood from the race.  you can read more about it from the ‘review’ link on the right.

FX-Bandit… where did this Expert Advisor come from?  if i am not wrong, the creator of this Expert Advisor sells it on eBay only.  i was pleasantly surprised to find out recently that this Expert Advisor (likely an improved variant) is also competing in the 2007 Automated Trading Championships too.  you can have a look at the creator’s profile here >> waaustin

on the morning of 22 oct 2007, we saw a really good downward move on the EURJPY (approx 220 pips) and EURUSD (approx 170 pips).  i’m not sure what was moving the EURO that day.  but whatever it was, i hope it will happen more often :O)  why??… you might ask.  well… our new-comer FX-Bandit did a great job in capitalising on that move and managed to get about +90 pips out over 9 cocnsecutive trades.  DoublePlay did equally well… squeezing out +100 pips in one single trade.  if i had my DoublePlay running on my LIVE account (which i didn’t!!!… since i disabled it after the crappy week #8), i would have been a very happy man.  well… so much for trying to time the market!  i’ll probably leave it on next time even if it experiences (god forbid!) another drawdown.

whatever these 2 Expert Advisors were doing, they were doing it really really well.  with 9 trades on FX-Bandit, i was interested to look at the chart in detail to see what it was really doing… and very interesting it was :O)  FX-Bandit trades on the H1 timeframe.  but looking atthe H1 chat does not really show anything.  but once you get down to the M1 charts… we could almost be certain that this Expert Advisor uses the M1 chart to trigger it’s entry.  as a matter of fact, most strategies work this way too…  finding entry signals on a higher timeframe, and then going down to the shorter timeframes to find an entry trigger.  have a look at the FX-Bandit trades here : EURJPY-M1

as you can see, FX-Bandit was continuosly milking the pair (no pun intended ;o) that morning.  after 9 trades and +90 pips later, the downtrend stopped at about 15 mins to 1200 hrs GMT… and so did the Expert Advisor : nice!!  but if you looked at the M1 chart, you will notice that this Expert Advisor seems to rely on a ‘confirmation’ pattern before making an entry.  waiting for a confirmation is sound, but the M1 chart shows that the entries could have been better optimised to get more pips… much more!  on a number of the trades (circled in orange), the trade goes negative -10 to -15 pips almost immediately after it’s entry.  any major issues here?  not really… a long as at the end of the day, the Expert Advisor is able to capitalise on the move. 

it’s interesting to compare… FX-Bandit took 9 trades to generate +90 pips VS DoublePlay only took 1 trade to get +100 pips.  but please don’t get me wrong.  both the Expert Advisors did an amazing job… entering at the right time and getting a good profit out of the positions taken. 

however, i would like to urge you to give this a good thought : when FX-Bandit was doing those trades, the spread ranged from 3 to 5 pips.  so in essence, the broker would have made approximately 20 pips or more from those 9 trades.  now think about this : if we could get back some of that spread as a rebate for every lot we traded, wouldn’t that be nice? :O) **more about this later**

 *** sorry… got to go for a run now.  will continue later in the afternoon. ***

[29 oct 2007, 0400 hrs singapore time]

the run totally consumed me.  i was a walking shell most of the day…. so did not have the energy to do much until now :O)

ok… we have looked at FX-Bandit’s chart… but what about our best performer DoublePlay?  i’ve spend the last 2 hours preparing the charts… and i think the time and effort was well spent (ps : i will definitely need lots of coffee today :O)

analysing the +100 pips winner by DoublePlay : (see chart) i found that the M5 chart of the EURUSD was the best for looking at this trade.  the sell was entered very very nicely… just before the big move down.  it rode the downward move all the way to DoublePlay’s take-profit level of +100 pips and closed the trade.  but if you looked at the chart, the downward move still had quite a bit of steam left.  we could have gotten about +130 pips if we had a bigger take-profit of say 150 pips.  with a rather effective trailing-stop of 20 pips, i think it makes perfect sense to push up the take-profit to 150.  that’s what i did for the demo and my LIVE account and have turned both of them on for the week.

when it comes to trade entry, DoublePlay was all over the place for the last 4 trades after that +100 pips winner.  (see chart)  i’m not sure if the M15 chart is best for analysing this Expert Advisor, but it does help give a good idea what happened throughout the life of those trades.  although DoublePlay did not do too well last week, it did show that the 50 pips stop-loss (see trade #1) and the 20 pips trailing-stop (see trade #2) was working well.

** almost time to leave for work.  will update more once i get a chance.  please see important message below. **

IMPORTANT : market opened with a gap today… so i believe we should see some good volatility… especially with the FOMC statement coming out on wednesday and Non-Farm Payroll on friday!  if you are using an Expert Advisor that does not employ a stop-loss, i would suggest that you disable it and stay out of the market this week.  if you have open trades that have stop-loss levels that you or your account cannot handle, consider closing them early and stay on the sidelines by early wednesday. 

** i need coffee…. ** :O)

it’s been a busy week on all fronts!  RobinHood has suffered 2 consecutive drawdowns and the account has been reduced considerably.  you can go to the RobinHood review link on the right to have a look at the testing history. 

we have added 2 new ‘contestants’ to the review  : PipForia’s Hedge Grid and FX-Bandit.  these 2 Expert Advisors have been generating lots of trades and have been very exciting to watch.  i hope they will give DoublePlay (best performer so far) a good run for the money! 

i would also like to urge viewers to join my mailing list.  how would you benefit from it?… you can find out more here >> http://ckowyong.com/blog/?page_id=31

for the record, we have been forward-testing the following Expert Advisors :

1. DoublePlay v3.5.2
2. RobinHood v4.9
3. PipBoxer v2.0.6
4. FX-Bandit v1.3 (time-based trial)
5. Steinitz HAS MTF v2.31
6. PipForia’s Hedge Grid (time-based trial)
7. EuroX2 (stopped)
8. and a few others which are being privately tested

there has been many lessons learnt from this whole experience, and i trust that you have benefitted from this blog as much as i had in putting it together.

my main motivation is to find a set of profitable Expert Advisors that are reliable and relatively easy to understand and control.  and with this set of Expert Advisors, i feel that we should be able to generate some consistent income.  i’ve more or less summarised this in a post at IBFX’s forum : http://forum.interbankfx.com/viewtopic.php?t=2507  if you could, please drop by and post your views on the topic.  alternatively, you can also email me at ck@ckowyong.com

to our success!! - ck

guess what?  the EURUSD gapped up this morning and took out my RobinHood’s 140 pips stoploss!  i was looking at the chart last friday and i had the chance to manually close when it was just -60 pips down… but the gambler in me persisted… so i left the trade alone… and i’m not surprised what happened.  RobinHood was off to a great start… gaining at much as +13.45% before hitting the much dreaded drawdown this morning which reduced the demo account to just $6,345 from the initial $10,000 *ouch!*  thanks to the good people behind InterbankFX and RobinHood, we all get to experience this without loosing a cent :O)

DoublePlay also had a lousy week… suffering 3 x 50 pips losses in a row.  however, the account is still up +74.6%… so it’s still good, and also still the best performer of the Expert Advisors we are testing.

i have not had the time yet to analyse the charts to see why DoublePlay and RobinHood performed so badly.  but i think having seen some good times and some drawdowns, we should have some good data to look at to see how and why they performed the way they did… which will help us in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the Expert Advisors better.

new this week!! : we’ve added 2 more Expert Advisors to the ‘race’.  PipForia’s Hedge Grid and FX-Bandit.  both have an expiry date… so their presence in the race will be short.  i’ve tried my best to get them up before the market opened this moring.  so far no trades yet… hope i’ve set them up correctly.  i’m also seriously reconsidering an Expert Advisor which i dropped some weeks back.  due to strong recommendations from a few of my forex-savvy mailing list subscribers, i will be looking into added Bluto’s SuperRSI into our review soon.

results so far (ending week #8) :

#1. DoublePlay v3.5.2 : +74.6% after 39 trading days.  estimate : +42.08% p.m.

#2. PipBoxer v2.06 : +6.69% after 5 trading days.  estimate : +29.44% p.m.

#3. Steinitz HAS MTF : +35.31% after 30 trading days.  estimate : +25.89% p.m.

i think once we have enough data, we’ll probably need to record the performance in terms of pips-per-month… or maybe we can start with a pips-per-week table.  will work on it later in the week.

important notice!! :  www.fx-scalper.com - please scrutinise their forward-test statements carefully (esp. strategy 3).  i’ll be sending my findings about FX-Scalper to all my mailing list subscribers in a bit.

*** update : 22 oct 2007, 0530 gmt ***

Bluto’s SuperRSI Expert Advisor will not not be reviewed publicly here since it’s ‘private intellectual property’… and for ‘private trading purposes’ only.  that’s the rule that the creator has set forth to be able to join his private group and get to use his Expert Advisors.  got to respect that.  however, i’ll be writing about it in my private newsletters that i will be sending out to my mailing list subscribers.  if you want more information about Bluto and his SuperRSI Expert Advisor, please Google it or search for it at the forums.

*** more to come ***

with the weekend approaching and Bernanke due to speak on Friday morning, i’ve disabled DoublePlay(IBFX) for our forward-test and my LIVE account. DoublePlay(RFXT) will be left running to trade through these events.

DoublePlay has suffered this week… hitting 3 stop-losses in a row. the profits have gone down quite a bit, but the account is still up +74.6%, which is helping to buffer the blows.

RobinHood was on a roll… but is now stuck in a short position. the EURUSD has rallied in the past 24 hours and has just reached a previous high of 1.4300 (a round figure!) -> click to see chart.  it seems to be hoovering around that figure a bit.  i’m hoping that we’ll see a sizable correction down from that high so that i can close the RobinHood trades will a smaller loss. let’s see how it goes…

*** update - 19 oct 2007, 0320 gmt ***

EURUSD still hoovering below 1.4300… i hope it holds longer which will make it a good resistance level.  but with Bernanke speaking in about 12 hours, the fundamentals are likely to rule today.  i’m still keeping watch…

*** update - 19 oct 2007, 0530 gmt ***

the EURUSD is really teasing the 1.4300 level quite a bit!  the European market is going to open soon… and i still have no chance to exit the RobinHood trade yet.  it’s now about -120 pips down… just 20 pips away from the 140 pips stop-loss.  until the European market starts, i’m still not certain if the 1.4300 will continue to be a resistance… or will it become a new support on the H4 chart.  good thing this is just a demo account! :O)

*** update - 19 oct 2007, 1100 gmt *** 

 i think a top has formed over the last couple of hours on the EURUSD H4 chart.  i’m still not sure what to make of it.  one thing for sure, Bernanke is probably under a lot of stress… and his speech will be under a lot of attention.  i don’t think he will say anything that will cause the dollar to tank further, but i also doubt that he can say much to boost it.  it’s anybody’s game now.  think i’ll wait it out :O)

KISS has been given a fresh start.  a new version is out (v1.4-Daily), and it looks like it has been given a overhaul… settings are different and is now trading the 15-min timeframe.  

PipBoxer has also been upgraded to v2.0.6, now trading the top 5 pairs recommended by the creator, using a ’high’ percent risk.  like KISS, a detailed statement of the past forward-test has been archived in their respective folders where the live statements are located.

i’ve also started 2 demos at http://www.zulutrade.com, trading the “EUR/CHF-Mover” and the “Forex-Millionaire” signals.  most of the signals are very new… so i think it’s best to give them a couple of months to run-in first.  i am also a bit wary about the fact that they are earning only from the spread as an introducing broker(IB).  having to split the earnings with the singnal provider and also to fund their operations as a hosted trading platform provider… i would think they are doing a lot with very little!  i’m still looking out for reviews about them (please add them as ’comments’ to this post if you find any).  anyway, let’s see how the demos go.  (thanks to MB for the introduction :O)

EUR/CHF-Mover : username : DM2125 / password : 41831
Forex-Millionaire : username : DM2221 / password : 99024
P.S. : please don’t change anything.  thanks!

race update : RobinHood is doing great.  it’s up +13.2% since last week!  DoublePlay has been doing some interesting stuff at IBFX and RFXT.  will analyse the contrasting trades once i get the chance.  overall, it’s still up +92.9% in just over 7 weeks… very respectable considering the fact that recovery from losses are usually achived within the next couple of trades following it.

offer :  back in september, i had a chance to compile a list of freebies that were worth a total of US$2,500 for my mailing list subscribers… specifically for subscribers who purchased DoublePlay or RobinHood through me.  NO… i am not ashamed of promoting the Expert Advisors that i like, and i think there’s nothing wrong in doing so.  frankly, it helps heaps in keeping this blog running and allows me to acquire more Expert Advisors to test and review.

so… if you are interested in finding out more about the US$2,500 worth of freebies, please consider subscribing to my mailing list below.  your privacy is my top priority, and i promise that i’ll only send you information that i feel is useful in helping you succeed with automated trading systems.  to join my mailing list, please fill out the form below :

p.s. : Fed chairman Bernanke is going to speak again this friday. you may want to stay out of the market during this time. and while you are out of the market, you might as well stop looking at the computer and go out for a coffee or something. if you find the blog useful or are feeling a little generous, you could buy me a coffee too! ;o)

the week is ending… and with DoublePlay and RobinHood already disabled to prepare for the market’s close, we might as well tally the results now :O)

yes… that’s how i’m going to run the forward-tests with DoublePlay and RobinHood.  from past experiences and recommendations from the creators, these 2 Expert Advisors are better left disabled on a friday or before any news announcements…. as they seem to be more susceptible to drawdowns during these times.  all open trades should also be closed prior to the end of friday. 

with this kind of knowledge about the Expert Advisors that we are testing, i would estimate that we can maybe avoid 50% of the drawdowns that it may encounter.  and to further improve our profitability (or survivability), i would like to suggest the following approach that i’ve been using religously in my live trading with Expert Advisors :

“withdraw a certain X% of profits everytime it makes 2X%.
this helps to preserve capital, and at the same time,
leaves some profits in the market to help it compound”

that’s how i traded with RobinHood for slightly over 3 months.  for every 20%(of the initial capital) it made, i would issue a withdrawal notice to IBFX to take out half of it.  4 withdrawals and 3 months later, i had 40% of my capital back in my pocket, and another 40%(which are profits) in the market together with my initial capital.  the money in the pocket provided a buffer for the drawdowns that came in the 4th month (ouch!!).

confession of a gambler : i was trading RobinHood with a 45% risk, although the creator advised to set it between 1% - 10% max. (click here to see)  why did i take such a high risk?… because someone whom i respected as a trader advocated so.  he suggested that 45% can be used initially, but should be lowered down as the account grows.  45% did make sense to me at that time, because the months of forward-testing that i had done showed that it had to be that high to really get somewhere with this Expert Advisor.  plainly put, i was greedy!!

if you are wondering how risky a 45% risk setting is, a $10,000 account would become $3025 after 2 consecutive drawdowns hitting the 140-pips stop-loss of RobinHood.  that’s a staggering 70% drop!!… something that you would not want to see happen to your trading account.  but thanks to my ‘take out X% for every 2X% gain‘ approach, i weathered through 2 drawdowns in the 4th month and still had +45% gains to smile about.  if not for the withdrawals, i would estimate my account to be near -10% to -30% after the drawdowns.

i consider myself very very lucky to be able to enjoy 3 good months of profits with RobinHood before the drawdowns happened.  if they came any earlier, i think i would not be here testing and reviewing Expert Advisors and writing this blog :O)

i hope my experiences with RobinHood do not give you an impression that it’s a bad Expert Advisor.  frankly, i think RobinHood is an excellent scalping Expert Advisor.  it’s win:loss ratio is impressive.  but due to it’s scalping nature, the strategy carries some inherent risks.  to describe this Expert Advisor, i would say that it’s a ‘wild horse that needs to be tamed‘.  Glenn Bacon did a good job in creating it, and deserves a round of applause for keeping it updated.  his integrity as a Expert Advisor seller / creator shows in his forum.

yes, i will still trade live with RobinHood, but only with money that i can afford to loose.  if DoublePlay continues it’s winning streak, i think i may be able to have these 2 amazing Expert Advisors in my Portfolio of Expert Advisors by Nov-Dec 2007  :O)

—————- sorry for the suspense :O) —————–

with RobinHood back in the race now, we’ve got to measure the Expert Advisors’ performance a little different now… since they started the race at different points of time.  assuming that there are 22 trading days in a month, i’ve calculated their average % gains per trading day since it began, and then multiply it by 22 = giving the estimated % gain per month.  i know it’s not very accurate since the late starters have not had a chance to reap the benefits of compounding yet… so just take it as a rough guide and do your own calculations if you need to.

#1. DoublePlay v3.5.2 : +109.74% after 34 trading days.  estimate : +71.01% p.m.

#2. RobinHood v4.9 : +8.77% after 5 trading days.  estimate : +38.59% p.m.

#3. Steinitz HAS MTF : +9.49% after 25 trading days.  estimate : +8.35% p.m.

… more updates to come …

please leave a comment if you found this post interesting.  thanks!!

yes.  he’s alive and well… after upgrading to v4.9 which fixed a bug that prevented it from trading when Stop_Friday was set to true.  RobinHood, which i believe is some kind of scalper, is up +8.7% in just 4 days.  DoublePlay and Steinitz have a competitor now!

there’s a very interesting thread which discusses RobinHood here : http://robinhoodea.com/forum/index.php?topic=39.0

you’ll hear more about RobinHood from now on :O)

here’s the read-only logins and passwords :

RobinHood v4.9 : Broker = InterbankFX, Login = 1640072, Password = dfh0pae
delta.foxtrot.hotel.zero.papa.alpha.echo

DoublePlay v3.5.2 : Broker = InterbankFX, Login = 1604065, Password = co1iklk
charlie.oscar.one.india.kilo.lima.kilo

Steinitz HAS MTF : Broker = InterbankFX, Login = 1601798, Password = qy3rmyq

after writing about the NFP in a previous post, i realised that the topic might deserve a post on it’s own.

before i bore the daylights out of you, i’m pleased to let you know that the amazing offer that i’ve made available to my mailing list subscribers is still available.  it contains 3 freebies worth a total of more than US$2,500 (…of course there’s a catch! :O)  if the stuff that i’ve been writing about interests you, i am absolutely sure that you’ll want to know about this US$2,500 offer!  together with the offer, subscribers will also be able to download the following files :

1. VPS guide for MT4 : it’s an instruction manual on how to set up a Virtual Private Server to run your MT4 platform.  for more details, see http://ckowyong.com/blog/?p=9
2. DoublePlay Risk and Performance Simulation Spreadsheet : with this spreadsheet, you can simulate quite realistically how much you would have made if you traded at varying risk% with the DoublePlay Expert Advisor.  so… if you are a conservative investor, you could put in a risk of 2% and see how much the account would have grown compared to what our forward-test has achived so far.  this is possible because we already have the P&L of each trade in pips from our forward-test statement.  we just need to put in some formulas to calculate lot sizes based on risk% and capital size.

if you would like to get these, please consider joining my mailing list :O)

ps : the US$2,500 worth of freebies are strictly for members of the mailing list… and for a limited time only :O)

the Non-Farm Payroll and the Expert Advisor : last friday was the release of the NFP report.  prior to it’s realease, i was trying to send my subscribers a ‘warning’ message advising them that this event could have some impact to their Expert Advisors.  here’s a copy of that email  which only reached about 30% of my subscribers due to some technical issues.

in a previous post, we have mentioned about the practice of closing out all trades before the close of the trading week.  i believe most will agree that this is good practice, since there’s no telling what might happen over the weekend that could potentially move the markets on monday.  with that same logic, i feel that it’s also prudent to stay out of the market when a news event is due, since it carries the same kind of uncertainty as a weekend would.

hence, applying the same logic, i sent out that email advising that we should look at a NFP week as though it’s a long weekend that stretches 3 days, starting friday.  hence, all trades should be closed at the earliest on the thursday, and the Expert Advisor should be disabled.  that’s exactly what i did with the DoublePlay forward-test account at IBFX.  for the sake of having something to compare with, i let the DoublePlay on RFXT trade through the NFP and the weekend.

the IBFX DoublePlay was switched off at about 1900 hrs (EST) wednesday evening.  at that time, there were no open trades.  the RFXT DoublePlay went on to make a sell and made a profit of +69 pips (we’ll look at the chart later).  towards the end of the day, it entered a buy and held the trade over the weekend.  when the market opened this morning, the EURUSD went down and the trade was stopped out with a -50 pips loss.  so all in all, we are up +19 pips.  no major damage done.

looking at the chart (coming soon), the +69 pips profit was more luck than anything else.  it seems like it entered on a candle-based confirmation, but right after, the price started to run the other way.  it stayed flat for quite a few more bars… which i think in this case would have void the entry logic.  so i would tend to think that it was lucky to meet a big bearish candle at around the NFP report, which allowed the trailing stop to kick in, and then took profit as it made a reversal upwards.  quite nicely done i would say :O)

having loosing trades is part and parcel of trading, be it manual to automated.  at the end of the day, the most important thing is your P&L.  would you mind if you had only 3 winners out of 10 trades but still ended up in positive territory?  not me :O)

however, the question of what makes a good win/lose ratio is a subjective one.  give a scalping strategy 5 winners to 5 losers and you will be in deep dung!  scalping strategies tries to take profit very very quickly… often somewhere between 2 to 6 pips.  by their nature, their stop-loss are usually quite far away… mostly more than 10 times of the take-profit target.  so for a scalper, you would not like to see any losers at all…period.  even a 1:10 losers to winners ratio can be deadly to an account.  so, please be aware of what type of Expert Advisor you are using or planning to buy.

short term profits can be amazing for scalpers, as it trades very very often and it’s great seeing some profits coming in almost every day or sometimes even every hour.  however, all it takes is a good strong trend to  throw it off balance.  remember the saying that “the trend is your friend”?  well, scalpers hate trends!!  they live by volitality and the probability that price will always return back to equilibrium (ie. the trade entry price).  sound?  you decide :O)

as there’s always a flip side to all things, we can’t ignore the fact that there are some really good scalpers out there.  an excellent example would be the current leader of the 2007 Automated Trading Championships - winwin2007.  he uses a combination of scalping strategies and have doubled the account in 1 week!!  100% winners!  let’s keep an eye on him and see how his scalping Expert Advisor stands the test of time.  this would be really interesting to watch!!  :O)

in my opinion, i think investing strategies are the way to go.  the strengths of an investing  Expert Advisor should not only be in it’s trade entries.  it should also have excellent stop-loss and take-profit strategies.  in my opinion, having an effective trailing stop and multiple levels of take-profit should work well.  however, i’ve not seen such an Expert Advisor yet.  maybe someday, some brilliant Expert Advisor programmer will stumble upon this blog and test out this approach to see how it performs as an automated system.  till then, let’s keep searching… please remember to email me if you find anything good, ok?  it’s slow doing it alone…

please leave a comment if you find this post helpful (or not).  cheers!!