The main reason is that I’ve been kept really busy with a project for my non-forex business, which has been keeping me snowed under.

As a result I’ve also not had any real time to look into anything forex related. Although I am currently testing out some systems and as soon as I have some information I will reveal any details here first.

Right, nose back to the grindstone. I hope you all have a great weekend.

Steve

However, I have added a sliding entry on stop orders into the news trading section of the EA so that it avoids false entries due to spread widening and this morning I noticed that there was a high impact news release on sterling and decided I owed my readers a video to demonstrate it in use.

I’ve uploaded it onto YouTube and you can find it here.

To cut a long story short.

85 seconds.

4 trades

£1980

Firstly I just received an email from someone asking about the triad system which is from Jason Fielder asking for my personal opinion on it.

Well, I actually bought the Triad system the first time around as it sounded like it made a lot of sense. Big mistake. I shall reproduce the response I just sent to the email. I have changed the name to protect the innocent.

“Hi Ferdinand Maximillian,
I bought the original Triad system when it came out about 12 months ago.
It’s absolute crap, don’t buy it.
The manuals look as though they have been put together by a twelve year old with cut and paste used to repeat everything several times in order to pad it out and make you feel as though you are getting something substantial.

The strategies are bad, basically placing stop orders to try and catch the market if it goes in a certain direction. It was impossible to backtest it. Within a few weeks of going live Jason himself was contradicting his own trading rules in order to try and make the strategy work after several losses. The support was appalling.

Stay well away from the guy he’s just one of the email marketing brigade.

Hope this helps!

Best regards Steve”
So, there you have it. Stay away from anything released by Jason Fielder in my opinion.

Onto other things! As readers are probably aware I’ve been running a test of Extreme Signals for the last month and it’s not been going brilliantly from my perspective. The problem is that the trades are announced within a ten minute window and as I’m often doing about twelve things at once I’m sometimes a few minutes late in seeing the email coming in and consequently have missed putting on some of the trades. I was also away for one of the weeks. I was chatting to a friend of mine about signal services and he was basically saying the same thing that he tried them once but he invariably managed to place the losing trades and miss the winning trades. This is pretty much what I have managed to do. Missing 260 pips on the week I was off and somewhere in the region of four or five other winners.

So, I’m going to cease my trial of Extreme Signals as I feel that I’m unfairly representing the service with my inability to sit still for ten minutes and just do one thing. My verdict then on Extreme Signals would have to be – inconclusive. If you are the sort of person that can sit in front of a screen religiously waiting for an email to action then it might work for you. Thanks to Extreme Signals for letting me run this trial.

I’ve been running a test of Primeval over the last month, there is a new version of Primeval coming out which hopes to address some of the issues within the current version. I shall be updating to the new version and removing the non working pairs and continuing the trial with this EA. You can follow the results on MyFxBook.

Finally, it’s actually beginning to look as though Behemoth is coming together. After tweaking the settings at the end of August it’s returned 12.58%, this is risking only 1% equity per trade. I’m still looking to improve it and hope to have the EA ready to replace Cast Iron Man in the new year. I have not as yet decided on the best method to offer it to subscribers. You can follow the performance of Behemoth here.

I’m also involved in a couple of other things at the moment, but they’re proper secret squirrel! All will be revealed in due course.

Hope your trading is going well.

Steve

After I installed it I ran a backtest on Jade FX – my play account broker. Now Jade’s spreads are amongst the lowest in the industry with EurUsd often around the 0.5 pip mark. However I discovered that Forex Bulletproof blows the account around the 6th May ( the time of the Greek crisis and the big fall in the Euro ). I told them this and I was told that they hadn’t seen this in backtesting and suggested I backtest another broker. Now, anyone with any experience on MT4 knows that most MT4 brokers use the MetaQuotes history and that the only thing that changes is the spread that your broker is currently offering at the time you start the backtest. So this is just silly.

I’d advise staying away from Bulletproof, if you really want to try a martingale system there are plenty of free ones around – Blessing 3 being about one of the best.

I’ve been running a trial on another EA this month, as I mentioned in previous posts. That EA was Primeval and here is the link in MyfxBook. So, how did I get on?

I decided to  trade all the pairs in the manual, even though I was advised that some of the pairs ( mainly GbpUsd and EurUsd ) were not currently traded live. The forward test confirmed that these two specifically are bad pairs to trade and for the duration of the trial were the only losing pairs.

I achieved a return of 4.27% for the month. However if you remove the GbpUsd and EurUsd results I achieved a 16.8% return. Which is a much more credible performance. There are some issues still with Primeval. It trades when major news has been released in the evening – might want to switch it off manually when that has happened and it also did on one occasion cause a platform crash, but overall I’m happy with the results and plan to carry out a live trial of the EA on my small account. I will of course keep people informed of the results.

It’s a pretty sophisticated piece of kit that I decided to write to help with manual trading. MT4 is an okay trading platform, it’s main strength lies in it’s easy coding and number of brokers that use it. However it’s nowhere near as good to use as something like Oanda for manual trading.

So, what I decided to do was to try and replicate the user friendliness of other platforms onto MT4 in order to allow trades to be placed and managed in a much simpler manner. The results are this EA.

So, what does it do? Basically it allows you to use three things on MT4 for various purposes. Horizontal lines, trend lines and text labels.

I’ve been using it today to do some scalping and also to trade the news, which it is brilliant at doing. I’m sure some of you out there have tried straddling the news releases before. It can be an absolute nightmare, the spread widening can mean that your stop orders get filled on both sides when they shouldn’t. You then get stressed trying to cancel your unwanted orders, trying to lock in profits and generally the whole thing ends up a disaster.

You might have heard the expression that the people that made the money out of the gold rush were the people that solds the tools. Well, that’s true but some people made money from the gold rush because they used the right tools. I’ve come to realise this week that having a solid tool to trade with makes the whole process so much easier.

Now I’m still working on the EA but here’s a breakdown of the functions I’m working on.

If anyone feels that they might be interested in this tool when I finish it ( and I won’t beat around the bush – I will be selling it ) then please feel free to contact me with suggestions.

Here’s the list of functions so far.

Prosper Bot EA
Here is a full list of the objects you can use and there uses.
Horizontal Lines
Place a horizontal line called “sup” – Place below price
This can be used in three ways and is determined by how you set the variables
TradeCrossHorizontal – Trade will be opened if the price crosses the line
TradeClosePastHorizontal – Trade will be opened if the price closes below the line
TradeBounceHorizontal – Trade will be opened if price crosses the line but closes above it

Place a horizontal line called “res” – Place above price
This can be used in three ways and is determined by how you set the variables
TradeCrossHorizontal – Trade will be opened if the price crosses the line
TradeClosePastHorizontal – Trade will be opened if the price closes above the line
TradeBounceHorizontal – Trade will be opened if price crosses the line but closes below it
Place a horizontal line called “bp” – Creates a pending buy stop order there
Place a horizontal line called “sp” – Creates a pending sell stop order there
Place a horizontal line called “sl” – Sets your stop loss, this line remains on screen so you can actively move your stop loss by simply dragging the line
Place a horizontal line called “tp” – Sets your take profit, this line remains on screen so you can actively move your take profit by simply dragging the line
Trend Lines
Place a trend line called “sellx” – Place below price
This can be used in two ways and is determined by how you set the variables
TradeCrossTrendLine – Trade will be opened if the price crosses the line
TradeClosePastTrendLine – Trade will be opened if the price closes below the line
Place a trend line called “buyx” – Place above price
This can be used in two ways and is determined by how you set the variables
TradeCrossTrendLine – Trade will be opened if the price crosses the line
TradeClosePastTrendLine – Trade will be opened if the price closes above the line
Place a trend line called “sellb” - Place below price
TradeBounceTrendLine – Trade will be opened if price crosses the line but closes below it
Place a trend line called “buyb” – Place above price
TradeBounceTrendLine – Trade will be opened if price crosses the line but closes above it
Place a trend line called “slsell” – Allows you to follow a trending trade using a trend line, as soon as the price crosses back across this trend line the trade will exit
Place a trend line called “slbuy” – Allows you to follow a trending trade using a trend line, as soon as the price crosses back across this trend line the trade will exit
Text Labels
Add a text label called “b” – Creates a buy order
Add a text label called “s” – Creates a sell order
Add a text label called “=” – Creates a straddle by placing a “sup” and a “res” line, the Buffer number of pips away from the current prices.
Add a text label called “cb” – Closes all buy orders
Add a text label called “cs” – Closes all sell orders
Add a text label called “c25″ – Closes 25% of your order
Add a text label called “c50″ – Closes 50% of your order
Add a text label called “d” – Deletes all Prosper objects from the charts
Add a text label called “dp” – Deletes any pending orders
Add a text label called “da” – Deleted ALL objects from the charts

There is also functionality in there to set a break even on trades, trail the stop automatically and close out a portion of the trade automatically. As you can see it’s pretty feature rich. All you need to bring to the table is the ability to trade!

However, that’s easily learned as you can use this EA within the strategy tester and practice trading! All the functions will work on visual mode backtesting, so you can practice trading to your hearts content. The trade history updates and you will even get a report out at the end with profit factor, drawdown and all the usual data. I’ve even added code to set the speed of the strategy tester visual mode to whatever speed you want and you can even have a different speed when you are in a trade to when you are out of a trade.

I’m currently beta testing this myself to try and iron out all the bugs and once I’m happy that it works well I’ll record some videos of it being used to give everyone an idea of how it works. I used it today for the news releases and I managed to set up straddle orders for four pairs each time in a little under 30 seconds. Which means that you can get them placed at the very last second.

Anyway that’s me for the weekend, it’s been an up and down week trading. Hopefully once August is out of the way trading will return to normal.

Have a good one!

Steve

I was away last week on a short break and so I was not able to place the trades on the trial account I’ve been running.

However I have got the details of the trades that were places and here they are.

So a nice total of 279.5 pips so far this month, which I’d be happy with for August considering it’s generally considered a bad trading month.

I spoke the other week about a few things I have been running trials of. One of these was a signal service. The company in question is WDFX. They provide an EA that copies their trades onto your MT4 account. I signed up in the middle of July and unfortunately seemed to catch them at a bad moment. So far I’ve had seven trades in total – two losers, three winners  and two break even. I did however miss one loser as I had accidentally disconnected the EA for a day. This doesn’t really match up the promise of their previous results, however it is one of the quieter times of year.

What does concern me about this service ( as well as the price which at £105 per month is pretty high )  is that I can’t for the life of me figure out the trading methodology. They claim to only take high probability trades and few of them. However I sat and watched them sit out of the market for an entire week when the bull run started in mid July. Once the run had lost pace, they suddenly started trading and promptly lost.

Given the time of year I would probably continue the trial and see if they can improve over the autumn, which are generally good trading months. However I’ve also been made aware of a new signal service this month, which is a much more reasonable $39 per month at the moment. Historic performance for these signals is good. I’m going to be starting trading this as a trial and will make my results public on MyFxBook. The site in question is www.extremesignals.com. They also appear to have had a poor August so it will be interesting to see if their prior months good performances can be replicated when August is over.

As I mentioned I’ve also been trialing a commercial EA this month. Results so far are looking promising and I’ve been in touch with the developer regarding some of the things I’ve noticed with some suggested ideas. I’m going to wait until the end of the month to announce the results on this one though. At that stage if I am happy with the performance I’m going to be putting it onto a live account.

Which brings me to the results of my polls from the other week. I think it was interesting to note that most people think I should not associate myself with products by affiliating. I’ll honour your request on this. I obviously am gaining a benefit from having blog readers and to violate that would be silly.

With regards to Cast Iron Man. It was good to see that the majority of the voters would be interested in a copy so I’ll bear this in mind. As I said in the original post, this would not be until the end of the year in order to honour the 12 month contract I have with Tradency. John raised some interesting questions asking what my angle was on this. I think it’s clear that I’m not trying to sell something that doesn’t work. Cast Iron Man is clearly having it’s problems but it’s also fairly clear to anyone that examines it’s trading profile on MyFxBook that there is definitely some mileage in taking the robot further. Trading only certain days or certain directions makes the robot far more profitable. I’ve been trying to work out why certain days may be more profitable than others but so far have come up with no clear cut answers. The robot would be sold “as is”. It’s pretty versatile in the way it can be used and having access to the source code would allow people to tinker with it and possibly even make it better.

Finally, Behemoth is still struggling. I do think this is down to it being August. There is not as much liquidity in the markets and it appears that other systems are struggling at the moment. I expect it to pick up next month. It’s good to see however that it is still only marginally down, managing to all but stay out of the ranging conditions. I expect it to leap into action and catch some good winners over the next few weeks as market conditions return to a more normal state.

Hope you are all doing well with your own trading

Steve

The first of these was the Oracle Trader from Dustin Pass. Now news trading is currently on my work in progress pile as I mentioned last month so I attended the first webinar this morning to take a look at the system and get a heads up on some of the questions I’ve raised with my own system.

The webinar didn’t go well technically and I was left with nothing to see or hear after about fifty minutes so I missed some of the relevant bits and didn’t get to ask my questions but I got a friend of mine who was in to ask them.

I was interested to know what brokers they used for trading news as I am well aware that it is vitally important to get the correct broker for news trading. The answer given to this question was that any broker is fine. The first red flag went up.

My next question was in regards to stop losses on trades. Again pretty important as the price can quickly go against you and lose you a lot of money. It’s also important to know your stop loss for position sizing. The answer to this question was that they didn’t use a stop loss as the price generally goes in the direction you expect!

I thought therefore that is was kind of poetic that Eur/Jpy went in the opposite direction to the direction Oracle Trader decided when they carried out their live news trade at 13:15 ( Uk time ).

The final red flag for this offer for me was the $2500 price tag and the lack of a refund. There answer to this? The software works, the strategy works therefore there is no need for a refund. This to me screams, “don’t do it” more than anything. If you truly believe in your software, why would you not offer a refund?

The second thing I was looking at this week was Forex Supersonic as I have spent a lot of time looking at London breakout strategies myself in the past. So I forked out on this and set up some backtests. Here is the backtest, using the settings from the manual, on GbpUsd over ten years.

As you can see it has been curve fitted to recent history. That’s all I have to say on that one. Refund time!

Get yourself a nice cup of tea and put your feet up. It’s the weekend!

My Behemoth test crashed this morning and no  matter what I do I cannot get the FxOpen installation of MT4 to restart. I’ve been in the process of setting up a new trial of the EA, using Alpari and the latest version of the software along with the optimised settings I’ve been working on. Here is the link, I will be adding more pairs over the next week.

I’ve also been busy working on trying to determine if the backtests for Behemoth are valid or if the interpolation of one minute bars on pip range charts in effect makes them pointless. The new version of Behemoth only ever trades on the beginning of a new bar and the nature of the strategy is such that I am not concerned about interpolation affecting the entry. So, from my perspective there were really two main things to test.

Firstly if each of my pip range bars contained enough individual one minute bars to render the interpolation errors meaningless due to the scale of things. In effect is interpolation of one minute bars the quantum theory of my particle physics so to speak. I’m glad to say that each of my bars contains dozens and in some cases hundreds on one minute bars – which I established by measuring the duration of the pip range bars. So, a tick there.

Next I wanted to establish if it was possible that the interpolation problem was having any great impact on the trailing stop that Behemoth was using. I trail the price by 20 pips once it’s got up to 20 pips profit. So, I modified the EA to also look at the high or low ( depending on trade direction ) of the previous one minute bar and to use that if it was more appropriate, thus removing interpolation from this part of the equation. I’m glad to say that this didn’t noticeably effect the backtests either. So, another tick for Behemoth.

I also had a really weird experience this week. It’s been rather a low week for me ( which I’ll get onto later ) and I was just sat wondering where to go with my trading next when up on my iPhone popped the word of the day from Dictionary.com. Behemoth – I kid you not. Take a look here.

Now, I’m not one for signs or portents or that kind of thing being from a scientific and very rational background. However, up until that point my iPhone had never, nor has it since popped up a word of the day from my Dictionary.com app. Weird!

So, where did this frustration I was feeling come from? Mainly from having to deal with FxPro, the broker I was running Cast Iron Man on. I decided this week after yet another week of requotes and old ticks that I had finally had enough of trying to use FxPro as a broker. So, I’ve closed down my live trading with Cast Iron Man. At the moment I don’t know where I will trade Cast Iron Man on MT4 or even if I will. I have several other projects on the go and might decide to place the money elsewhere. I feel that I’ve proved that Cast Iron Man works. In nine months of live trading version three generated around a 90% return – although admittedly for the last seven months it has been treading water. However I do believe that a lot of this was down to missed trade entries on FxPro.

Just to throw some salt into the wounds FxPro insisted I use the same debit card to make my withdrawal as I had used to make my deposit. Now, the card I used was an old card, long since destroyed and I don’t have the debit card number. I spent a whole day arguing the toss with them and actually threatened to go to CySec in the end to get them to release my money.

I am however still running the install of MT4 that that feeds Tradency with Cast Iron Man trades and will continue to do so. I am contracted to do that until the end of the year. At this point I think I will switch it to ZipSignals, who I have so far been very impressed with and I prefer the up front subscription model they offer. However whether I offer Cast Iron Man or not is a different matter. If Behemoth is the better performer then it would be silly to continue to offer Cast Iron Man.

As a consequence I am weighing up whether or not to sell Cast Iron Man to the public as well as I firmly believe that from my own trading perspective Behemoth will replace it in my own portfolio. However unlike commercial EA sellers I would sell the EA uncompiled. So, you would be able to see how it works and modify it. Who knows maybe even make it better! However I will only do this if enough people are interested in buying it, as obviously the I.P. is not worth releasing unless the compensation is suitable. Also, I will not be selling it until the new year as it’s not fair on Tradency. So, here’s a poll for people to vote on.

On other trading angles, I was offered the opportunity to test a well known commercial EA this week, and blog about my experiences. I’ve set up the test on Jade FX and in due course will reveal my results and findings. Only through the readership of this blog has it been possible to secure this kind of a deal as it’s not a cheap EA and I’ve been allowed to test drive it for free. So thanks again to all my subscribers and readers, you’ve made this possible. Hopefully the EA will work out and I can give you a recommendation for a commercial EA to try out. This raised an interesting dilemma for me as I was also offered the option to sell it as an affiliate. So far I have tried to avoid affiliate marketing, however it made me think. If I found a decent commercial EA, that I truly believed in, should I benefit from telling other people? So, here’s poll number two!

Almost, finally! I’m also running a trial of a company that provide a signal service. They use a trade copier to place their manual trades on your MT4 account. Their historic trading data looks good so fingers crossed. So far they’ve placed five trades on my account. Two winners, two losers and one break even, so not an auspicious start. They charge around £100 a month for this signal service. I’ll give them to the end of the month.

And last but certainly not least. A quick viewing of the Oracle Trader, that landed in my inbox this week, reminded me that I had always planned to write a robot that could trade the news successfully. Since I’ve been working on a velocity indicator I figured that I would get that finished and then see if I could combine it with a news indicator to trade the news releases automatically. Here are a few screen shots of the velocity indicator in action. As you can see if appears to be a leading indicator and not a lagging indicator picking up on some nice moves ( not news related ) last night before they happened. I shall continue to work on this over the next few weeks. As I can’t backtest it it will need some careful calibration.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

I’ve come across a nice tool in the last few days that allows backtest reports to be consolidated. In the next few days I’ll post some backtests of the new conservative Behemoth consolidated across the three currency pairs I’m using. You can pick up the tool here.

I did notice a bug in Behemoth the other day that was preventing the robot taking any long positions. Unfortunately when I installed the new version I set it to a 2% risk instead of the 1% risk I had been using and I promptly suffered a 27 pip loss on a Gbp/Usd spike that has been attributed to a fat finger trader. So the current 5.81% equity increase should be slightly higher if this is factored into things.

My trial of ZipSignals continues as a method of delivering the signals once I am happy to release it for trading.

Steve