EA Reviews

The developers of Forex Pip Bot recently contacted me and encouraged me to test and review their product. As I do not conduct backtests (always leery of curve fitting), I have placed the robot on a 30-day demo account to test it. Forex Pip Bot runs on either the AUD/NZD or EUR/CHF currency pairs on the 1H timeframe. I will have more analysis of the EA after I have seen it run for a while.

Forex Pip Bot went on sale today, but you may want to hold off buying until you see what our independent tests show. They are using ClickBank, so the product does have a 60-day money back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied.

Ok, time for a few updates on our robot tests.

Forex Set and Forget

It appears that the GoMarkets demo accounts are only good for 30 days at a time. I found this out the hard way, as my Forex Set and Forget robot stopped working a few days ago. That said, it did very well in the first month, grabbing a profit of 27.61%. This was version 1.09 of the robot. It is my understanding that version 2.0 will be released very shortly with several improvements. Tony Manso (the developer) has kindly agreed to forward us a demo copy to test and review once it is available. We will then put that version to the test and see if it can do as well or even better over the course of a month’s trading. If you are wishing to purchase this robot, you will need to wait, as Tony has temporarily made it unavailable until version 2 is released. We will let you know as soon as it is available once again.

EuroBlaster

The EuroBlaster demo has gotten off to a shaky start. It has won 73% of its trades, but as mentioned previously, because of the still less than ideal risk-reward ratio (6:1 in my demo), it must have a greater winning percentage than that (over 85%) to be profitable long-term. In several instances, the robot has entered its trades at the worst possible times (very top of an uptrend or very bottom of a downtrend). The account is currently down about 15%. I will just let it continue to run and see if it can trade its way out of the hole it has created. This demo is on IBFX, so I will have more than 30 days to see what it can do.

Forex Overdrive

Forex Overdrive has done very well thus far, winning all 28 of the trades it has taken. It is up 28.9% in just about two weeks of trading. The thing to keep in mind with this EA is that when it does finally get a loss (and it will), it will be a large one and will knock the equity level down a ways. I am currently running it at the 5% risk level, which I consider a prudent level. The key will be avoiding too many losses in row or getting into a trade that won’t hit TP or SL but just languishes for days or a week or more with no end in sight.

Forex Revolution

I was approached by the Forex Revolution team about testing their robot, which I agreed to do. But I have had the robot set up properly for two weeks and have not seen it take one trade. The manual says to be patient, but I have no interest in an EA that trades that infrequently. You do have to be in the market some to make money, after all.

New Grid-Based Bot

I am in the process of testing a new version of an existing grid-based robot that may very well be the most powerful and capable EA I have ever worked with. I have been very impressed with it so far and have gotten excellent results. I will be introducing this EA to you probably by this weekend sometime, so keep your eyes open.

In my never-ending quest to find expert advisors that actually live up to their advertising and produce real profits, I came across another interesting candidate a few weeks ago. It is an EA called “Forex Set and Forget” by a fellow named Tony Manso.

I’ll get right to the part you are wondering about. I traded this on a demo account on the default settings for the past month and managed a profit of 29.32% on my account. I consider that impressive!

Now that I have your attention, I’ll give you a few more details. Forex Set and Forget is a trend-trading robot that bases its trades on the AME Support Resistance Custom Indicator, another of Tony’s creations, which he also includes as part of the package when buying the robot. The robot trades on five different currency pairs: EUR/USD, USD/CHF, EUR/GBP, GBP/JPY, and CHF/JPY and averages one to two trades per day.

The thing I like most about this robot is that it uses something almost no other robot uses: a proper risk-reward ratio! It actually only won about 50% of its trades, but because it uses a proper risk-reward ratio, it was able to make an excellent profit for the month. It achieves this nice ratio by opening up three positions. Once the trade has reached a certain level of profit, one of the positions is taken off the table and banked. The stop loss is then moved to ensure a profitable trade no matter what occurs from that point forward. If the trade reaches the next take profit level, the second position is removed and banked and the stop loss is once again moved to lock in profits. The third and final position is closed out once the final target is reached. That is outstanding trade management, my friends.

My goal for the longest time has been to find one or more EAs that would allow me to consistently make around 20% on my account per month. While I have only tested it one month, I am optimistic that Forex Set and Forget could be one of the few EAs out there that can accomplish such a goal. At this point I am going to add it to the official recommended EA list. We will continue testing at least for one more month. If it still does well, we will consider opening a live account with it.

For more information or to purchase: Forex Set and Forget Website

I recently acquired a copy of a new robot called Forex Overdrive for testing and review.

The first thing I noticed is that from a settings perspective, it reminded me a lot of the early Euro-Blaster versions. I asked the author about this, and he said it is indeed similar. Specifically, it has a default take profit level of 25 pips and a stop loss level of 328 pips. These can be modified, of course, but that would likely take a bite out of the robot’s winning percentage. With such a poor risk-reward ratio, the robot has to win around 93% of the time just to break even! That’s awfully high, and I have my doubts as to whether that could be sustained for any substantial length of time.

Just like the early Euro-Blaster versions, my guess is that this robot can occasionally churn out some very impressive results, maybe winning 20, 30, or even 40 or more trades in a row. That makes for a nice looking chart. But then comes the dreaded loss. In an early test, my demo account made a 15% gain in about 15 days before it hit a stop loss sending it back to about a 1.5% gain. Unfortunately that is just the nature of the robot. There is a chance that you could run off an impressive streak of wins and build up your account quickly, but there is equally a chance that you could hit two or three (gasp) stop losses in a row and really do some damage to your account.

The risk can be lowered via the settings so that it trades smaller lot sizes, but of course that limits the amount you will make during the stretch of wins. Like all robots, you would need to find a risk level you are comfortable with.

I’ve begun another demo account on GoMarkets. I am trading on the EUR/USD and GBP/USD pairs, which is what the creator recommends. I have set the risk level to 5% (the default is 15%). Let’s see how it does…

For further information: Forex Overdrive Website

It recently came to my attention that a new version of Euro-Blaster had been released. I have always been a fan of the robot and of its creator, Patrick Doucette, who I have gotten to know fairly well through many email exchanges.

My biggest knock against Euro-Blaster when it first came out was that the risk-reward ratio was so extreme. I believe the recommended stoploss with the initial version was between 300 and 500 pips while the take profit was still only 10-20 pips or so. The robot would sail along great for a month or two, but then it would hit one of those monstrous stoplosses and knock your account way down.

This newest iteration, version 7.11, contains better entry logic, allowing for a more reasonable risk-reward ratio. While the R:R is still not perfect (now somewhere between 5:1 to 10:1 depending on your settings), it’s vastly improved. Patrick’s back and forward tests look good, so I thought it merited more testing here at EA-Reviews.com.

I have set up two demos (same settings) with different brokers, as Patrick says you can get different results with various brokers. Below are the results from the accounts so far. I will post the settings for the accounts in a later message.

For more information: Euro-Blaster Website

I will make this short and to the point as I am late in getting it posted. Basically, after testing all the FRWC robots extensively, there was only one of them that I would recommend even thinking about using, and that is HiRider. I could not manage to maintain a profitable account with any of the other FRWC offerings. In short, I couldn’t replicate the results that the FRWC published during its contest, which was very disappointing, especially given the high price of the robot package and the fact that these robots were supposed to be different (they were supposed to “really work”). While HiRider has the potential to be profitable, even it has to be traded very conservatively. Frankly, I feel there are better robots out there, so I will not be putting it on a live account at this time.

For those of us who opted not to get refunds for the FRWC package, I am hopeful that they will include at no additional charge the new robots developed for their 2nd competition. The submission phase for the new contest began on May 6. Visit our blog often to stay abreast of the latest FRWC developments and release dates.

Since my FXCM demo accounts expired, I opened an IamFX demo account to run the newest version of HiRider, named HiRider Advanced. So far (after three days) it has won two of two trades for a grand total of $1.28 in profits on a $3,000 account. Pretty slow start. I am wondering if the new “advanced” version of this bot takes safer (and thus fewer) trades. Hopfully we will see more action on it next week. At some point next week I will set it up my myfxbook account so you can follow along as it trades. I decided at this time not to open up new demos on the other FRWC bots, as I still feel HiRider showed the most promise of all of ‘em.

In other testing, PipAndroid made up some of its recent losses and is now in profit about $95 on a $3,000 account. This is after about 7 weeks, so again nothing to write home about there. I will probably remove it from testing after another week or so if it doesn’t really make some nice gains.

If you have any robots that you think are worth our testing, please contact us and let us know. Trade well, everyone.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. By day I work for a company that produces annual reports for other firms, and this is by far our busiest time of year. Thus it leaves me little time to worry about my Forex trading. Now you know why I like to use EAs!

I noticed early this week that my FRWC robots were “frozen”. Rather, I should say the MT4 platform on which I was running them was frozen. All of them were showing “Invalid account” when trying to log in. So I contacted FXCM, which I was using to try to replicate the environment that the FRWC used for testing, and they informed me that their demo accounts are only valid for 30 days. Say what?!? Needless to say, I am a little bummed about that because to keep testing I will have to open new accounts now. I wanted to have some “history” to show for each of these robots, but I guess that can’t be done at FXCM. So I think I will open demo accounts at IamFX. They’ve got a low spread, and they aren’t handcuffed by the NFA nonsense, so all the bots should work on their platform.

Looking at the 30 days I was able to test, my pre-testing prediction held true. HiRider was the only robot of the bunch to show any real promise and would be the only one I would consider putting real money on at this point (though I still recommend more testing). It ended up the month with a bit more than 12% in profit. No, it’s nothing like the 40%+ that FRWC showed in their contest (where they were using unreasonable lot sizes), but that is nothing to sneeze at by any means. If you compound 10-12% per month, you will be rich sooner rather than later.

The other FRWC robots didn’t fare as well, ranging from 6-18% in losses for the month. The good news is that the FRWC is continuing to tweak the settings of the robots so that they are optimized for current trading conditions. They have released new settings for some of the robots and a completely new version of HiRider, which is what I will be using with the new demos.

The other robot I have been testing (Pip Android) has regressed, losing all of the profit it had gained. It is now just under break-even after a month and a half of trading.

Last week ended on something of a down note for the FRWC robot tests, with all of them except one (HiRider) currently being in some degree of drawdown. Here is a brief rundown:

Fusion V — Struggling with a series of GBP/JPY trades that it opened last week, this bot is currently carrying about a $200 drawdown and will need for GBP/JPY to sell off a bit to be able to get out of these trades with success. The equity on the account (including the current drawdown) is $950, so the account is down about 5% at the moment. Hopefully it can bounce back this week.

HiRider — As predicted before testing ever began, this EA has been the best of the bunch so far. There is only one trade open at the moment, and the account is sitting at a gain of around 8% so far. As mentioned previously, I have lowered the risk as much as possible, trading a lot size of 0.01 per $1,000. So far, so good.

LMD Multicurrency — This one has been a mixed bag. It wins some and then loses some. Thus far it is down about 4.5% from when we began the demo. Amazing that it could do so well in the competition and then be such a bust afterward. Just shows that two months isn’t enough time to demo a robot.

Super Volcano – Nothing much to write home about with this robot either. It is stuck in one losing trade right now, and the account is down about 11% overall.

I still think HiRider and Fusion (in that order) are the best of the bunch. And as I said early on, even if only one of these robots gets a consistent return month after month of between 10-25%, it will have been well worth the purchase. HiRider is getting close to that 10% mark, and Fusion has quite a lot of catch up to do.

For anyone that might have missed it, I should mention that the FRWC did release updates to Fusion and LMD late last week. I am running the latest version on my demo accounts.

And in case anyone is following the Pip Android demo, it has been profitable, but not exactly overwhelming. It’s winning the vast majority of its trades, but it just doesn’t take that many. The account is currently up about 3%.

Just a quick heads-up to any of you who may still be on the fence about getting the FRWC Royal Trader package — they are taking the product off the shelves in about 22 hours. They said it would only be available for a limited time, so I guess they were serious.

I am still firmly in the testing phase of these robots so the jury is still out in my opinion as to whether they are the real deal long-term. But given that they do offer a 6o-day money back guarantee, I guess I would advise you to grab a copy if you were still interested because you won’t have that opportunity after tomorrow. Here’s the link again:

www.forex-robot-world-cup.com