EA Reviews

The official launch of the latest commercial Forex robot, Pip Android, is now upon us. According to the developers, it is not due to launch until 9AM EST, which is about 7 hours from now. But I just visited the website, and it appears that you can actually go ahead and order it right now. I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or what. In any event, the price is $127. As mentioned before, I will hold off purchasing at least a few days and see what others think about this one.

One thing about Pip Android that is very encouraging (if it is indeed legitimate) is the live trading results they have posted on their front page. They’ve set up two live accounts (with starting balances of $1,000 and $5,000), and the results are updated every 15 minutes. The $1,000 account has increased its equity to $1,719.78 after one month of trading. That’s an incredible 72% account increase in one month. The $5,000 account is sitting at $6,233.06 for a 24.6% increase after trading for about a month and a half. It appears the $5,000 account has not taken a trade for about a week, so I am not certain if they are still actively trading that account. I am not sure why there is such a discrepancy in results between the accounts. That’s something that will have to be determined after purchasing and getting more details. I did notice that the $5,000 account only took trades on one pair (AUD/NZD) and always used the same lot size whereas the smaller account traded on five pairs and varied its lot sizes. So clearly there appears to be some settings differences in play.

If you are interested in learning more and possibly getting a copy for yourself, click here:

www.pipandroid.com

Once you begin to get some results, please let us know how you fare, and we’ll share with our members.

Today I want to take a closer look at the HiRIDER EA, which was the second place finisher overall in The Forex Robot World Cup that I have been talking about for some time here on the blog. During the competition, it increased it’s initial deposit from $1,000 to $1,881.19, an increase of $881.19 or 88.11%.

Unlike the LMD-Multicurrency EA that made trades on many currency pairs, the HiRIDER robot only took trades on the EUR/USD pair during the competition. That said, it took a bunch of ‘em — 277 to be exact! At an average of 6.3 trades per day over the course of the competition, it was one of the busier robots in the field. In short, you won’t have to wait long to see this robot do its thing.

HiRIDER doesn’t appear to restrict its trading times to any certain period of the day or night, as it registered trades at pretty much all different times. I noticed that it quite often would open up as many as 10 different positions at one time (or within a minute or so of other trades). When many trades were opened, they were invariably in the same direction, but every so often it would only open two trades, one in each direction. I found that curious and will be interested to learn more about the logic of this robot once it is released. HiRIDER also has built-in money management capabilities, as evidenced by the varying order sizes used throughout the competition.

This EA has an extremely high winning percentage, winning 97.8% of the time. It had only five losses and one breakeven trade out of 277 positions taken. That’s amazing any way you cut it. The way it accomplishes this feat is by having its SL level much, much farther out than its TP level. The TP level appears to be fixed at 12 pips, while the SL level was about 100 pips much of the time. That’s a lousy risk-reward ratio and something I would typically frown upon, but this EA won so often, it really didn’t matter. Its largest win was $7.75, and the largest loss was $33.63.

If you don’t like drawdowns, this EA is your friend. It recorded an outstanding 3.26% drawdown over the two-month competition, making it fourth best in that category among the 24 finalists. As you see from the chart above, the equity curve was beautiful — nice and smooth. That’s good on the heart! Can it continue to do as well in future trading? No way to know for certain, but we’ll certainly be testing it with our fingers crossed. Of the top three robots in the competition, this is the one I am currently most excited about.

The top three robots go on sale in just 10 days! Go to www.forex-robot-world-cup.com for more info.

The Forex Robot World Cup folks today released a 40-page special report that further explains their mission in holding the competition as well as what they hope to ultimately accomplish. It was a good read, and I would recommend you visiting their site to download a copy (it is in PDF format). Here is just a snippet that I found amusing (but very true) on page 29:

“Someone once said that trading is like being pregnant. You are either pregnant or you’re not! There is no middle ground…. an EA either works with real money or it doesn’t.”

Another interesting thing mentioned in the report is that the FRWC is planning “a huge surprise” on February 16 (launch day) that will “undoubtedly tremble the automated FX industry.” Whoa. I’m not sure what in the world that could be, but they’ve definitely got my interest. For the rest, you’ll have to visit their site and download your own copy: www.forex-robot-world-cup.com.

I just got wind of the next robot to come down the pipeline. This one is called Pip Android. Supposedly it boasts the following features:

• Live trading results on vendor website updated every 10-15 minutes
• Works in any kind of market (ranging, sideways, choppy, trending)
• Profit and drawdown protection system
• Compatible with all brokers
• Fully automated and manual trading options
• Easy 5-minute installation program

Looking at the Pip Android website, if it can be trusted, they have a live test running that shows about a 65% profit in one month. Another live test shows a 25% increase over about a month and a half. Presumably they are using different settings as the trades taken are not the same.

This robot launches officially on February 9 at 9 AM EST. I may not jump to buy this one right away but may wait and see what the early birds think about it and how their testing goes. If we do buy a copy, we’ll issue a report on it here on the blog.

In the meantime, you can sign up on their website for a chance to win a free copy. Go here:

www.pipandroid.com

Today we take a closer look at the LMD-Multicurrency EA, the top performing robot in the recently concluded Forex Robot World Cup. During the competition, it increased it’s initial deposit from $1,000 to $2,456.84, an increase of $1,456.84 or 145.6%.

The LMD-Multicurrency robot is aptly named, as it made trades on eight different currency pairs during the competition. They included: USD/JPY, USD/CHF, GBP/USD, AUDUSD, EUR/GBP, EUR/CHF, EUR/USD, and USD/CAD.

In all, the robot took 96 trades over the two-month period, for an average of 2.2 trades per day, so it is a fairly active EA. When trade conditions were met for a certain currency pair, it would appear from the trade log that a position was opened at midnight GMT. And if positions did not hit the stop loss or take-profit levels, however those are determined, trades were automatically closed out at midnight GMT of the next day (or on Monday if the trade was opened on Friday). This means each trade was held for a maximum of 24 hours.

The EA does not appear to utilize a predetermined, pip-based SL or TP, as the loss and profit levels varied quite a bit. Money management is built-in, as the lot sizes were gradually scaled up as the balance on the account grew.

Breaking down the trades, the EA had 50% winners with 48 wins and 48 losses. The average win was $156.00, while the average loss was $125.67. The largest win was $544.44, and the largest loss was $311.64. Maximum drawdown at any one time was a little over 34%, which means you’ll need a pretty strong stomach to weather the volatility that accompanies this EA. But, at the end of the day, the profits are incredible, and that’s what really matters.

This and the other top performing robots from The Forex Robot World Cup will be available soon (February 16). We’re looking forward to it! Click here for more info.

The Forex Robot World Cup produced some very interesting results (see graph at bottom of post). Of the 24 EAs that were entered in the two-month competition, 10 of them finished with a positive return, and five of those recorded a double digit gain or better. In particular, there were three robots that seemed to rise up above the rest of the competition. They were:

As you can see, all three of the above EAs showed outstanding results. If I had to pick an early favorite out of the three, I would probably favor the #2 ranked robot, HiRIDER, simply because it showed a much more steady growth during the competition and boasted an incredibly low drawdown (3.26%!). But the results speak for themselves, and each of these look like real money makers. The great news is that all three of these outstanding robots will be available for sale in just 13 days on February 16! I believe all three EAs will be sold as a package deal, and given the potential they have to really boost your trading profits, I imagine they won’t be sold too cheaply. I don’t think they have settled on the price yet, but I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

As mentioned previously, we will purchase the FRWC EA package the day it comes out and will begin forward testing right away. All the results will be posted here for you to see. I am hopeful that we will see similar results given that the FRWC’s tests were done on live accounts!

For more info, check out The Forex Robot World Cup’s site. They are currently featuring an interview with Matthew Navie, V.P. of Institutional Sales & Business Development at FXCM.

If you’re anything like me, you get tired of EA vendors manipulating their results or “curve fitting” their robot so that it does well for a specific window of backtest data. Of course then those are usually the only results they share with you, neglecting to mention that the robot loses money most of the rest of the time. That’s one of the primary reasons I began this blog. I wanted to test some of the more promising EAs in a forward test environment for myself and for all of you to see as well. Most of the time, the forward tests reveal that the EA is nowhere near as capable as the vendor’s hype suggested. Regrettably, the vast majority of the commercial EAs are junk.

Well, a few weeks ago I came across something very interesting. It was an independent competition for EA developers, called The Forex Robot World Cup (FRWC). Last fall, EA developers around the world were invited by the FRWC to submit their very best EAs in the competition and vie for substantial cash prizes. And I do mean substantial. The top-performing robot takes home a cool $100,000. Yes, you read that right. $100 grand!

Now, why would they offer such an unreal amount of money for a few hundred lines of MQL code? It’s simple, really. They rightly figured that they had to dangle the big bucks in front of the world’s top EA developers to get them to put forth their very best effort and create EAs that could actually beat the market on a regular basis and consistently grow accounts over time. It worked. There were 329 EAs submitted to the competition. The FRWC then put the entire batch of expert advisers through some preliminary testing, eventually narrowing the field to what they believed were the 24 robots with the most promise. These were the 24 that would go on to the live testing phase to determine the best of the best.

For the live testing phase, each of the 24 robots were placed on a real money, live trading account (funded with $1,000). The robots were then placed completely on autopilot to navigate the Forex market on their own for a period of two months (December-January). At no time during the live testing phase were any of the EAs tampered with. The developers were not allowed to change any code or any settings for the duration of the test. It was truly a hands-off experiment.

Throughout the competition, the Forex community was able to visit the FRWC website and keep tabs on how the robots were doing. Results for each EA were updated every 15 minutes. Everything was posted as it happened, right there for the Forex world to see. How is that for transparency? Consequently, the results of this competition can be trusted. Now that’s something refreshing in this industry!

Visit The Forex Robot World Cup website to get more info and to watch a video that they put together about the details of the competition. I will post more about the competition results soon. Stay tuned!

You probably wondered what happened to me and EA-Reviews.com. Well, I’ve been on about a 6-month hiatus to do a little “soul searching.” After some rather poor live robot tests, I became pretty disenchanted with EAs, to be quite honest, and so I have been trading the Forex manually for the past several months with mixed results.

Here’s the usual routine. A Forex robot vendor creates a glitzy marketing page that explains how his or her robot gained xxx% in the past month or year or whatever. Amazingly, this vehicle to riches only costs $97 or $149 or something ridiculously cheap for such a sure thing. So I buy a copy to test, and amazingly it backtests very well for the most part. A live demo test also shows promise, and I really begin to get my hopes up. So I then move the EA to a live real account to begin the journey to financial independence. Only natural, right? That’s when for some odd reason, it just stops working as well. Either it doesn’t take as many trades as it should or it has much larger or more frequent losses than ever before. The end result is that it either loses money or simply isn’t worth the hassle for the little that it earns. This scenario has played our for me more often than I care to tell you. So, you can hopefully understand my discouragement. That said, it was good for me to take a little break, hit the reset button, and reevaluate where we are.

I have not given up hope that it is possible for an EA to be very profitable in the Forex market. Deep down I still think that if a human can do it, a robot can also be programmed to do it. I am not going to revisit any of the EAs that I had been reviewing (EuroBlaster, Forex Derivative, Forex Grid Bot, and Robominer), as I don’t believe they are the “answer” for various reasons. But I was encouraged a few weeks ago to learn about the Forex Robot World Cup, which was a competition held from December to January to find the world’s best EA. There were some very promising results, so I will be focusing my efforts for the foreseeable future on the robots that did well in that competition. Stay tuned!

I apologize for less frequent posts this week. Things have been extremely busy both at my full-time job and in my personal life, so I’ve not had much time to write here. As a consequence, I will combine the weekly wrapup of the systems we’re testing and trading in this one entry.

Forex Derivative
It was a mixed bag this week for our two Forex Derivative demo accounts. The FxPro account did well and was up $284.36, or 8.6%, bringing its account equity to 3,579.30, or a 19.3% gain since the account began one month ago. The Alpari-US account didn’t have such a nice week and continues to disappoint. For the week it lost $316.71, or 11.0%. This account now sits at $2,554.63 in equity, or a 14.8% loss since the account was opened on June 4.

EuroBlaster
It was a great week for our EuroBlaster demo account. First and foremost, it was able to get itself out of the rather large drawdown that it had been fighting since a June 12 trade that went against it. Then it also made a positive trade or two. The account now stands at $6,092.40 in equity, which represents a 21.8% gain since it began on June 8. There is one position open, currently with a drawdown of $154.00. I have now lowered the risk that the EA is using. I am risking just 2% with a lot size of 0.1 and maxtrades of 1 as well.

The Robominer
The Robominer had a great week. As I have stated before, I *really* like this robot, and this week showed why. This week the EA added another $67.37 in equity after it was able to close out a whole host of open trades. The equity balance is now $3,180.35, representing a 6% increase since the account began on May 21. This thing just chugs along making a steady stream of small wins. It’s conservative — but effective!

Forex Grid Bot
I blew it with Forex Grid Bot this week. I took down the demo account and began a live account on Tuesday with $1,000. It was able to close out its first trade on Tuesday with a profit, but then the trouble began. The GBY/JPY pair decided to make a steady play to the north and never retraced enough for either of my two open positions to close out a profit. Ås the price continued up, I foolishly went against my plan and removed my stoploss at $150. My thought was that the immediate 1-hour trend would bring the price back down to a point where I could get out of the trades without an issue. Well, the price has ranged since Tuesday and has not allowed me to exit those trades yet. I am presently down about $275 between the two positions and have turned off the EA to manage them on my own. In retrospect, I should have been firm with the stoploss I set ($150) and just taken my lumps. So depending on what happens with these trades, I will be back soon with trading results on either the demo account or the live account.

It wasn’t a good week for the EuroBlaster demo as it struggled all week to recover from the trade taken on Friday, June 12. This week the drawdown on that trade got as large as $2,500 at times, or almost half our account. The trade came within 29 pips of being stopped out before heading back up. At week’s end, that trade is still in drawdown by $1,122, and while the trade is closer to the take profit than the stoploss at this point, it is very much anyone’s guess how this trade will end up.

I should note that Patrick sometimes does not let his EuroBlaster trade on Fridays. Obviously if I had restricted mine from doing the same on June 12, I wouldn’t be facing this current drawdown. It sounds like that may be the safer way to trade this EA, and thus I have set the “Trade_On_Friday’ parameter to “false” going forward.

Also, I have changed the “RiskPercent” setting from 5.0 to 2.0 going forward. Using 5% still leaves you open to too much drawdown when a trade doesn’t go the way you intended (and believe me, it will happen eventually). So, to review, for my demo I am using the conservative preset with MM turned on, the risk percent set to 2.0, and no trades on Friday.