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.

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.

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

www.forex-robot-world-cup.com

PIP ANDROID

Pip Android is not a very active robot, but it has at least been profitable overall. It only had seven trades this week, six of which had closed by the end of trading on Friday. Of those six trades, five were closed in profit, and the one loser only lost $2.08. The one trade left open is currently down $22.00. Hopefully it will be able to clean that one up Sunday or Monday.

One thing I like about this robot is that it has a definite stoploss — it’s around 40 pips. Plus it only opens one position at a time. So you never have to worry about opening up your trading platform and seeing this robot with a drawdown of 30-40% at any one time. In this way it is conservative and safe.

So far, in closed trades, the robot is up 2.53% after two a half weeks. So you’re looking at about 1% per week. No, it’s not going to make you rich overnight, but as I said, at least it is positive and seems fairly low risk. I am running it using the “medium risk” settings recommended by the developer.

FUSION V

The Fusion demo had a bit of a scare this week. It opened ten positions using the HiRider algorithms, and the currency went severely against those positions for a good part of the week. At one point the equity on the account got down to around $700. Fortunately, though, EUR/USD finally turned and headed back up and allowed it to close out the positions in profit. The account now sits at $1,070.14 for a total account gain of 7% after a week and a half. That’s a pretty impressive gain any way you look at it.

Note that this demo is using a fixed lot size of 0.02 lots for all trades. This is exactly what the FRWC’s current live test is using. I wanted to run an identical test to make sure that I am able to get the same results that they are. So far the trades and results seem to be the same. Even at 0.02 lots, though, it’s important to remember that if all ten HiRider trade positions go against you all the way to stoploss, you will take a pretty heavy hit to the account. This is one reason I use 0.01 lot sizes for my actual HiRider demo account (see below).

HIRIDER

My HiRider demo continues to move right along with success. So far only one loss since we began running it a couple weeks ago. To date, the account is up to $1,067.81 for a total gain of 6.8% so far. As mentioned elsewhere, I have changed the settings so that it is now trading a fixed lot size of 0.01 lots per trade. This is the most conservative setting for the robot, and I think it is the only realistic way to trade real money on it. The FRWC recommends 0.01 lot size per $1,000 in the account, so that is what we will follow. So far, so good!

LMD-MULTICURRENCY

This demo was restarted at the beginning of this past week to again use more conservative settings that are recommended by the FRWC. I have turned money management off and am trading a fixed lot size of 0.05 lots per trade. So far it has fared pretty well. The first week saw a 3.5% gain on the account after managing six wins and seven losses. Stay tuned!

SUPER VOLCANO

Well, this robot seems to be the dud of the group. It has taken a grand total of ONE trade over the first two and a half weeks of the demo. That one trade was a loss, and the account is presently down a little over 4%.  I have reviewed the settings to see if there was something I needed to adjust to get it to trade more often, but I did not notice any problems there. If anyone is getting more trades with this robot, please send me your settings as well as who you are using for a broker.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that I was having trouble downloading the EAs using Firefox on my VPS. I wasn’t getting an error message, but the file was nowhere to be found after downloading. When I tried it on Internet Explorer, I would get an error message which was something to the effect that it couldn’t save the file and that I should check to make sure my hard drive had not run out of room and that the user had the right permissions or something. I thought that was odd as it was the first time I had seen such an error. I figured maybe it was because it was an EXE file and the security on the VPS was not allowing such a file to be downloaded. So I turned off all the security and tried again — same result. Then I noticed that I was able to download other EXE files without a problem. So that wasn’t the issue. I then attempted to upload the file via FTP. But after the file would finish transferring, I could never find it in the directory anywhere. I also tried to upload it via the file manager in my VPS manager to no avail. There it would just give me a generic error message. So I finally decided to just run the installer on my local copy of Windows and then just transfer the EX4 and DLL files to the VPS. The LMD Multicurrency EX4 file transferred to the VPS just fine. But when I tried to bring the DLL file over, I got a warning from my AVG antivirus software that the DLL file was infected with a virus called Win32/Huer. I knew that FRXC said they had doublechecked all their files before making them available so I thought maybe AVG was just being too sensitive. So I tried to proceed and upload the file anyway, but my VPS again wouldn’t even accept it. I then decided to test the rest of the EAs. There were three EAs that were clean (Fusion, Nutcracker, and Cobalt), but the rest had this same problem.

The interesting thing is that I downloaded and installed LMD-Multicurrency on Tuesday of this week without any issues. So it would appear that something has changed with the files since that time. I am not trying to be an alarmist or anything, but I just wanted to report to you what I had experienced so you could be aware of it.

In any event, I can’t get the LMD robot reinstalled because I can’t get the DLL file to go onto my VPS. It’s crazy. I have contacted FRWC three times today via email but have not heard anything. I also attempted to call but just got a voicemail message. I have not seen the live chat open today, so it’s kind of frustrating.

If anyone would be willing to share their DLL file for the LMD robot with me, I would appreciate it greatly. Let me know if you would be willing to email it to me, and I will send you my email address. Hopefully I will hear from FRWC by tomorrow before trading begins, but you never know.

UPDATE (2/22/10): I received a response from the FRWC. They gave me a link in the members area where I could download all the experts in one ZIP file. After I did this, I was able to get LMD reinstalled. If anyone else needs this info, just contact me privately and I will gladly oblige. You will need to log in to be able to access the link. They made no comment on my suspicion that their previous files might have been infected. But I am back up and running again, so no harm, no foul I guess.

PIP ANDROID

Pip Android took only four trades this week – two wins and two losses for a very small gain on the week. Our demo has been running since February 11, and the EA has lost $2.03 or 0.1% since that time. There are no positions open currently. So we’re basically at breakeven so far. I’ll give it a few more weeks at least before drawing any hard and fast conclusions.

FUSION V

As mentioned in my previous update, the account statement that the FRWC showed for their live test of Fusion V clearly shows a lot size of 0.1 lots. Thus, in an effort to test the robot on identical settings, I advocated making the change to a 0.1 lot size. Well, I immediately saw that this wasn’t going to work. Fusion proceeded to open up ten HiRIDER trades, and suddenly my available margin was in jeopardy. It got down to around 105% before the EUR/USD turned the opposite way and allowed me to close out of the trades with small gains before it damaged the account. Note that I am using an identical FXCM account as the FRWC folks ($1,000 balance, 1:200 leverage). Here’s the thing. If you get several wins in a row right out of the gate, you might be able to keep trading at such a high lot size, but you are risking a margin call, especially if the first few trades go against you at all. Therefore, I do not think it is even remotely reasonable to expect the kind of gains that FRWC showed on their 19-day Fusion V demo (345%). It is entirely too risky to trade such high lot sizes on such little starting capital, and frankly I think it’s misleading that they would advertise results that used such a risky setup but then in their manual say this: “Our opinion is that a lot size equal to 0.01 for each $1,000 of available equity is reasonable.” If that is their opinion and what they think their clients should use, then that is what they should have used in their testing. That effectively means the expected results should be about a tenth of what they showed, or about 34.5% over 19 days — still very respectable and worth using but a far cry from over 345%. These guys talk a lot about transparency. Where is the transparency in that?

Interestingly, in the manual they state (and it is highlighted): “In our opinion, it is far safer to turn off the automatic Money Management feature and set a fixed lot size of 0.01. This is because certain strategies, i.e. Straasha, involve a modified Martingale system while other strategies (like HiRIDER) can open up to 10 trades at a time! You must therefore set a “safe” lot size to avoid unnecessary risks.” This is a warning that shouldn’t go unheeded, in my opinion. Thus going forward, I have changed my lot size back to 0.01 lots with money management turned off. I will follow the guide of 0.01 lots per $1,000 of equity, as recommended. If you do likewise, just be aware of the fact that you will nowhere approach the ridiculous return that they reported during their 19-day test, but you should be able to rest a bit easier knowing your money is safer.

The good news is the robot did make it into positive territory by the end of the week. The account balance after closed trades is $1,016.84. One trade remains open and is currently profitable, so the account equity currently stands at $1,025.05, or a gain of about 2.5% over the first three days of the test. That’s a pretty good start.

LMD-MULTICURRENCY

Well, unfortunately the LMD-Multicurrency EA continued to dig itself a deeper and deeper hole and at one point was in drawdown over 50% – a complete train wreck, frankly. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not willing to even consider putting real money in a robot that has drawdowns of that magnitude. Therefore I am going to be starting a new demo with this EA with the following changes to the settings to see if we can get much smaller drawdowns with the expectation that the possible account increases will also be tempered:

Lots: 0.05
Microlots: true
Money Management: false

I will use the user guide’s recommendation of 0.05 lots per $1,000 of equity.

The current demo will be stopped and its results will be available on the Results page on Monday.

HI-RIDER

Thus far, this robot has been the most consistent performer of the bunch.  It has registered only one loss in the first three days of testing. Closed trades have resulted in an account gain of $62.77, or 6.3%. However, on Friday, two trades came just short of hitting their take profit level before completely reversing and going the opposite direction. These two trades together are down $40.10, so the account equity is at $1,022.67 at the close of the week, for a 2.3% gain for the first three days of trading. Again, this is a pretty impressive start. Let’s see if it can recover from the two stranded trades early next week.

In rereading the manual and after looking carefully at the backtests, I think I probably have the risk settings too high on this robot as well. There were at least three occasions in 2008 when all ten positions hit a full stoploss at the same time. That could potentially be account debilitating if your risk levels are too high and if it happens several times in a short period of time. Thus, going forward, I will be changing the LotRiskReductor setting from 5 to 1 with money management turned ON. Admittedly, this will result in slower growth than what was achieved during the two month competition, but it will be a lot safer. Account protection is the name of the game, folks.

SUPER VOLCANO

Not much going on with this robot. It took one trade, which it lost. Account equity is at $958.80, so the total loss for the first three days in the market was 4.1%. All we can do is keep the demo running and see what happens going forward.

Closing note

I’m going to be honest here. I still love the idea behind the FRWC competition, and I think there are some good robots here, but I feel they did everyone a disservice by allowing the robots to operate with risk levels that simply won’t be sustainable over the long term. Yes, you might get an occasional two-month period where some of these robots do really well, but that does not mean they are viable for a year or even six months at those settings. And the problem is that no one ever knows when a bad period is coming. Thus it’s not realistic to think you can just go forward with those settings. My guess is that you could run the competition again with the same robots and same settings, and you would probably get vastly different results, both in terms of percentage gains/losses as well as the finishing order.

As I said, I think some of these robots may indeed be winners, but I think we need to rein in our expectations a bit with them. I think the risk settings need to be lowered to what the FRWC suggests in its manuals so as to make the robots’ performance sustainable for the long-term. It does no good to have great gains for several months only to lose all of it along with a portion of your principal in one or two bad trades.

Fusion V

This EA has been the most active of the bunch, winning 18 trades and losing 5. It currently has two other trades open that are in profit. Equity on the account as of this moment is about $1,005, or a 0.5% gain. Not exactly hitting it out of the park, is it? And it makes you wonder how it could even get close to over 300% return in 19 days. Well, one thing right off the bat that I have noticed is the lot size setting. The FRWC has said that the default setup for each of these robots mimics the exact settings used in the competition. This simply isn’t true when it comes to lot size. If you will look at the lot sizes of the trades in the account statement that FRWC provides on their website, the trades were 0.1 lot size right off the bat (with a $1,000 balance). Yet the default setting is 0.01 lots per trade. I don’t have to tell you that will make a large difference in the results. So I have just switched my lot size for Fusion V to 0.1 lots just as they had it in the competition. Remember, this is a demo account, so if you are trading a real money account, you may want to tread cautiously and wait to see more results before doing likewise.

LMD Multicurrency

I knew (and stated here on the blog) from the very beginning that the LMD Multicurrency robot was very volatile and would have large swings in account balance, which is really not my cup of tea. This is one of the reasons I said right up front that I preferred the HiRIDER EA, as its competition results showed a much smoother equity curve. Now you would hope that we wouldn’t get a large swing down at the very beginning of the demo, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened. Several losses in a row have made for a rough start out of the gate for his EA. At the onset of the FRWC competition, the robot had several wins, and the automatic money management quickly adjusted the lot size from 0.15 lots up to 0.18 lots and higher right off the bat. Given that my demo has experienced a few losses, the lot size has been reduced down to 0.10 for the current trades. Right now the account is in drawdown about 30%, so it has some ground to make up. If you will remember, LMD experienced over 30% drawdowns at different points during the contest, so it shouldn’t be a complete shock that we have seen something similar here. All we can do is let the robot work and see if it can dig itself out of the hole. This is why we test.

HiRIDER

HiRIDER pulled off a nice series of wins already, but then it had a loss which wiped out most of the gains. It has won 13 times and lost just once and currently has a 0.42% equity gain. Here is another example of where the default settings of the EA do not match what was done in the competition. If you look at the competition account statement for this robot, you will see varying lot sizes, and it began at 0.3 lots. But the default for this bot had MM turned off and the lot size set to 0.01. So we really should be looking at a gain of around 1.2% already on this robot. I have turned money management on for this robot going forward. It only makes sense to test it with the settings used during the competition.

SuperVolcano

There is really nothing to report on this EA, as it has yet to take any trades in the first two days. Looking back at the competition results, there were some periods where this robot sat on the sidelines waiting for the right conditions, so I am guessing this is one of those periods. According to the user manual, this EA waits for very high volatility and then for a price spike or drop. If anyone else has gotten any trades on this EA, please let me know.

So that’s where we stand after two days. Still way too early to draw any broad conclusions from what we have seen. Let’s give it some time and see where it goes from here. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I feel if I can get any of these bots to give me a consistent 20-25% return on my account per month, I will very happy and will think the FRWC purchase was more than worth it. With the the magic of compounding, that is a more than ample return on principal that will grow an account substantially and quickly.

Trade well!

Speaking of documentation, it is excellent. There are audio, video and PDF text guides in the member’s area that explain everything. Each of the robots comes with its own user guide to help explain the EA’s background and strategy and to help you get it set up just like it was for the competition.

Also, the package comes with the TOP 10 finishing robots in the FRWC competition PLUS the previously mentioned super bot, named Fusion V. So there is plenty to experiment with.

Another nice perk is that the FRWC, in conjunction with FXCM-UK, provides its members with a special live account that is identical to the live accounts used for the competition, including:

• MT4 platform with ECN execution
• 1:200 leverage
• Micro lots (0.01 minimum lot size)
• Only $1,000 needed to fund the account (normally $2,000)
• Free VPS (but only if you are trading 30 standard lots per month)

There is also a 60-day money-back guarantee on the Royal Trader package, so there is little to lose. I’m looking forward to putting these EAs to the test and reporting back here.

Get your own copy today and test along with us. Use the link below to take advantage of our $100 cash back offer on your purchase!

www.forex-robot-world-cup.com

Well, I am happy to say, that as of 9:27 AM ET, the FRWC website is finally up and taking orders! Click the link below to go to the site and place your order. By using the link below you will be eligible for a $100 rebate from EA-Reviews.com once your refund period has expired.

www.forex-robot-world-cup.com