I’ve gotten a fair number of emails and comments from folks who are already “down” on the FRWC robots, which is ridiculous, quite frankly. Folks, it is still very early in the testing phase. These robots didn’t make their gains overnight during the competition, and they did experience losses and drawdowns along the way, so there is no need to draw any final conclusions on the ability of these EAs just yet. We need to give them some time to do their thing. Given that we can get a refund anytime up to 60 days from purchase, we have adequate opportunity to see if they can be profitable for us. Here are my comments on the specific bots and their performance to date:

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!

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