EA Reviews

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!