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As I’ve been totally focused on my work I didn’t hear about the fx “genius” until last week.

Curious, i checked out some reviews and then did a bunch of “special google searches”. A couple hours later i managed to find a working version of FX Greed which I think is a modified version of the fx genius that someone ripped off and decided to sell. Gotta love the internet =)  I saw a comment somewhere from the creator Dominic complaining. So… do I feel sorry for him- hell no!

Scam or no scam?

It’s a bit of both! So on the website fx genius robot dot com you can see a live account info with FX Clearing who is a decent bucketshop broker who’s earned my trust and is awesome for testing ea’s (check out their micro cents account) – before it was only Oanda (who I love but they don’t have mt4) where you could do cheap moolah per pip. Anyways, I opened up FX Clearing with the login and investor password and watched it trade over a few days earning like 5,000 dollars. It looked like a real account so I decided to test it. At first I put it on my demo account and watched it gain 250 pips in 2 days.

The verdict (part 1): The results on his site are from a demo account which works like a charm but when you put it on a real account and watch the journal in metatrader 4, it’s requote after requote and doesn’t work. I have a very fast vps that I use (ecovps in Holland)  and with the datafeed of Alpari UK demo account with a 31ms pingtime vs FX Clearing server at about 200. (By the way, don’t try to use Windows 2008 server for running metatrader ea’s, it shuts down automatically every 12 hours which sucks – you need 2003 server.)

The verdict part 2: Well, the “good folks” at fx greed (nice name btw), have made some modifications so that you can adjust the “aggression” level so that it waits for bigger gaps. I’ve been testing it the last couple days with agression level 1 and it’s bringing in some pips so far, I’ll update in a couple weeks and let you know if I plan to run it full-time. I like a lot that it gets in at a good time and automatically sets a really tight stop. That keeps the risk way down. If it gains 10 pips a day and it’s trustworthy that can still be some nice extra cash and worth running.

Summary – FX Genius’ promises  are a lie, false marketing, bullshit. However, the concept of scalping the lag time is pretty cool and like I said if it does 10 pips everyday that could be 100 or 200 per day extra cake.

This is where magic happens!  I’m loving trading manually lately, staying up all night playing tunes and making nice gains, gotta love it. After 2 years of tough work to get here, now it’s gravy time!

Update on Ultimate – 2 weeks ago it made close to 300 pips, last week it made 250 pips and then lost all 250,  Ouch. I realize that I need another filter so that it just trades with the “general trend” which for me is above/below the 77 ema. Why 77?  I like it and it works =)  I’ve got to do some more testing before I send it to my programmer for the upgrade but after 8 hours of visual renko backtesting yesterday, I just wanna trade…

Here is a tutorial on how to visually backtest renko.

This is not for auto-testing (if you figure that out please let me know =), it’s for visual backtesting and gives you the ability to be able to “play”and “pause” the charts, and “fast-forward” which I am using to create winning strategies. I have my entry/exit criteria and then keep records of the wins and losses in excel. Note: To do this you should have already added more renko bars.

1. First of all download this trading simulator shared at ForexFactory by Ronald Raygun. Follow the instructions to manually install to your mt4 or use the auto-installer
2. Go into your metatrader to  c:\program files\metatrader 4\history\ and create a new folder called: renko.
3. In the same folder go into where it says Demo and copy the following files:

   >symbols.raw
   >symbols.sel
   >symgroups.raw
   >ticks.raw
   >all 1 min data, e.g. EURUSD1.hst, GBPUSD1.hst, USDCHF1.hst, etc.
4. Paste the files into your newly created renko folder
5. Open Mt4 and click on Login, use the same user/password but in the server field put: renko and login (no connection)
6. Restart metatrader  (when it opens don’t touch the login button)
7. Put renko script on all or any 1 minute chart, choose the bar size you want and then for timeframe put 5
8. Click View > Strategy Tester
9. Where it says expert advisor choose: LFH Strategy Tester 3
10. For Symbol, choose the currency pair you want (that you put the renko script on)

    Model (every tick)
    Use date – unchecked
    Visual Mode – checked
    Period 5m
    Optimization – unchecked
11. Now click start to open the chart!  (if it says waiting for more then a few seconds, just restart mt4)
12. Right-click to apply a template

Remember that due to the nature of renko bars, price can go almost 2 bars against you with no record. Example – if you short after a down-bar (say 20 pip renko bar) then price can go above where you entered up to 39 pips without creating a new bar.

PS. Credits to “Aktur” at ForexFactory for sharing the original tutorial about how to do backtesting with renko.

For all you renko enthusiasts out there. Here’s how to get more renko bars:

1. Download a fresh mt4 – ex: fxcm uk mt4
2. Change chart to 1m and zoom in
3. Turn off autoscroll
4. Go to Tools > Options > Charts – put max bars in chart 512000
5. Put a small rock on your home button and go have a coffee (wait 5-10 min)
6. Add renko script (choose your bar size and put bars 512000)

I just did this with fxcm uk and I’m getting 937  Renko 15 pip bars

If you haven’t heard of renko bars: how it works is instead of a new bar being formed every 5 minutes or hour, you can set the amount of pips movement which will yield a new bar. So if you set it to 10 for example, turn on your renko chart  and the last bar has been an up-bar – now price will form a new up-bar only when price moves up 10 pips. If an hour goes by and price doesn’t move more then a few pips there will be no new renko bars created. In order for price to create a renko down-bar, price has to move 20 pips down.

Yahoo!!  I’ve been at it full on – focussed -  in the lab working hard. (well mostly =)

I’m excited to report that my new ea”ULTIMATE” is 4 real.

Ulimate was designed to prosper in ALL market conditions yielding consistent, high-probability trades with low draw-down, YES!  (It doesn’t trade when the volatility is too low and I manually turn it off before high volatility news events)

Last week was its debut and Ultimate brought in 540 pips!!! I’ve made a small tweak which will improve the probabilities. Ultimate is based solely on price action and “takes small bites out of momentum moves“. Brilliant!!!  The following results are based on a demo account so it may be a bit less although I did have some technical glitches to sort out with my new vps, it turns out that you can’t use Windows Server 2008 for forex trading software because it shuts off every 12 hours. Right now I’m using 2003 64 bit.

I’ve just thrown 100$ into a micro-account and turned on the ea. Updates to come.

(This was on a mini account so each dollar represents a pip. The last trade doesn’t count though because I loaded my new version and forgot to change it from a standard lot to a mini-lot).

Slowing down a bit unfortunately, still positive though – I’m tweaking the settings a little bit and looking at avoiding low volatility times of the day..

I had a really good night last night =) Not just with my adorable girlfriend Sophie.  You see, in the last couple months I’ve found the “system for me”, it works with my style of trading. Hallelujah!

However, there’s been some challenges as this year I’m living on the west coast (after living on an island in Thailand for the last few years), the hours for trading with some market flow start at 11pm and go until 9am.  I either stay up until 4 or sometimes all night and sleep in the day.

So, I’ve been working on making an ea that can trade my style and give my eyes a break. I know my style works so it’s just been a question of how to automate it.   Last night I finally got it!!

(17 wins and 2 losses on just two pairs: cad/jpy and aus/jpy)

This is what I call a sweet equity curve:

Now, of course it’s only been 1 night – if this was some “super duper ea” I would be very skeptical, but this is the same system I’ve developed over the last year and have been trading live for the last couple months. I’ve never had 19 trades in a day before though!

Very excited about next week…

PS.  Please don’t contact me asking to have a copy. If you have been accumulating knowledge, the picture is worth a zillion words.  I will be offering my signals here next month: ZIPSIGNALS – Automated Forex Trading, 10 day Trial $1

Stay tuned to track the progress and more hints. Keep it real!  ~ Jason

There is a ton of mt4 expert advisors available on the net, but do any of them really work? And if they do, can you trust them?
So I’ve been on “mad scientist mode” for the last year, working all hours of the day and night, testing – tweaking – statistics, further, further  and am now convinced that from this moment on I’m collecting the prize.   Don’t let me anybody tell you that you can’t do something, just because they gave up and are bitter…  Be very careful because this is so subtle and you could wind up carrying someone else’s limitations. If you’ve been spending a lot of time in forums investigating systems, then you’ll know what I mean. =)

It’s been 2 years now since I began “The Quest”, to earn a REAL income, working when I want – living where I want – traveling the world – abundance baby!  There have been many times I’ve been extremely  frustrated and considered giving up.  Losing money hurts and even more when it’s because you haven’t been disciplined.  AND even more when you don’t have much money to begin with. But that’s all in the past now…

Don’t worry, this is about automatic forex trading sytems, it’s not some article that’s been put together by a robot for search engine optimization. =)

During the last year I’ve tested/investigated “a bunch” of ea’s. How many?  At least 20. I’ve tried backtesting the systems using mt4, reaching for that positive equity curve. Previously I had one that was profitable but was on the daily chart and I don’t want to wait years to get mine. I’ve visited blogs where other people tested sytems a variety of ways and shared results. I’ve “come across” hacked versions of various ea’s, etc.  Nothing, nada, zilch.  Don’ta worka.

This is from testing in my own account for a couple weeks by the way, not from backtesting. I want to see for myself it it works or not, how is the drawdown (the amount of your account at risk), most wins in a row – most losses in a row, etc.

So, I gave up on all the “ea nonsense” and worked really hard to come up with a system that suited me.

Part of what was frustrating was that I found a few systems along the way that actually worked but I didn’t want to play that way, waiting forever and not enough opportunities.  So I’ve kept searching to find what I really wanted. (after reading this, you can google forex factory big dog breakout, from my tests if you use a 1:2 risk: reward, it’s profitable, test for yourself of course…)

BTW – This blog post has some amazing clues in it, some people are going to relate I know it. A lot of us on this crazy forex journey I’m sure.

Along the way I have established some personal biases:

• You can never know with 100% certainty what will happen
• Don’t trust backtesting results from mt4, most likely they will be “curve-fitted” – meaning either a certain date period was chosen to enhance results and the settings were tweaked for this
• There are some “technical fundamentals” and if you look hard enough you will find them - It doesn’t hurt learning traditional methods used by professionals, the tough part is deciding what is useful and what is not unless you are going to copy their system/tweak it slightly.
  
• Set an alarm and don’t be in trades when major news happens. - This is dangerous as the market could go 100 pips against your position so fast that your stop loss doesn’t work.  We have to accept that it’s possible this could happen anyways if a terrorist event, etc happened  on a once-in-a-decade basis, but it can also happen on a weekly basis if you’re not smart with news. I use a program called Aquarius Soft PC Alarm Clock Pro, I just scan Forexfactory at the beginning of the night and set the alerts for orange and red events and get out of my trades beforehand  unless I’m up a lot on the position and think it’s safe
• I like “black box” strategies as opposed to discretional – no stress! (b-b-when this happens do this)
• I like Renko charts better than time based charts - It is so much cleaner and smoother =)  In Renko charts, each bar shows price movement only, instead of ‘in 5 minutes it went up 10 pips’, you could set the bars to be 10 pips each and then ‘a new bar will only be formed when it completes 10 pips’.
• I want a lot of opportunities per week with a high success rate

That’s what I’ve been working with for the last year. Personally before I risk a lot of my hard earned money I want to know that the method is solid.  I don’t want an automatic forex trading system with a fancy name like Golden Goose Forex where I have no freaking idea why it enters a trade. That’s almost as scary as “photoshopped” results appearing on a sales site for Forex Kill Em All coming soon to your local web browser. (A lot of tangents I know, I’m having fun with this!)

What I mean is that I want to be able to manually backtest the system for the last 3 years and see how it performed. What’s the win rate, how much profit per 100 trades based on my risk:reward minus fees, slippage, etc.  Personally, I find Renko to be awesome because you can easily manually backtest – I’ll talk more about this later , and I will discuss the ea that I have created and why it’s different.

As the majority of new traders bounce from system to system, its important to stop and look at what makes a Complete Trading System. We need to know:

• Which Markets/Currency Pairs do we trade? – If you are trading more than 4 markets and are losing money, its a good idea to specialize and get to know the pairs you trade. Personally I find cross pairs, especially yen crosses very hard to trade with short-term strategies as it’s like the pair is in a middle of a tug-a-war, getting pulled in opposite directions.
• Risk Control / How Much To Trade - It’s important to know exactly how much of your trading account you will risk per trade, and also to have a predefined “pain threshold”, if you lose X amount in a day/week you will quit trading and re-evaluate your strategy. Without proper Risk Control, you can not be a successful forex trader
• Entries and Exits – Exactly when do you enter and exactly when do you exit a trade? If you don’t know this, you might as well go to the casino and play blackjack, your odds are about the same. (bad)

• When Not To Trade – There are times when you should not be trading the market. If you have a trend-following strategy and the market is range-bound, you should not be trading or your account will get eaten up. And vice-versa, if you have a counter-trend/range strategy and the market is in a major trend, you’re just throwing your trading money out the window. Know thy strategy!
• Time of Day – this is similar to the last point, but I gave it a new heading because its really important. If you are a daytrader, just because the market is open 24 hours a day does not mean you should be trading at all times. There are many hours per day that have very low volatility for example, if your forex strategy requires high volume, you will get chewed up. Spend time analyzing and backtesting your forex system and find out which times of the day work best.

By covering the above points you will be heading in the right direction, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of really knowing your trading strategy inside-out, what are it’s strengths and weaknesses? How do you know when you’re wrong? When exactly do you take profit or take a loss? To be a professional forex trader, you really need to treat this like a business.