Automatic Forex Trading Systems

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.