I’ve been playing around with a couple of the scripts in the tutorials and a few I found on the forums, but haven’t come across anything I would consider putting my own money into. Even the Z2 strategy that is included with Zorro seems pretty flat for 2012.
Has anyone managed to put something together that comes out with decent results?
If Bob had opened 20 accounts with $250 in each account, and he would replace it once if the account looked bad, even in profit, he would have invested a total of $10000 (20 * 250 * 2). Given the stats, 1 in every 5 accounts would reach his ideal goal of 1000%. Because he essentially opened up 40 accounts (20 * 2), that would mean 8 accounts would hit that 1000%. 8 * $2500 = $20000.
Would that not mean that Bob just doubled (200%) his principle in a matter of 1 year. That’s a better return than most traders can achieve.
I guess it is a truly profitable system afterall. 
You should definitely trade it then - it’s free… 
The gain on the initial capital is 600%, not 1000%. In the calculations, we assumed that $250 are equivalent to 4000 pips, so 25,000 pips gain would be about $1500, or 600%. But the performance of a system is normally not calculated from the initial capital, but from the drawdown. When we assume an average 50% drawdown, trade recording services can give you more than 1000% gain this way even if you made only $1500 with $250 capital.
Also, I made a mistake with the 20% winning systems. The real number is about 10%, so Bob got only 4 winning accounts, not 8. The mistake is in the line that simulates a margin call on a $250 account:
if(NumOpenTotal == 0 and ProfitCurrent > -250) …
This lets too many accounts survive that would in reality be closed by the broker. Here’s a code snippet that would better simulate a margin call:
if(ProfitOpen+ProfitClosed < -250) {
exitLong();
exitShort();
return;
}