I have been researching these robots out of curiosity. I really don’t trust all of theses reviews since most of the webp pages for the reviews start with the name of the program. I was wondering if anyone has used robots and what everyone thinks about them… Thanks
yes, i’ve used robots - and guess what?
They don’t work?
awesome guess!
They work marvellously for the people who sell them.:rolleyes: Why do you think they keep coming up with new ones?
Based on the interview with Kiril Kartuniv who is the championsion of 2008 automated trading competition. Robot cannot success alone but semi-automated trading does.
I think robot has no common sense. It only take profit and stop loss whenever it hit the preset target.
Don’t the big institutions use automated trading? But I’m sure the difference between that and a metatrader EA is like night and day.
The reason mose commercialy available robots dont work is because they are optimized to show good results over a previous historical period.
To simplify this, imagine you have last months chart history you could create a robot that would use the perfect trade criteria to make the most of all the big price moves last month, then obvioulsy in a backtest using last months data your finished robot would show awesome profits, this is what most commercialy available trading robots do, but optimized using the previous years, or two years data.
On the other hand, if you have a trading system that uses set criteria to open and close trades, a robot you create yourself can do exactly that and automate your trading for you, also you can create robots to test trading strategies using previous chart history, these kind of tests do give accurate results as long as you do not fall into the optimization trap as you could end up with a robot tailor made to fit some previous chart history and useless in future trading.
hahahahah!
I quote part of a very interesting article I found on nobrainertrades.com. It talks about these differences.
Institutional Versus Retail Automated Trading
One of the wealthiest hedge funds on the planet is run by a man named Jim Simons, called Renaissance Technology, and they’re based here in New York City and in Long Island. Renaissance separates itself from the pack because they engage primarily in automated trading, and returns have never been known to suffer. People joke because they say that walking around Renaissance is like walking around a quant-physics laboratory filled with PhD’s, because these guys are fierce number crunchers. I never worked for Renaissance, but I worked for a fund comparable in size that did engage in automated trading, and I can say this much about the systems that were used:
They are quantitative strategies because they exploit opportunities in the market without any qualitative judgment (unless they start to really lose, of course). For equity driven systems, pretty much all of them used one form or another of off-pricing exploitation, such as various arbitrage / black schools strategies, etc. For the FX systems, some of them used one form or another of fundamental analysis, taking into account interest rates, or whatever other form of economic data was seen relevant or at hand to success, but not all.
But in terms of many of the systems, a lot was purely based on price action and technical analysis, using things like relative strength, etc, in order to make judgments or forecast future price movements. If you read the book Market Wizards, you’ll find some of the industry’s top traders trading in much of the same manner as you or I. Few differences can be found here.
So the ultimate question is this: are many of these systems that get offered to the retail crowd all that much different in terms of general strategy than some of the ones used by major institutions? Surprisingly no, they’re not (yes I’m serious).
What separates them is QUALITY and the experience levels of the programmers / traders / developers that create them as well as the amount of work that goes into maintaining them. Many systems offered to the retail crowd are cranked out on a steady basis, making millions for the creators, taking millions (and then some, if including losses in trading accounts) from the users / customers.
The other big thing that separates them is RISK. Institutional investors or hedge funds are thrilled by the idea of getting a 30% return every year. An uneducated retail investor looks at that number and gawks, because they’re too jaded by the false advertising that has bitten them in the face over and over again in the short time they have been exposed to this market. They’re expecting that goal to get hit in a matter of weeks (I begin to laugh), which is a common but completely distorted understanding of the market.
In a nutshell, the ‘concept’ is all wrong from the beginning, when it comes to systems readily available to the retail crowd. My former hedge fund coworker was promoted to a position at one of our quant funds. His job? To continuously optimize and maintain the system with a team of other analysts. Contrast this to any automated trading system available to the retail crowd, and you’ll immediately see a difference in both care and logistics.
Granted, comparing a system trading over $500 million in capital versus a system trading your $10,000 brokerage account seems like a far cry, but conceptually, the goal is the same: to make money trading. How this gets accomplished is where these systems vary so much.
So getting down to reality, if you think automated trading is going to take your 1,000 account and blow it into 1,000,000 within a year, think again. None of them will.
If you have a system that you are convinced does otherwise or proves me wrong, send me live, auditable proof, and I’ll write a public apology and note your system for the books to all of my readers. But I doubt this is going to happen.
That reminded me of the first time I heard about Econophysics. I thought the idea of predicting financial markets using physics was something some EA seller thought up, but it’s real…
You can even get a PHD in the subject… Econophysics - University of Houston
Robots can work. Look at all the Math, Physics, and Engineering PhDs that the big banks are hiring up to be quants.
Lol, that sounded like financetecture and medicinology. How specialized things have become lately eh?
On a side note, going back to the main topic, I have never used a robot, and I don’t plan on doing it, at least not in the near term.
I think the guy on the article made a point, and that is no robot is reliable by itself, and a lot of human work and thinking is involved, and I mean A LOT, which to me, it makes implicit that you must know well the market and/or whatever variable your system considers.
So that being said, I’m of the idea that a robot shouldn’t be a way to avoid learning the markets and speed up your process to riches, it should be (if you ever consider using a robot) an extra tool, created by you, once you have gained experience in the markets and know what you’re doing.
That way you won’t be trusting blindly in something you don’t know, and you’ll be able to modify and mantain your robot to current market conditions, just as you adjust your regular trading.
My two cents.
Exactly!
I use EAs for things like moving my stoploss up to a breakeven level when a certain profit target is reached. This is proper use for them, to make predetermined repetitive tasks more convenient. I used to have to set a price alarm when I went to bed and then get up in the middle of the night to change the stoploss. Now I just tell the EA when I want it changed and what I want it changed too.
They should be tools, not decision makers!!
Thanks you’ll thats what i thought i was just making sure
I was just going to post something similar. I don’t think they cna ever replace the trader, but they can make the chores of the trade and micro management alot easier.
On a side note, could you post the EA you use to move trades to BE please? I lost mine on an OS reinstall and can’t seem to find it again.
Cord
It’s integrated into my Sunday Breakout EA so it also does a couple of other things you probably don’t want… Plus all the variables are hardcoded to match that system. I don’t have a standalone EA that just does BEs.
Sorry!
No probs, I’ll just keep searching 