Hey,
My name is Jon and I wanted to share a little about my experience with trading. I started trading a few years ago but never had much success with it until I learned about Expert Advisors. Due to my background in software development, I discovered that they could be built and modified quite easily.
My first EA was based on a simple martingale strategy, back then I didn’t really know what a martingale strategy was or how common it was in the trading world but it seemed to work for me. For 3 months straight I was averaging 1% a day while running it on 3 pairs, so I decided to open a PAMM account.
My PAMM Account became extremely successful in a very short amount of time. After calling 20 different brokers I finally decided on one because they had the best customer service that responded to my clients within seconds via their instant chat. Although their spreads weren’t the best they made up for it with their transparency and communication.
My PAMM account size quickly outgrew my martingale strategy and at the time I didn’t know that I could split the charts to divide the lot sizes. So me and my business partner decided to start trading gold with a DCA strategy.
The gold bot did extremely well and we reached our highest month ever with 36% profit within one month. Then one day we forgot to turn the bot off before a major red folder event and we got stuck in a huge 80% drawdown. This happened on Thursday and by Monday we had blown the account. Since our PAMM was doing so well we had managed to attract over 300 investors, but we lost a lot of money that day, more than what I feel comfortable saying in this message.
But after all was said and done, we realized that we were able to successfully run a PAMM account for 6 months and generated a return of almost 200% in that timeframe, which we thought was pretty good for beginners.
So by this time, we had discovered prop firms and we figured that it would be better to risk the funds of large companies rather than the funds of our friends and family. The only difficulty with prop firms is that they have strict trading rules and none of our EA’s could pass the challenges. So we hired a few companies to help us pass the challenges but a few of them failed and the others gave us an EA that we had to manage full-time in order to get through the challenges.
After searching far and wide, we finally found what seems to be the best prop firm passing EA with the option for them to manage the live account as well. We heard about this company through this site called the #1 Rated Prop Firm EA and so far they have gotten us 400K in prop firm funding. The awesome part about them is that they actively manage the bot on our live account and change the parameters when necessary so essentially it operates completely hands-free for us.
This brings me to the final phase of my forex trading journey where I figured that it would be best to start learning how to trade manually. So I found this forum because I heard that it was a great place to start for beginners. At the end of the day, I don’t want to solely depend on a bot to manage my capital and hopefully, whatever manual trading strategies that I learn can be added to my EA algorithm. The one thing that I have learned so far is that the martingale and DCA strategies are not long-term strategies and will eventually fail so I’d like to find other strategies that don’t involve them.
