i recently started trading forex and after educating myself on the basics and playing around with a test account i opened a mini account with zecco and have been trading for two days…
day #1 - lost $50
day #2 - lost $105
each time i even start a trade it puts me in the red (about -$5) even if one is going down and i liquidate and do the opposite…i have been having a great year so far with equitys and options but, since i am working nights now and have lots of down time i wanted to dive in to the forex world and do some live trades.
most of what i read online is people either recommending or trying to sell robots that you input data and they do the trades (or most of it) for you…seems like not doing so will require you to become glued to a screen for hours making very little gains and tons of transactions…is this the case?
can anyone recommend a program before i go out and buy one? fab turbo and killer forex have been advertised more than others…maybe for negative reasons?
i am sure that using one of these programs is not going to make you money alone, otherwise why would every single person with a computer be doing it…but i just want to know if there is an advantage in doing so and if someone could point me out in the right direction?? i would be happy to give some very useful equity tips in exchange
No way. I can’t wait for one of those investigation news shows do an expose on all the bogus stuff in the trading world. If more traders would use my B.S. DETECTOR questions, they would not fall prey to things that don’t work.
TOUGH QUESTIONS aka
TRADING METHOD B.S. DETECTOR
What is the expectancy of this system or method?
What is the average number of wins percentage?
What is the average win size?
What is the average number of losses percentage?
What is the average loss size?
What was the biggest win?
What was the biggest loss?
What was the longest win streak?
What was the longest loss streak?
How many trades were used to obtain the answers to the above questions?
Were the trades executed with real money?
When did you personally start trading this system or method?
Please copy/paste these questions in each and every thread that you read that puts forth a system or method.
“each time i even start a trade it puts me in the red”–that would be the spread. Ye lol, while some traders who are educated enough to do so don’t stay glued to the pc screen all day in order to make profits…the majority of people who are learning are almost required to do so. There is so much to learn about the FOREX that it makes it quite difficult for starting traders to just go to the screen, see an opportunity to enter a position, and do so. That’s ok though, tbh, it happens with everything. As for forex robots, expert advisors most of them are called–or eas for short, they are by far the most dynamic and powerful tool in the realm of forex in my opinion. I can’t think of a single thing that a person can do that an ea can’t do…except maybe trade based upon emotions or randomness =P (but hey that’s what MathRand() is for amirite?). There exists a problem with the majority of eas though. “If an ea is worth using, it isn’t worth selling.” So when you see people selling their eas, more times than not they don’t tend to produce consistent profits. My advice would be to learn some more about forex, craft your own strategy, refine, refine, refine, then program it into an ea and work with that. happy trading!
I don’t use EAs and I’m now profitable. It just takes time and a little effort before things go the way you want them to. If you don’t put in the effort, don’t expect any returns.
Robots are good if they fall in the right hands, trust me I’m profitable with a certain robot that’s been discussed in here a lot. While a noticed that others don’t seem to have so much luck with, I’ve had.
You will always find that’s the case with EA’s, or indeed any trading system.
Try building an EA that opens and closes trades completely at random, give it 40 people and I guarentee you with 100% certaintly that one or two will get fantastc results. Its nothing to do with the true expectancy of the EA, its the variance you are observing, not the long term return.
You can take an EA thats designed to LOSE money, run the same experiment, and some poor soul will end up making a profit.
I’ve regularly seen what seam like profitable mechanical systems take well over a thousand trades, then give everything back, and a great deal more over the next 1000 trades. Some of the commercial EA’s are even coded to eliminate these trades from their back test results
Differentiating between luck, and a genuine edge is not particularly easy but its impossible if your trading a black box system. If you cant determine that you have an edge (and a rising equity curve is definately NO guarentee of that), then you’ll just have to hope and prey that your the lucky statistical outlier who succeeded despite the odds being stacked against them.
Some robots can do well check out the forex trading robot championships competions on mql4.com (the metatrader 4 website)
They run the submitted EA’s all on their own server for 3 months.
The winners of the last competition achieved amazing results they all made over $150,000 from a 10k account.
.
Its nothing to do with the true expectancy of the EA, its the variance you are observing, not the long term return.