Smart FX Technology EA Follow Up

Trading Systems Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
1

Hi Folks,

I have been following the Smart FX thread and have read through many pages. It stretches as far back as 2011 with a lot of great information, thanks to Johnny for starting it as well as the developer for responding so consistently and everyone else for chiming in. I am writing in a new thread because there are over 2200 replies in the previous one; there is a lot of great information but it is also mixed in with friendly banter, technical questions and a few heated tiffs lol.

Personally, I am ready to jump in and start a demo account with Pepperstone, on CNS VPS with the Smart FX combo pack. What I am interested to find out for is:

  1. How long have [I]you[/I] been trading with the Smart FX EA?

  2. How have your trading results been for this whole period, regardless of how long or short it has been?

  3. Now that you have used and applied it, did it give you what you anticipated?

  4. What would you have done differently in hindsight?

Your feedback and any constructive comments will be much appreciated. Cheers!

2

Godspeed, I have also taken a recent interest in the SmartFX programs. I am about 100 pages into the original thread, which takes me up to the first of the year, 2012. I will probably get through that history by the end of the week.
Through the point I have reached, the account tracking links are inactive and I have noted a turnover in thread participants. I followed up on three of those who were most active through 2011. I saw that tradingshed stopped posting on the thread in april, 2012. Mrql, who seemed to be very careful with his money, stopped in February 2012. Kanoo stopped posting around august 2013. Kanoo seemed to have picked up other interests, especially in pursuing Tom’s ea and expressing his political views, but it would seem the bloom was off the rose for smartfx. I did note that Robert continues his patient involvement with the thread, which, in fact, was the only reason I was willing to invest the time to go through it.
From the smartfx website, I see they are recommending accounts with Trader’s Way and Tallinex for US clients. I already have accounts with Tallinex, but no experience with TW. No problems with Tallinex.
If I understand, you have purchased and are using the smartfx ea’s. I will continue to follow your progress. Also, appreciate your updates on the scion service.

3

Hi Pipwoof, thanks for your reply, I did not get as far into the forum pages as you did, but am glad to hear the results you found. I have not purchased the EA yet as I am still doing my due diligence as to some current results. A member named Trecarp, in the original thread, mentioned that he did purchase it and was giving it time to see how it progressed. I hope that he catches this one and updates us on it.

I also searched on myfxbook for their results, have a look:

SmartFxTechnology’s Profile | Myfxbook

It seems like most of the trading was demo trading with their previous versions. In the charts the results are around the time period of 2011. One of them went as far as 2013. There is the latest one for 2014, a live account, it shows about a 5% gain in the last 4 months of trading. But there has been nothing when it come to a full track record from time of inception till present. I suppose that is because they have had many updates since development.

So my concern about all this is that after reading so much of the original thread, where there were claims of big gains and then following up with SmartFX’s posting on my myfxbook, the two don’t seem to match. I am not calling foul here, just saying that I’d like to get more solid info on numbers as I am interested in this product.

I will say that reading so much of the thread does give one a very thorough education when it comes to EAs and all the peripheral knowledge that is associated with it. Anyhow, I hope there are people out there who have used this EA and are getting good results from it who are willing to share. It would be nice to find a good EA with proven results that can work in the long term. If the developer Robert is also willing to chime in here, that would be much appreciated.

Cheers and good trading to all!

4

Hi Godspeed and fellow traders

Good idea to start a fresh thread with less emphasis on the support side of these EA’s. Interesting to see you have gone for CNS VPS, if you don’t mind me asking, what would you be paying for this service? (and this is for your demo account, right?).

I keep a small netbook running 24/7, not ideal as occasionally I lose my internet connection, but I don’t feel these EA’s make enough profit to justify VPS, though I do accept it depends on the size of your trading account.

It’s interesting to see Smart’s own results look like they have been flatlining recently.

My Pepperstone trial is now 10 working days in, and the $5,000 account is now down to 4,975, so not a drastic loss, and it is early days. Virtually all of the losses have been caused by Breakout Hunter, which trades the EUR/USD. If I stripped that out, the account would be showing a more reasonable balance of 5,015. I can confirm that since I started testing these robots back in January with other brokers, the EUR/USD has been a consistent loser and drag on the combo pair.

The Euro has been ranging for quite a while now, which as the name implies does not suit Breakout Hunter. Its a pity the EA does not have an algorithm to recognise this and just stop trading.

So I will continue in demo mode with Pepperstone for a while longer before I open a real account, but I feel it will only be using the Master Scalper until the Breakout Hunter can demonstrate a degree of profitability.

I would also be very interested to hear other’s experiences, mine is from a UK viewpoint, maybe other world locations trade differently. (sorry Smart FX, this question is not really directed at you, but ordinary punters like me, though your support and interest is appreciated).

Trecarp

5

Hey Trecarp,

Thanks for coming over and joining the new thread. Essentially, as far as platform and services go, I did not want to rock the boat, and after a lot of due diligence, I went with their suggestions of Pepperstone (or Synergy) and CNS private server. The reviews looked good for both those services, and I trust that the smart fx guys did some home work too and found that was what worked for them and their platform.

Good call on the EURUSD being flat hence breakout hunter has not produced pips. The more I trade, the more I see that there really is no substitute for the human mind. Robots work fine for particular times, but there HAS to be some overwatch to make sure when to start the robot and when to put it to sleep and use brain power.

I think it is very safe to say that trading is hard work and there is a lot to learn before one becomes successful, it is for that reason there are so many robot programs out there, to try to cater to the human hope of less work more money. However, IMHO, I am seeing that the ones who really succeed are the ones who train their minds to the point where trading is a reflex rather than a reaction. More and more, I become clear that this is really the path meant for me. The true “Holy Grail” is my own practiced and honed mind. It is not to say I won’t use a good proven EA, but until I find that, I shall keep working on my skills.

Cheers.

Ps: Just to be clear, I have the Pepperstone Platform and am [B][I]considering[/I][/B] using CNS. I have yet to buy SmartFX or subscribe the CNS service. Still doing my due diligence. Hence this thread. Will make my mind up soon.

PPs: CNS VPS costs about $30 a month.

6

Hey Trecarp, How goes the good fight? How is the SmartFX EA coming along? Are you open to sharing your results? I’m very curious :slight_smile:

7

Hi Godspeed
Happy to post results from time to time, though bit of a shame that nobody else trading these Smart FX bots has posted any results…so far anyway.
In the 8 days since my last post, the bots had performed quite well and recovered their losses to stand at $5,027.
At least that was the position until 15 mins ago when an open EUR/USD trade whipsawed on the news from the Fed, and so reduced the balance down to make it $5,006. So once again it’s the Breakout Hunter that reveals itself to be the weak link.

Have you taken the plunge yet ? Difficult I suppose to make a judgement without more feedback?

Bye for now.

Update: Oh dear, overnight losses have occurred on some of the scalpers, so balance now down to $4,964.

8

Wow, sorry to hear that. All this was happening with breakout hunter? Bummer!

9

I have been watching the combo pack on a $10K demo account for the last few months, am not too impressed. In the first two weeks it was pretty impressive, about 5% per week, which is close to what they claim. Then the first major issue was Breakout Hunter, in a span of a week it opened positions, in my opinion, too soon after major news events, and instead of opening them in a news rebound fashion (rebounding in the opposite direction of the market move resulting from the news event), it opened them in the same direction and in a matter of minutes hit the stop loss and I was down 8%. It did the same again a week later. I turned it off. Breakout Hunter, in my experience, is not a leave and forget EA especially around major news events.

The next issue just happenend this week. Scalper is set to work at later end of the New York session, except on Fridays where it doesn’t trade at all - I like that. It actually does remarkably well during this session. Some of the scalper sessions overlap into the Sydney session which seems to be okay mid week, but just a few days ago I noticed Scalper opened up a bunch of positions on the Monday morning opening of the Sydney session which all stopped out later that morning when Tokyo openend. Not sure why it would do this. Scalper does not seem to be a leave and forget EA at the opening of the trading week.

These were with default settings, am guessing some of their news filter and time filter code is buggy, or just not well thought out. Like any other commercial EA I have yet to see the results they claim. With some manual intervention around news events and weekends you could probably do okay. Their money-back guarantee seems a little lame - I can achieve positive gain in two months using a savings account at a bank, and it doesn’t cost $100. Making your money back in 2 months would be a much better offer :32:

Wish I had better news, but that has been my experience.

Por Thonkao

10

Thanks for chiming in Thonkao! Good to hear other people’s experience with the EA. I wonder what happened from when it first started, with all the hype around it, to present time. It seemingly started off as a bright star, but there does not seem to be much of a spark left. Results from people are scarce, especially from the original group who started it, and whatever numbers that appear seem to be rough and spotty. Well, I guess the adage is proving itself true about EAs, they work for a bit and then die a quiet death.

11

No worries - If I had to opine, many of these commercial EAs tend to be heavily optimized during backtesting (which also provides the basis for their incredulous claims of profitability), which ultimately fails when run on a forward test or live account. Good sound time-proven trading practices will eventually win out over uber-hyped claims of profit for only $100.

12

Hi all

This will most likely be my last post in this thread.

Unfortunately Pepperstone pulled the plug on my demo account - apparently the computer does it automatically, and there is no way to retrieve and analyse the trading results - so black mark to Pepperstone for their lack of adaptability. (I have spoken with other brokers whose demo accounts normally expire after 30 days, eg Hantec, and they have agreed to extend their trial).

Anyway, from memory the original $5,000 account finished around the $4,950 mark after one month. So I don’t think these robots are worth persevering with unless there is some change made to the way they trade (I agree with what Portonkao has said previously).

I am going to concentrate instead on my manual trading - there are no shortcuts to success in forex, or so it seems.

If there are any traders out there currently having success (with a real money account) with either Breakout Hunter or Master Scalper, please feel free to post and convince me otherwise.

13

Sorry to hear about the disappointing results Trecarp. Thanks for keeping us all in the loop and good luck with manual trading. That is my main focus for now too. Like you said, no shortcuts to success.