Smart FX Technology

Trading Systems Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
204

Hi All,
Also first time poster but been lurking. I bought these EA’s a couple weeks ago and also been experiencing the poor luck others have been having, including Robert (looking at his myfxbook entry). I’m testing them on a Ultrahost VPS using 3 different demo broker accounts for comparison (Oanda, IBFX, and Hotforex). Oanda and IBFX @ 50:1 and Hotforex @ 300:1. The most stable has been the IBFX account. I must say though, there were 2 times that I had an issue with the Oanda account where they created trades without Stops!. Between those times, Robert took a look at my setup and said it looked fine. I’m not sure if there is an issue with it and Oanda but the other 2 brokers haven’t had any problems. I’m optimistic about it and will continue trying it out. Below are links to myfxbook accounts. Just add the appropriate preface.

myfxbook com/members/tberry61/oanda-smartfx-demo1/178109
myfxbook com/members/tberry61/interbankfx-smartfx-demo/178138
myfxbook com/members/tberry61/hotforex-smartfx-demo/178087

Tim

207

Hello Traders:
This refers to the post by Fredik regarding his denied refund.

We need to get something straight:
We have a refund policy that is fair, but has to be followed correctly.
[B]You need to test the robots (demo or live) for 30 days[/B] before you can conclude that you are not happy with them.

The main problem is that once you have the robot files installed in your computer, we cannot get them back from you. If you do not give us a fair chance to prove ourselves, how can we offer a guarantee?
The terms are very clear: you must trade at default settings for 30 days. That means all pairs, all times, no picking and choosing, [U]plain default settings[/U]. If you do that and do not make a profit, we take responsibility and refund your money. If you choose to use your crystal ball to guess who is going to make money and you are not right, we are not guilty of that.
If you do not trade for 30 days, you do not qualify either. You cannot judge a trading robot over a weeks’ worth of trading.

Now that the legalities are spelled out, let me tell you how I really feel about refund policies on EAs:
I think that if a robot is properly built and it trades according to the strategy that is described in the selling literature, the trader should bear responsibility in what the market does to us. If I sell you a boat and you test the boat, and it’s a very good boat indeed, and then you want to go fishing but it rains 3 weeks in a row, why do you come complaining to me?
We build great EAs, that trade great under most market conditions.
If the market is upset for a month, we do not make the markets. The most we can offer is a small drawdown. And that we do have.
Your boat did not tip over, you just did not catch much fish! And not because the boat is not good, it was raining… You should thank us for the nice boat that did not tip over and try fishing again next month.

But if you don’t even give us the benefit of the 30 days worth of testing, and you want a refund and keep the software for free… don’t you see the abuse in that?
Try getting a refund for a Windows, or Apple product? No such thing. Software is non refundable because we cannot get it back from your PC.
But we choose to offer a guarantee to convince you to test our EAs. The only catch is that you do have to honor the terms of the guarantee: 30 days at default settings, demo or live.
Otherwise, it’s just not fair to us.

[B]Issue #2[/B]: Everyone knows what kind of customer service we offer. If your account is losing money at the rate that Fredik has, it is obvious that something is wrong. In his case, the trades are way too large for the capital of the account. His leverage must be way higher than the 50:1 of default, or even the acceptable 100:1. Trading this hard does this to an account, a couple of bad days, out of business. But we did not do that. We did not even get a chance to help him rectify the problem. He went straight into Live trading without taking any precautions of even checking with us. We cannot be responsible for reckless trading behavior.
A quick look into the following real account and long running demos, show that drawdown is very small, usually under 5%… isn’t this proof that something is wrong in his setup? Well, all we ask is the chance to help him correct it.

Here is the link to our new Real Account, opened with the release of version 7.
Broker: MB Trading (ECN), TimeZone: New York (currently GMT -4 on DST).
Started trading on Oct.4th, 2011,

Since the Real Account just started, I am posting the older demo tests.
They run each EA independently and show several months of trading.

Breakout Hunter, started in April 2011. Updated to version 7 on Oct. 4th.

Master Scalper, started in August 2011, started with release of the previous update. Updated to version 7 on Oct. 4th.

208

I agree. Either reduce risk or stop the EA until trading conditions (i.e. the Euro debt crisis) becomes a bit easier, or test on demo.

Give it a fair go first.

I will be waiting for fundamental factors to normalise before starting it up again

209

Hello Traders,
I would like to explain the problem of excessive leverage, so maybe we don’t have to hear sad stories that should have been prevented. No one is happy when these mistakes are made. Least of all me.

The difference in performance due to use of excessive leverage happens in two ways:
a) When we are trading using the Money Manager to calculate the size of our trades, we have the lots sizes assigned as a percentage of the Free Margin in the account. If the leverage is too high, the size of lots would go up too.
When we figured out the best amounts to trade in our default settings, we used 100:1. We made sure that even if you have orders opened for all pairs, you would never get into an over-trading situation that could trigger a margin call.
We have tested this percentages and found that they work fine, never a margin call.
But if you push up the leverage, the lots will be increased with the extra available margin, and you could find yourself over-trading to dangerous levels.

b) When we have losses, our capital is decreased. If you trade with small leverage, your losses will be small. But watch what happens with increased leverage:
Let’s say that you have an account of $1000, for example, and you are using the recommended 50:1 leverage (maximum legally allowed in the US, and for good reason).
Let’s also assume for this example that 1 pip= $1 in the size lots you are trading on the $1000 account (keep the figures simple).
Imagine that on a bad week you lose 100 pips. Given your lot sizes you would have lost $50 using 50:1 leverage (5% drawdown is normal for us).
But if you had been trading at 500:1, you would have lost $500 because your lots would have been that much larger. Now instead of a 5% drawdown, you now have a 50% drawdown on the account!
To get back to your starting point you now have to make $500 profit instead of just $50.
Now let’s say that the next week is a really good week. BUT, your account is now only $500, which means that your trade sizes are going to be half the size of the trades you took in the losing week, (because the MM will always calculate on available margin).
To get back to your starting point you now have to make twice the number of pips to make up the loss, because each pip at half-size lots will only pay you $0.50 (whereas your losing pips cost you $1.00).
To recap, in one losing week you lost 100 pips and the next week you won 100 pips. If your leverage is 50:1, you are pretty much even because the size of your trades is more or less the same, since you only have a 5% drawdown. If you are trading 500:1, your lots will be half-size and with 100 pips you will only make up about $250, to keep figures simple, because the size of your wins were much smaller than the size of your losses. You lost 100 pips, then you recovered the 100 pips, but you still have a $250 loss to make up! You still have a 25% drawdown, even though you made up the pips!
That is the difference.

Basically, in Forex the main concern in not how fast you make your profits, but rather how much you can control your drawdown, so the size of your trades remains more or less the same, or hopefully grow at an even pace.

Good systems, well implemented, make money. But if your leverage is too high, in the bad week you will lose too much. In those bad weeks you may deplete your account so much that it would take you months instead of days or weeks to get back to your starting point.

210

Hi
iam using this ea for 2 weeks also , last week was not good but give it a chance the EUR\USD market is whit no clear direction (i.e. the Euro debt crisis) stop for now the break hunter and continue run the scalpers, maby anyone no how to set the take profit value of this EA?
thanks

211

Hi guys, If you follow the rules you would not have had an issue. Robert is one of th emost customer service focused people I have ever met. I wanted to ensure that I had all the facts first so I COMMUNICATED with them and received one to one advice on numerous occasions. I followed the recommened Broker and opened up an account with them. Yes I am down from my £500 investment to around £486 but I too have been running the EA for about 15 days so cannot understand how you lost $500. From the start SMart FX have been realistic and if you speak to them on their chat room they will even logon to your PC and double check all your settings.

Thats the Positives, the only negative I have is the performance of the Breakout Hunter. Its not a major issue due to the lot size but I do chuckle at some of the entry points. The EUR/USD pair is so volatile and the EA seems to jump on a trend RIGHT AT THE TOP (in a buy position). Anyway, I won’t be turning it off. I’ll run it for the full 30 days and then see what I am left with.

212

Hi Robert,

Can you share the setup of your test accounts? Are they just running on out of the box defaults?

Thanks

214

He offered that you can test it on a DEMO account also. You were not forced to use real money. He clearly states that. Even put it in bold letters in his post.

215

Hi Traders,
First, thanks for the cool support. Appreciated.

All our accounts, Demos and Real accounts, business and personal, ours and our clients’ are all trading the same thing. We all started v7.1 the same day we posted it on the website.
And the settings are strictly “out of the box”. And if we ever feel like tweaking something, we release an update right away, so everyone is in it together.

Regarding the Money Back Guarantee, it is correct that either Demo or Live are equally valid.
Furthermore, if you are new to this, you would be well advised to double check with us before going live, just to make sure. It takes 5 minutes, and we happen to be nice to talk to.
In the case of Fredik, his $500 account was trading lot sizes corresponding to default settings of a $5000 account. That is 10 times bigger than default!. We run demos on his broker (FinFx) and the problem was strictly lot sizes, huge lot sizes. I don’t know (since we were not consulted) whether he used 500:1 or opened a Standard Lot account to trade $500, where he should have opened a smaller account, like mini or micro, so his capital could be used in smaller trades.
No loss should ever exceed 3%. If it does, is time to call us to make sure.
Maybe you even have the wisdom of going on Demo for a couple of days, so you see how the lot sizes work out, to make sure before you go live.
If you are going to be protective of the money you lost, why weren’t you protective before you lost it and asked for advice. We would have loved to spare you the headache.

216

Hi Robert
im a guy who lost 551$ in two days … i was frustrated and mad but now i calmed down specially after you explained and shed the light on some stuff .
your job is tough Robert but you are doing GREAT in it … it’s very rear to find someone like you gives quick answers & reply’s to his customers … “usually they sell you the product and never reply to your emails and never answer the phone” ! … so i give you that man .:35:

we will ask you to just bear with us some more please coz some of us are newbie’s “like me” ,and some of us are putting all their savings on this “like me” !

Now … ill get to my point
i asked earlier in post #197 about the Trailing Stop and if it can be added and included in the next ea update?
but you didnt get the chance to answer my question yet .
i know that im two weeks old in this whole thing … but im just thinking loud …and excuse me if im asking something stupid !.

Robert i used it yesterday manually and i made a successful exit from a losing trade ! … if you look on the same trade we both entered EUR/USD you will see that i escaped with 49$ profit and you were stuck and lost 179$ ! (im attaching next a screenshot of the trade im talking about)

sudacan.jpg700×85 11.4 KB


robert.jpg700×125 12.4 KB

so … i dont know man …but im just saying :33:

217

I have to agree that a trailing stop would be good (i think). also Robert and co are fantastic so even though it is losing me money at the moment i am going to carry on as i think these guys are worth holding on for. I hope the system starts doing better as im down $60 this week.

Using a hotforex currenex account which has had the settings changed by smartfx (thanks for the remote session) to trade as 50:1 on a thrustvps (uk)

Fingers crossed :wink:

218

Today has been rough on my account too. It is days like this that we need to consider how important money management is. I know its like beating a dead dog but the reality is we need to live to trade another day.

Finally I would also add one of the main most important differences between amateur traders and professionals is this…

Amateurs always think in terms of how much money can I make
Professionals always think in terms of how can I preserve my capital when things move against me

because the pro realizes the markets will always move against him from time to time. An edge is defined as giving you better odds in the markets not perfect trading. If you have 100 trades and win 51 you would have an edge. In fact there are times and styles that win much less than 50% of the time and still make profit. The bottom line is no system, no algorithm, no style, no robot will win 100% of the time. That is why Robert talks about leverage and risk. It is critical.

Even if some of you go on to refund this ea, I can assure you that if you fail to grasp this you will fail at trading period.

[B]
Manage your risk and live to trade another day![/B]

219

Hi Traders:

  • I am glad to read your post Sudacan, yep, it’s a game of patient learning, a long term investment… Thanks for the good words.
    On to your question: We have built in something that works similar to a trailing stop, under the Breakeven function: in some pairs, after being in the positive for a few pips, it will reset the SL so we won’t give back the gains. In scalping there isn’t enough room for a trailing stop, since the price is expected to reverse, so we would be leaving the “trail” pips behind us every time, and the scalping channel is just not wide enough to do that.
    In the BH, however, because we enter in the same direction, we just break up the entries as oppose to “trail” the stops. Since many reversals happen for a reason, and many of those times the reason is tied up to news reports, bypassing those times allows us to skip the re-entry and not leave the “trail” money on the table. A trailing stop for the BH cannot be less than 20 pips, or it would blow all the time given the moves of EurUsd. Our TP on 1 order is 32 pips, or 108 for more than 2 orders combined. There is not that much room to leave 20 pips as a trail. Having said that, and having a team of maniacal researchers, we will give it more thought and see if there is a possible improvement there that would work with the next version of BH, which is being tested at this time. Awesome stuff…

  • Yes, today has been a pain. What do you expect from a European Summit day? It is Red in the Forex Factory calendar and posted in your charts. Definite No-Trade Day. The problem is that this is one of those weird economic events that cannot be easily filtered. In the calendar it is coded with the starting time, so the opening of the talks was filtered by our EAs. But the darn thing goes on the whole day, and there is no way to filter that unless we hard-code it. We do that in recurring events like NFP and Interest Rate announcements. But this is just not a usual thing.
    We are working on further improvements to the News Filter, so that in time we’ll go from catching 98% of them, all the way to 99%. But in trading you still have to look out for the proverbial “tsunami”, which will not be in a calendar, will not be filtered, and should not be traded.
    It’s the real world, not a pre-fab game…

220

I’ll try on Demo with $5000.:51:
100:1

221

Regarding losses…

We, as traders, have only one thing that we can control, the rest is at the whim of the market.

What we can control is risk… and if we choose to use too much risk we then donate our account to the broker.

People who want to be donors will use high leverage, those that want to stay in the game will be quite conservative.

This is simple… if you want to lose your account, increase the risk…

Often we HOPE that we can beat the market and this has been proven to be a delusion over and over and over.

222

Thanks for the detailed response and for investigating the trailing stop. Just wandering while the news filter is being perfected could we as your customers receive an email update to advise to switch the ea’s off in the non automated no trade days?

Just a thought.

Also I would like to give a big thank you to Hugh and John from smartfx for being so patient and helpful with me. And ofcourse Robert for your ongoing forum support.

You guys rock :wink:

223

Hi Traders,
Sure, I can post here an alert for those rare days, no problem.
Fraz, I will ask you to remind me when this list runs out, so we get the next month or so going… thanks. Just to make sure…

[B]PLEASE NOTE: I am using NY times and dates in the following list[/B]. If you are in Australia, Singapore, etc., keep this in mind so you do not confuse the dates. When we skip a Monday afternoon in NY, you are skipping a Tuesday morning in Australia… make your conversions carefully…please.

[U]Very important: this list of No Trade Days does not constitute trading advice in any way[/U]. It is just a list of days where the market volatility is expected to be abnormal due to economic reports or unusual market schedule. In our trading strategy we believe that it is better to skip them altogether. Sometimes these days turn out to be profitable, sometimes not. But because they are unpredictable, we rather be conservative and take a break.

The next unfiltered NoTrade Days coming up are:
The G20 meetings, on Nov 3rd and 4th, next week(whole day, both EAs). They are not such a big waste because we were not scalping at all those days on account of the European Interest Rate and NFP. But the Breakout Hunter needs to be stopped manually on both days, thru 0:00 gmt of Monday, so we skip Sunday as well.
ECOFIN meetings are on Monday Nov. 7th., (whole day, no trading on any Euro pair). This can still be bad because of the indecision of European officials on the debt crisis…
Here is a rare beauty, gift to my forum friends: On Nov 16th thru 17th, skip EurCad, because of the end of the Front End Oil Futures monthly contracts, which mess up the oil market and affect deeply the Cad. The end of the contracts is on the 18th, but the two prior dates are the big swings in prices.
On Nov 24th and 25th (both days, both EAs)we have the Thanksgiving weekend in the US, both Thursday and Friday are bad news. Last year was really messy. Should skip those too, altogether.
Nov. 29th, ECOFIN again, (whole day, no trading on any Euro pair).
On Dec 7th we have NZD interest rate, I would skip the EurAud, just in case.
Dec. 18th thry 19th, no EurCad, Oil contracts again.
Starting Thursday Dec 22nd thru January 4th, it’s Russian roulette, really bad trading. Enjoy the Holidays and let the first couple of trading days of the year go by as well. Just not predictable in any way.(Both EAs)

That’s the list for the remainder of the year. The rest is automated by the News Filter.
By the time we update this list for next year, it will be smaller, since we expect to make much of this list automated as well.

NY, starting next week, will again be GMT-5, once DST is reversed.
Since we are talking entire NoTrade Days, you should skip the scalping session of the day in question, completely, and on the Breakout Hunter, the whole trading day (9am GMT to the following days same time). This will cover Sunday if it’s on a weekend (9am gmt Friday to 9am gmt Monday)

224

Thats great Robert, we are all here to make money so im sure no one wouldnt mind making these changes if it means less losses and more profit, thumbs up

225

Just wanted to say it is a pleasure dealing with SmartFX - John has been very patient and posts from you here Robert are certainly very much appreciated.

226

Quick List of my long-winded explanation…:13:

Nov 3rd and 4th - turn off Breakout Hunter and Master Scalper
Nov. 7th - turn off Breakout Hunter and Master Scalper (except UsdJpy)
Nov 16th thru 17th - turn off Master Scalper for EURCAD
Nov 24th and 25th - turn off Brekout Hunter and Master Scalper
Nov. 29th - turn off Breakout Hunter and Master Scalper (except UsdJpy)

Dec 7th - turn off Master Scalper for EURAUD
Dec. 18th thry 19th - turn off Master Scalper for EURCAD
Dec 22nd thru January 4th - turn off all EAs