The reason why you had trades and I did not is because the NoTrade Day of Nov. 30th finished earlier for your broker than for mine, since mine is gmt -4 (NY time)
and this is for johnny: why did you stop trading with this ea since September? how is that EA performing for you today?
Read more: 301 Moved Permanently
I am running these ea’s. I never stopped. Also the account I posted is live. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t believe in demo results. The only true test of an ea’s vaibility is in live forward testing. Don’t get me wrong back testing has it’s place but nothing replaces live forward testing.
If you look at my account all those ea’s listed under magic number were basically being tested all at once. By September I had started running Smart FX Tech and I never looked back. I got rid of most of my other ea’s that were not profitable and were responsible for large draw downs and eventually the margin call of that account.
At this point I have smartfx and wally running. I have mdp running but honestly I think I am going to get rid of it. Smart FX is by far the best ea’s I have in my portfolio. I believe in them and I run them live on my main account as well as my test account.
Hi Johnny,
Thanks for sharing and starting this .I’m have stopped MDP.
I have a question for Robert, Would you recommed to turn the EA off till Monday 12/05/2011 ?
Also, Robert thanks for all the posts and recommendations. I enjoyed your explanation about Margin call and I must say it happened to me a fews times and the feeling wasn’t great.
Slow and Steady hope to grow with smart fx and hope this EA goes the distance.
Hi Still learning,
The EA will actually stop on its own because of Non Farm Payrolls on Friday.
So today we have the scalper trading only till about 21:00 gmt, and then no new orders till Monday.
Basically the EA is programmed to read your mind… cool.
The Breakout Hunter, on the other hand, loves a rough NFP and will trade accordingly, so buckle up for that one.
If you consider that the European events are just too much, well, I can’t blame you. Hopefully next week will find them with their act together. Good luck on that.
Thank you Johnny and Robert for contributing. Do you know any certain flaws of the Smart FX EA on backtesting? I mean certainly the news filter. Does it work back in time? In theory, we are supposed to set only GMT differencials and risk management props in EAs? 4/5 digit functioning is AUTO?
steve
Hi John,
i love your contributions to this topic. 
But i don’t understand why they state “demo” when its not.
regards, Alex
Hello Pittikie,
You can backtest our EAs, we certainly do it all the time. I’ll give you a full picture, although you may not quite need all this information, other readers may benefit from it.
The trick is to have good data, one that you know what gmt time differential it relates to, and one that is backtested with correct spread settings on the MT4. To make it more complicated, the Metaquotes data you download from the MT4 directly is not so good, since it is an average of prices of a lineup of brokers, and usually gives results that look too good when compared to real trading with a single broker’s price feed, so you get good results that do not hold up in real life.
The News Filter will not work, since the Forex Factory has only the current week available, so you need to turn that off. Risk management: leave it in default values for starters, 4/5 digit is automated, GMT differential has to be entered manually.
Backtesting properly is very involved. For example, if you backtest over the weekend, when your broker enlarged the spreads for the Friday closing, you will be testing the data on spreads that could be 10 times larger than usual spreads. Those results are useless…
If you do not “freeze-in-time” an MT4 and keep it connected to the broker, the price of the pair and (if ECN) the spread will vary every time you backtest. Comparison between those tests will also be useless.
We have 12 servers in the cloud backtesting around the clock. This is what we do.
We test the current EAs, the next updates, and the next EAs we are planning to release in the future. It really requires very thorough work to make progress with it.
But on the other hand it’s a lot of fun if you like trading, spreadsheets and probabilities.
nice to read that, i didnt knew that backtesting was that complicated.
Robert how is development of the robots, is there any update coming soon, any sneak peak? new features maybe?
heheh, is just for curiosity. im waiting to get my credit card and start using that baby.
Hi,
We always have updates in the making, but we do not have a release planned in the near future, since the last one was just released less than a month ago.
Next year we’ll hopefully see new EAs, if we can finish successful forward testings currently under way. These will not be related to the existing EAs, but something quite different. Sorry, no sneak peak… :33:
Robert, tomorrow is NFP, what hours (GMT) will the scalper be offline for?
Thanks
Due to NFP, the UsdJpy scalper will not trade 16 hours before and 16 hours after.
Basically no trading till Monday for UsdJpy.
The Euro pairs will scalp normally between 17:00 and 20:30, like any Friday, since they are not related to the US report.
The BH will be trading with some time off before the NFP.
The past few posts just made me realize that the time in my mt4 (hotforex via VPS) is not GMT.
Right now at the time of this post GMT is 5.15am and on my mt4 it is 7.15am. Could someone tell me what exactly I need to adjust in my settings to either adjust the mt4 time or to adjust the EA?
Tomorrow I will draw my first conclusions about this EA, although it is still a bit early to do so (I have been using it for 2 weeks, but this week was packed with No Trade Days) but I hope to do some minor adjustments already anyway - as I do not really care about money back guarantee, because I see ho many of you are profitable with this bot - so I assume it is really about some minor tweaking to improve my results… more about that tomorrow;)
have a good one
The GMT is automatically adjusted by the EA.
Hi, Robert,
If the webstie you use as the source of news filter is down, what will happen to the EA?
Regards,
Ming
Good question: The Calendar is uploaded at the beginning of the week and is updated every 15 minutes in case there are last minute changes in the economic calendar. If the news website was down, it would not update, which is not much of an issue since usually the reports calendar seldom changes during the course of the week.
Worst case scenario, it would just trade without concern for the news, which would bring us back to the prior version of the EA, not much of a problem either.
Having said that, the Forex Factory website is highly reliable, so I doubt that we will seeing many problems of that nature, anyway.
I see. Thanks for your reply.
ok thanks.
I will post my stats this weekend, and hope to make some conclusions and adjustments with the help of you and the members of this forum.looking forward to that.
have a good one
Robert,
despite having all my nodatefilter set to true, none of my charts are showing no trade day today. Is that correct?
Correct, Tradingshed.
The sign “No Trade Day” appears only on those situations where the Date has been called a No-Trade Day due to the Date, not the event calendar. For example the last day of the month.
Today we have Non Farm Payrolls. In the UsdJpy you will see the [U]report’s name in Red[/U], indicating that trading is suspended.
EurUsd will go red closer to the report time, since that strategy requires less blackout time.
The rest of the pairs are trading normal since they are not affected by US reports directly.
On those dates that are eliminated by date, not report name, we print “No Trade Day”, since there is nothing else to turn red and we’d like to know why it’s not trading…
so, a report name in red text means that trading will be suspended on that pair according to manual? If the text remains orange, no suspension?
Also, if one wanted to increase size, do you recommend to increase the risk setting first or the lot sizes? Which should be first choice?
Thanks