Friday, September 26, 2008

Bogie-NN-v8 Expert Advisor by William Boatright, a Review

Today I decided to write a review about an ea that has been around for a while and has attracted the attention of many forex traders. The expert advisor I am talking about is the Bogie-NN-8v advisor developed by William Boatright. This ea is said to be neural network based and has managed to get profits in excess of 50% on some months.

Well, first of all, let me tell you, in my opinion, what Bogie is and what Bogie is not. Bogie is an automated trading system based on an indicator developed using a neural network approach, Bogie is not a neural network. What does this mean ? A neural network is supposed to optimize itself continously, that means, with each new tick, the expert should reevaluate and reoptimize itself to better adapt to current market conditions. A neural network, in analogy to your brain, should be able to "learn" from past experiences and therefore increase it's possibilities of trading the market profitably.

Bogie does not do this, the expert advisor does not continuously optimize itself but is based on an indicator developed months ago which is now, most probably, obsolete due to changes in the way market conditions have changed. To compensate for this, Bogie has to be optimized, that is, some parameters have to be changed in order to adapt the ea to current market conditions. The problem, as you may infer, is that the ea is always being adapted to some period of time before the present which may or may not represent current market conditions.

In essence, trading Bogie is like flipping a coin, if your parameters are aligned with current market conditions you will make money, if you don't you will lose (very volatile, you can expect +/-50%). This type of approach for an expert advisor is unreliable as it is true that expert advisors can remain profitable without constant optimization, which is, anyway, like guessing current market conditions. When do you reoptimize ? How do you know it works ? You can't know.

Furthermore, the use of the NN indicator is completely pointless since it can be replaced by any other market indicator. You can always optimize a variation in any indicator and correlate it with price as you would with the Bogie indicator.

In my opinion, although William's intentions with this ea are good and I believe him to be an honest person with the retail trader in mind, the expert advisor simply does not work, it's approach is flawed by design since the ea is not really a neural network and the optimizations needed are not guaranteed to improve the experts performance. If you want to see how Bogie has performed on forward testing and learn more about reliable and profitable commercial and free expert advisors please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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