Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Apocalypse an unbiased review

My eye turns again today towards the review of a new automated trading system. Two people have talked to me about this EA and wanted me to give my unbiased opinion about this trading system. My objective with this post is to write a review of this new expert advisor and in particular, to evaluate the claims made by the author against the evidence provided to determine if this trading system is worth or not worth buying and testing.

First of all, lets see what the creator of the forex apocalypse system has to say about its trading and what he says the EA can achieve. This guy claims without any worries that the EA can turn 3K into 170K USD and other similar profit targets. I can say that this things never seem to get old. Why do this expert advisor sellers keep on making this extraordinarily bold claims they CANNOT backup ?

Let us look at the evidence provided what the authors. A bunch of backtests and graphs. I am absolutely sorry, but a backtest is absolutely NO evidence of the profitability of an EA without live testing to prove it's consistent. It could just be that he made an EA that used bar closes on actual bars and could look into the future or he exploited one minute interpolation or one of the many other things he could do to make a system trade profitably when it does not. How do we know this is not the case ? We simply don't. However the large profits with the reduced draw downs hints towards an explotation of backtesting failures, also, the fact that ANY live testing is missing also hints to this fact.

Come on, you must be kidding us. We are NOT retarted and we will not buy a trading system based on evidence we could make ourselves in 5 minutes. I could make a system that had those profits in backtesting and draw some charts on metatrader to look like those. There is ABSOLUTELY NO CONSISTENT EVIDENCE that can backup ANY of the claims this guy is making. This puts forex apocalypse into the sadly LARGE amount of totally worthless expert advisors out there.

Needless to say, this expert advisor is in my opinion, totally NOT worth buying. If you would like to learn more about how you can learn to evaluate, build and program your own automated trading systems or trade already freely available long term profitable systems in the forex market 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Bling an Unbiased Review

After a lot of asking from my website visitors, newsletter subscribers and fellow retail traders, I have finally decided to review the forex bling system by Yohannes H.Gagahlin and the team at forexhope.com. Mr. Gagahlin claims his system to be different from the rest and claims it can bring success in forex trading to his fellow men. My objective with this review is to evaluate his claims against his evidence and tell you if his forex bling system is worth buying or testing. Of course, I get no gains from either positive or negative comments about this system.

To start, Yohannes does a good job at portraying his website, although a little bit on the marketing side for me, Yohannes makes absolutely no unrealistic claims through the whole page and leaves the profitability and draw down perception in the hands of the viewers. I have to congratulate him and his team for this webpage, it does look polished and provides easy access to the concepts and the evidence without being overly cheesy. However, I would strongly encourage him to cut the BS, those statements that say that only the next X people will get the software or that the price is dropped from X to Y is completely void of any meaning and is only meant to push people into buying this. Please, don't do this, if you he has enough evidence people will buy his system without these lame pressure methods.

Now, I have to tell you that I know Yohannes, he is actually a real person. I have him in my facebook and he has friends and family and everything like anyone of us. He is also a currency analyst and in fact I can say that I have always had a good view about his trading systems. As you may know, his DTS-1 system is currently being tested on my weekly newsletter.

As far as his forex bling thing goes, I'll tell you what I think. He does make a good point with 4 month long live tests anddemos making up the point tha the experts are indeed live/demo consistent. As always, I consider his profit targets and draw down targets are unrealistic. I have always thought that his systems have higher market exposure than what he says. Particularly now, his systems have shown very low draw downs from June. Be extremely careful as this draw down and profit targets are not what you should expect in the long term. However, I do consider that he does make a good point up until now about the profitability of his systems. On another point, there are no 10 year long backtests that show us that there is robustness on the systems. For me this is obviously something that is necessary in order to seriously consider long term profitability. Of course, if the systems are to be continuously optimized by his team, then it is probable that these systems will remain profitable for longer periods of time, but who knows.

Another very important aspect to consider here seems to be the cost. If you consider that the regular forex trader has about 1000 USD to invest and he would spend 250 USD a year in VPS fees then adding another 400 USD in the forex bling subscription, he would need at least a 60% profit to break even. I consider that with moderate risk, the forex bling package will be able to achieve, in the best case scenario, this or a slightly higher target. Maybe for most forex traders this won't be worth buying merely because of this fact. Although this is not bound to affect traders with higher investment capitals.

I would have to say to Yohannes that I would need a 10 year backtest (since backtesting consistency seems to be proven) to see that his systems are long term profitable. Otherwise, the chances for this system to crash and burn seem just as likely as any of the other short term profitable systems. If this cannot be done, then I would need at least 2 years of live trading. Sorry but these are the requirements to at least have an idea of how the system (and Yohannes's team) can couple up with market changes and such events.

As of now, this system is NOT worth buying and I would encourage Yohannes to give more evidence of long term profitability as ten year bactests (with proof of backtesting/live testings consistency) if this cannot be done, then we still need to see more to actually believe his claims. It is not enough to have a 4 month trackrecord to trade a system, usually money managers are demanded 2 or even 10 year track records, and this is for a very good reason.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading system and how you too can develop and program your own profitable long term system or trade the god's gift ATR profitably in the forex market 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Phantom an unbiased Review

I have to say that I have actually been looking forward to writting this post for a while. Today I will focus on the review of the Forex Phantom expert advisor which has some very special claims we will evaluate about the evidence provided by the expert's creators. I believe this expert is special because it clearly states "no more BS, no more hype, no more fake screen names or actors, fully legal & legit", of course, as soon as I see a statement like this I want to look more into the expert to see if it can truly live up to such wonderful claims.

It turns out to be however, that this expert just does not. For starters, the forex phantom creators just give us a relatively short backtest as trading evidence. They backup their claims about pulling six figures from the market by just showing us that on a simulatiob ? Hey ! Please, do not confuse facts and fiction, you have never pulled six figures from the market ! That just happened in a simulation, NOT in real life. So here it is, the BS, just in fron of our faces. I though this was supposed to be a non BS site ? Well, guess what ? Forex phantom is as full of it as many other experts out there and I find it really amazing that they even have the balls to say they are not. If you say you an pull six figures from the market in such a short time why aren't you showing us some live testings showing how good your backtests correlate with your live tests ?

They are certainly not doing it because probably this two things have nothing to do with each other ! Of course, would you thing that a trading system would produce such incredibly large amounts of profit in such a short time ? Also, why is their backtesting information so limited ? Why isn't their a backtesting from at least 2000 if the system is really long term profitable ? Truth be told, the system probably wiped out account on the years before, showed incredible draw down levels or did not produce any profits at all, but well, I guess we will never know.

I wonder how this people can be so bold faced and say that their system is proven, no hype and no BS when that is probably all that their is on their webpage ? This system does not show any reliable proof to backup their claims, there are no backtests from 200 and no live tests t compare the backtests to to say if they are reliable or not. So guess what ? This system, in my opinion, is totally NOT worth buying and not even worth the calories it takes to use the mouse to scroll down the screen. Of course, I would be glad to change my whole review if evidence of long term backtests and live tests we can compare to backtests with investor access are given. Why do I have the feeling I will never get them ?

If you would like to learn more about why commercial automated trading systems do not work most of the time and what free long term profitable trading systems DO work and can make you a profit with realistic profit and draw down goals in the forex market 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 !

Your loss becomes my gain... The world of FX affiliates...

Today I want to write a post about a very delicate topic, the world of forex affiliate programs and in particular, the world of automated trading and its relationship with affiliate marketers. I have been giving this topic a lot of thought for the past few days and since I had not written about these matters for a while, I have decided that it was time to tell you (and any affiliates reading this), what I think about affiliate marketing schemes in the forex market and why I have never and will never be anyone's affiliate when dealing with automated trading systems.

To start I want to tell you a little bit about my story. When I had the idea to start this website in the fall of 2007, they were practicaly no forex expert advisor review websites out there besides CK's from Singapore. I had the idea to start this website because, as CK, I was intrigued by the automated trading world and I wanted to have that glorious automated trading system that would turn 500 USD into a million in a few years. As I started, I decided that they were two ways in which I could do things.

One way was to start my website as CK, review and comment and also gain profits from the affiliate links to expert advisor sellers on my website or the other way was to make the website without any affiliate marketing whatsoever and just say my straight opinion about the system's, their trading, etc. It is obvious that the first way offers a much larger probability towards monetary gains but it was also obvious for me that it would be hard for me to say bad things about things that were bad if I would win money from selling them. Personally I chose at the beginning to work without affiliate links because of this.

As I progressed in my quest for automated trading holy grials, viable systems, etc, I realized that there was much more to this and that being an affiliate marketer to these guys is, for me, just unethical. Right now I feel that the knowledge I have on automated trading is larger than the knowledge the general public has (I have learned a lot of things these past 2 years of automated trading plus all the years I traded previously) so I feel that I have a responsibility to be true to my words and to carefully and accurately evaluate expert advisor systems. I know that there are a few or many people out there who will buy a system just because I give a positive opinion about it, just because I have been honest about my reviews and they know that if I say a system has potential, then I have legimite and valid reasons to say so. There is no money for me to make from saying anything good or bad about anything.

Many expert advisor reviewers have taken an approach similar to CK's first approach. They are just giving their opinions and their testing statements and just leaving the decision to buy whatever they have affiliate links to to their visitors. In my case, there is not a single commercial EA I have found that can offer valid proof of their claims beyond reasonable doubt and that can say with a very high degree of probability, that their system will be profitable in the future. I believe that being a reviewer that profits on affiliate sales just by offering comments without in depth analysis is a dangerous and irresponsible position since it would be exceedingly easy to have a bunch of experts with at least some showing some good returns in the short term and have these results convince people about buying systems which are not long term profitable. Most of these expert advisor reviewer websites lack depth on their analysis and this lack of depth may bring very bad consequences for the people using and buying all these expert advisors. This lack of depth is fueled by the fact that the affiliate links generate revenue for the reviewers so this analisys (which I do and points out to the unprofitability of almost all experts out there) does not benefit the EA reviewers. To sum it up, most reviewers out there may be showing the most convenient truth reflected by their testing without taking into account the most important and fundamental aspects of the trading systems.

Of course, these EA reviewers make a ton more money than me who just humbly makes enough for his VPS fees by means of his ebook and newsletter subscription. Of course, my intention is not to get my money from you, my fellow traders, but from the market out there, reason why I focus so much time on the programming of new strategies. I am also very interested in the protection of my fellow traders since I truly cannot believe that the forex automated trading business has become such an unethical place. This is the reason why I have devoted so much time to the creation of my forex automated trading ebook. Being profitable in the forex market with automated trading systems is possible, it is just not as easy as most people think.

I believe that the path I have chosen is the hardest and that the lack of affiliates may make my website a less profitable business but in the end I feel that all the knowledge I have gained and all the efforts I have put into system development and evaluation will eventually pay off with life long stable profits in the forex market. What I am doing is building and edge against the market, I am not interested in building an edge to get a cut of these (mostly in my opinion) unethical expert advisor sellers.

If you would like to learn more about my opinion on automated trading, the language I have gathered and the long term profitable automated systems I have traded and developed (as well as how to program and trade your own systems !) 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 !

I'm Starting with the Man in the Mirror...

Drifting a little bit away from my usual posts about automated trading system reviews and trading guidelines today I want to take a minute to pull your attention towards an entirely different and much more important matter (in my opinion).

I have always considered myself to be a good person, at least I consider myself to be ethical, moral and honest. These characteristics have always had me wondering about the things that happen in our world, why there is so much injustice, hunger, war, etc. Probably if you feel the same way you may have thought about theses things, probably those of you who are currently in a developed country like me may not see all of this beyond the usual documentary, news, etc, but we all know these things are real and they all deserve our attention.

From time to time I have given good thought to as how I may contribute to end the things that are bad in this world but I have always been defeated by this thought experiment. It is extremely hard to consider ways in which you can help that are really helpful and that do make a difference when we (at least me) have so little influence over the big scheme of things. The majority of people may just consider it easier to leave this in the hands of somebody else and simply pretend these matters do not exist. I am not saying that they are bad for doing this, I know that doing otherwise is much more difficult. However, I cannot simply comfort myself thinking that I cannot do anything when certainly I know there must be something I can do.

Fortunately, a small while ago, I found a way in which I could make a difference. I found several children sponsoring programs that help children in developing countries get basic healthcare, food and education for a very small fee each month. Particularly I have decided to sponsor a child at www.loveachildfoundation.com, which I particularly liked because of the smaller nature and more personal focus of the organization. I know that sponsoring a child will not save the world, but at least it will help save that child and maybe if we all did the same, this world would be totally different.

Of course, I am planning on doing this permanently and in proportion to my income so I have decided I will spend 10% of my net income sponsoring children who desperately need this kind of help. Sponsoring even a single child will cost less than what probably most people in first world countries spend in beer every month so it is really not a big change in income for most of you out there. If you are like me and you feel that you want to make this world a better place, then this may be something you would like to do, the gratitude from the child and the feeling that you are actually doing something altruistic for an innocent child who did nothing to deserve his desperate situation is also exceedingly gratifying.

Finally I would like to encourage all of you to sponsor a child or doing something in the likes to help your fellow men. As for me, in the words of the king of pop, "I'm starting with the man in the mirror". I hope you enjoyed this post ! Make sure you leave any comments. :-)

Forex Expert Advisors : Pipboxer v5 an unbiased review

This one will be a good one. Today I am focusing on the review of the pipboxer v5 system. The pipboxer system is a quiet old automated trading system that has actually been out there since late 2006 and that I traded before (older versions) with very bad results. This version claims to be different than previous versions and it claims to achieve profitable results in forex trading. Since a newsletter subscriber has recently requested a review of this trading system I felt inclined to write this post and give my opinion about the current state of the art of the pipboxer v5 system. I will compare their evidence with their claims and evaluate their logic in roder to give my opinion about the long term profitability of this expert advisor.

First of all, the pipboxer system seems to have done a certain effort to provide people with a good amount of live testing evidence. However, the way in which this evidence is displayed is quiet awkward and difficult to navitage through, something which makes it harder to get to where I wanted. Second, the evidence is not always given as statements but sometimes they are just some spreadsheets, something which I don't like, I always like trading statements to be available so that I can watch the evolution of the system trade by trade.

When it comes to the profitability of the expert, it becomes obvious that the expert suffers from some serious problems. Almost all profitability comes from the GBP/JPY pair (which is not what you would expect from a system trading 12 pairs) and also and most important, this expert is veyr likely NOT to be long term profitable because of it's horrific risk to reward ratio which I calculated to be near 90:1, that is, a losing trade needs almost 90 profitable trades to come out to the other side. This is evidenced when you compare SL and TP values on the live statements they do give. Then another important fact,why are statements from 2009 trading missing ? Why are they only test for previous years ?

This becomes a little bit clearer when you start looking at people's results online, you will see that most people have lost very good chunks of money in 2009 with this system. This system is of course not long term profitable, from a simple glance at the statements and the risk to reward ratio I could have inferred that. The creators do say on forexpeacearmy that they are looking at ways to correct these issues in 2009 but come on, it did not surprise me at all. This system was a bad one in 2006 and it continues to be a bad one in 2009. If their original system had fulfilled half the claims they had at the time they would now have 3 years of live testing. They actually don't have enough evidence for long term profitability and their impossibility for backtesting (due to the use of several pairs) and lack of live testing from 2009 (which is supicious) makes it very difficult to believe their claims.

Of course, if in 2012 they have 5 year long profitable statements I will reconsider this review. Meanwhile, I urge you to stay away from their system, they don't have enough evidence to prove their calims, and in my opinion, their system is just flawd by design. However, if you would like to learn more about automated trading systems and which free systems you can trade in a long term profitable fashion, preserving your capital and having realistic profit targets lease 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 !

Expert Advisors... The neighborhood full of loose dogs

When I think of the forex automated trading market right now and the way in which it has worked for the past couple of years one analogy always comes to mind. I tend to imagine this expert advisor market as a neighborhood full of loose mean dogs in which you are alone and trying to get across. I think that this perfectly portrays the confusion, misinformation, exploitation of ignorance, unethical behavior and other "properties" of this forex automated trading world.

Why is this market so uncontrolled ? Why is this happening ? For me it is pretty obvious, large sums of money are involved and whenever large sums of money are involved it doesn't take long for the predators of our race to go against their "prey", that is, retail traders who have just begun and are just desperate or wishing to earn financial independence. These people will go to great lengths to deprive everyone of their hard earned money. People will give their money willingly because they don't know any better and they trust the people that lie to them to be honest. The more and more I spend time roaming around this smelly market, the more I realize how people are tricked and how low and dishonest these marketing tactics the use are.

For me there is just one solution to this problem, which is summed up in a single word : regulation. The expert advisor market is in desperate need of some kind of regulation of what can and cannot be sold. People would argue against this since people are free to buy whatever they want and everyone is allowed to sell whatever they want. That is true, but to lie bluntly in order to sell something is an entirely different matter. This EA creators sell you an expert they say can "triple you account every month", "turn x into 100x" and they say this systems have been "battlefield tested", "proved", etc, without any actual conclusive evidence to backup their claims. I did not go to law school but I do consider that tellings lies to sell people things is immoral and should be punishable by law. Specially if it causes these people to lose their money because of their purchase.

My request is simple, have a necessary degree of proof for each claim established so that they are forced to show some realistic, convincing proof of anything they want to claim. It is not that hard, I am just asking for these people to show us the truth, plain and simple. Of course, this will only become true if people gain knowledge and start to demand this in a massive fashion, in no other way will the expert advisor sellers listen. Mainly because most of them cannot backup any of their claims (as you see within my reviews). Sadly, as with the informmercial market, this is likely never going to happen because most people that enter this market are ignorant about this situation and ignorance my friends, turns people into blind men driving.

If you would like to know more about what I have learned about this market, how you can evaluate experts and their proof, build, test and program your own systems and start trading the forex market profitably using automated trading systems 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Roboteer an ubiased review

The forex roboteer expert advisor is a trading system designed by peter parsons an elegetely experienced forex trader who is also the creator of the forex ranger expert advisor. He claims that the forex roboteer expert advisor is a long term profitable trading system and he also makes a strong emphasis in the importance of optimization and how he has been able to streamline the whole process to make it very easy and seamless for his EA customers. The objective of today's post is to evaluate Mr. Parson's claims against the evidence he provides. On this post I will give my opinions and analysis on this trading system and how I consider it stands regarding long term profitability.

The claims made by this expert advisor seller are quiet as we would expect , he claims to have up to 83% winning trades, automatic money management, 77 trades per month, built in optimization, etc. I have to say that the evidence he provides does allow me to evaluate the expert advisor and the validity of his claims to some extent. The first thing I noticed was that there are both backtests and live tests on his webpage, live tests seem to be broken up in months and some months like June seem to have been left out. I am always very very skeptycal when I see broken down live statements because the act of breaking them up can be used to eliminate losing trades. Since this guy's system has a very unfavorable risk to reward ratio of almost 5:1, you would have to say that getting out some loses could perfectly make the system more profitable. I also know several forex traders and non of them ever take trades with a risk to reward ratio of more than 1:3, that is, they never take anything in which they are not going to risk 1/3 of their possible profit. Why would I ever believe that a proffesional trader would design a system with a 5:1 ratio ? I simply just don't, at least not a trader who has really been long term profitable for a few yers.

The fact that June is left out of the live tests also makes me very suspicious, why wasn't it traded ? is it never traded ? Or was it just traded and there were too many loses to show ? This is totally wrong. Also the backtesting is very limited and only partial backtests are shown. Why not show us a 10 year long backtest ? Evenmore, why not show us year long backtests with walks forward to show us how the optimization performs ? What about back vs live testing comparisons ?

Well, you guesses right, the most probable thing is that all these things are missing for a good reason, they probably show the true face of this expert advisor, which, as many other systems out there with unfavorable risk to reward ratios is just short term profitable and then gets ripped appart as the market evolves. This systems also are not very good to optimize because you cannot optimize to the future ! only to the past ! and changes in the lower time frames happen rapidly so optimization is bound not to work because you always lag the market (and it changes to fast on those timeframes).

In my opinion, this system is NOT worth buying because there is a substantial failure to provide convincing enough evidence that a) the optimization works b) the system indeed produces profits in the long run c) the system's backtests are consistent with the live testing information. That said, if all this information is provided, I will be glad to rewrite this review. In the meantime, if you would like to know more about why experts like this and others fail so frequently in the forex market and what actually works in forex automated trading lease 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : VipFX an unbiased review

The VipFX expert advisor is yet another automated trading system designed for the mt4 trading platform that claims to give outrageous profits in short time spans with moderate risk levels. My objective with today's post is to evaluate the author's claims in comparison with the evidence he provides and to give my honest unbiased opinion about this trading system taking this into account.

Now this expert advisor is a special case I had not seen in a while. The VipFX author actually makes up a decent website that shows significant amounts of evidence supporting his claims. I would have to say that according to what he says and the evidence he has, there seems to be a complete backup of his claims. He actually has 6 months of trading evidence coupled with live tests that show how the average profit per month is actually superior to 25% and he also has backtests that seem to be consistent with his live testing evidence. Well, everything looks good until you really start to analyze his trading system.

Of course, for people who have been trading the forex market for a longer time, the identity of the trading system this guy is using should seem obvious just because of the look of his equity curve. This guy is trading a Martingale ! Of course, a system that uses incremental money management gets consistent profits by means of an expotential market exposure. It is the sort of system that works perfectly until it does NOT. A perfect example of this is the simple daily system I tested earlier this year which showed a profit of more than 150% during the first six months of trading, that would average more than 20% of trading, however, it is obvious that eventually this money management system will blow up your account. This can take a while ! (even two years!)

It is also worth saying that martingales do NOT have significant draw downs until they come up to or actually wipe out an account. Be extremely careful about systems like this. NEVER trade a martingale. Maybe you think you can just withdraw profits ? Well, Martingales defend from this strategy by wiping out accounts in unpredictable cycles so it may wipe out an account 20 times in 2 months, then once 6 months after that, then 5 times one month. Trust me, martingales CANNOT be traded profitably in the long run (this has been tested time and time again, as I explained with the simple daily system example) so you definitely stay away from them. Of course, this system is NOT worth buying and you should stay away from anything that resembles it.

If you would like to learn more about reliable trading strategies and how you too can use one to become profitable in the long run using automated trading 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Combo System an unbiased review

The Forex Combo System is an expert advisor that claims to be a proven professional trading system which offers long term profits. The subject of today's post will be to review this trading system according to the evidence given by the authors. As always, my comments on this expert advisor are as unbiased as they can be as I receive no compensation for giving either positive or negative remarks about the system.

The forex Combo system is devided into three different expert advisors which follow scalping, breakout and countertrend trading strategies. The webpage is pretty straightforward and takes us directly to the evidence of profitability for this trading system. The first thing that we see are backtests for the past 3 years for each one of the trading systems. I have to say two things about this, first, giving results in pips is an absolutely misleading way of showing profits (as the actual result we are interested in is actual percentage of equity and how this relate to pip values depends on money management) second, the levels of profit this guy talks about are absolutely irrealistic. Unfortunately it is this type of system that drives most people to say that metatrader backtesting is completely "worthless" and that people should only listen to live testing evidence. Of course, in cases like this, backtesting seems to be flawed because of a) the strategy has serious problems with interpolation errors because it enters trades midbar or b) the strategy has been designed purposefully to overexploit hindsight. Both of this things should be explained by the seller and the values are completely unrealistic and are NOT true. The system shows the classical behavior of a system that exploits a backtesting failure with huge profits and very smal draw downs. It has been shown that when this type of systems are brought to live trading they fail heavily.

The creator of the expert advisor also shows us some very limited live testing information which was suspiciously only carried out for two months. Given the fact that this was started in march and we are currently in septemeber, this guy could have approximately 6 months of live testing. Why doesn't he show them ? the truth is that he probably doe snot because the evidence did not favor his sales very much. Probably the system started to fail after the first few nonths and he therefore did not dare publish the results on his website. I mean, if I were him, I would have trouble sleeping. How could you sell something to people which you know by a fact, is NOT profitable. Talk about being unethical.

If he stopped the testing because he just didn't feel like testing anymore then how the hell can you sell something to people that you dare not trade with your own money ? There is just no way out of this, once you publish live testing you must keep on publishing it indefintely or otherwise it casts serious doubts on both the profitability of the system and the ethics of the person selling it. In my opinion this is just a worthless trading system like many others which has a backtest that is totally worthless and some very limited live testing that is only there to impress people who are easily caught by the idea of heavy profits (which unfortunately can be many).

Of course, this system is totally NOT worth buying and I would advice anyone who finds a system like this to just run away. However, if you would like to learn more about expert advisor evaluation and how you can stop losing and start a long term profitable relation with automated trading lease 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Triad an unbiased Review

Today I am going to focus on the review of the Forex Triad trading system which was requested last week by a newsletter subscriber. This expert advisor claims to be a "system so robust & powerful it can instantly identify winning trades, transforming you into an expert in every market condition no matter what your current level of experience is... Guaranteed". For sure, the first thing that went to my head when I read this was "they should better have the evidence to backup such a bold statement", of course, after analyzing the whole website I soon arrived to some very decisive conclucions about this trading system which will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

The Forex Triad trading system is part of a group of pure hype expert advisors that have multiplied like ants for the past year. Throughout the whole system's webpage there is nothing but talk, talk and talk with little evidence to backup the things they say. This guy is pretty bold to say that his system is "guaranteed" in any sense as there is not even a single glimpse of proof that can even hint to any of this guy's claims being true. For example, this person says that the forex triad system is able to work under any market condition. I am sick of reading this over and over again, why would a person say something works under every market condition when this is NOT proved anywhere ? There is simply no proof ever showed by the guy that tells us that his system is able to do this. Moreover there is not even proof that his system is profitable at all.

The creator of this system just goes on and on about things with no importance and then shows us some charts with "sample trades" and "testimonials" as evidence of a system's profitability. This type of evidence is what I like to call "soft" evidence because it does backup a system's profitability claims when 'hard" evidence (like verifiable trading statements) exit but by itself it is nothing but an illusion. I could go into metatrader and make those charts in 15 min, I could also write 6 fake testimonials in 5 minutes. Who says this guy is not ? Also, this guy should be aware (if he is no experienced in forex trading) that a few trades are NOT enough to know how a system works, in fact, thousands of trades are required to know this, specially if you want to prove your system works under EVERY market condition.

This type of sales page and the fact that there are people trying to sell systems out there with outrageous claims and NO proof of profitability is something that makes me angry. I wonder how many people have fallen prey to this guy and have actually lost their hard earned money trading this thing. I mean, if there is no evidence for profitability it is probably because the system loses money. If the webpage has a few months, the guy should have at least a few live tests on different brokers and a 10 year old backtest to prove his claims. If he does not, then maybe the evidence was not so "in tune" with the sales pitch. Don't waste your time with this system, it is absolutely, in my opinion, NOT worth buying.

If you would like to learn more about how long term profitable systems are really traded, tested, evaluated and how you can start to make money with realistic profit and draw down targets in the forex market lease 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Supernatural an Unbiased Review

Another expert advisor I was asked to review one or two weeks ago was the Forex Supernatural trading system. This trading system was released at the beginning of this month and it's website promises, as most expert advisors do, to give traders a high percentage of winning trades with highly probable profitable trades. The objective of this review is to evaluate forex supernatural's ability to live up to it's claims in virtue of the evidence provided by the author.

This type of sales page is the one I hate the most. First of all, the expert advisor creator is purposefully misleading through the whole sales page, never speaking about the balance necessary to carry out trades or the actual percentage of equity its trades represent. Again, as I have said many times, absolute money values are MEANINGLESS, a 10,000 USD profit is small for a 1 million dollar account and large for a 50,000 USD account, so please, give us meaningful profit values as account percentages. It makes absolutely no sense to talk in absolute values if no initial account equity is given. This is just purely misleading and is just there to fire people's greed up.

Now what the hell is up with this evidence ? I make all those screenshots up in a few minutes using excel or another spreadsheet program. These screenshots are totally worthless. Please, don't treat your customers as if they were retarded ! Anyone knows that the only valid proof you can provide is an actual account statement which in the best case should be verifiable by either a third party or direct investor access to the actual trading account. Are you kidding me ? How can you say that a system makes money consistently with such disputable and unverifiable evidence ?

After that, the author continues to insult our intelligence by saying that he actually tested the system for a year when all he has is a backtest. Of course, this backtest is totally worthless since we cannot verify it's reliability with any live testing results since we don't have ANY live testing statements. So what do we have ? A guy who is speaking a bunch of hype with no solid evidence of it being truth. Furthermore, the backtesting shows unreal profits which, in my experience, have always pointed to severe one minute interpolation or other backtesting error exploits by the expert advisor.

Please, provide me with a 6 month live testing and a 10 year backtest from 1999 and I'll be happy to reevaluate this review but from now, this system is totally worthless and NOT worth buying. If you buy this you are just gambling your money to whatever you get.

If you want to learn more about how to obtain reliable evidence, how to properly evaluate a trading system and how you can star trading profitably with automated trading systems with realistic profit and draw down targets 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : PipMax by pipyard.com an Unbiased Review

A website visitor asked me a few days ago to review the Pipmax expert advisor created by pipyard.com. I am sorry for putting the review on the side for a few days but as you may see, there is actually a quiet large queue of systems that are waiting to be reviewed. However, again, I would like to thank everyone who leaves a message on the chat requesting a system review. Even if it takes me a week or two I promise that whatever forex system you request me to review on the chat I will look at and review.

Now, let's start to evaluate the PipMax! expert advisor. The first phrase that greets us when we open their webpage is actually a whopping "You have just discovered the most powerful and profitable Robot on the net!" so let's see if they can live up to their claims and show us why this is the most profitable EA out there.

As a matter of fact, this website does show us some evidence we can actually use to go a little bit further into the logic and likehood for long term profitability of this expert advisor. Backtesting results show us that this EA trades with an internal closing mechanism aided by a trailing stop mechanism so there is not that much we can learn about it. A pretty interesting fact is that they also give us a few month long live testing statements showing how the expert actually traded on the real market.

Not to my surprise, there is a wide live testing, backtesting inconsistency with this expert advisor. If you check live testing results and then look at them against backtesting you will find that the number of loses increases dramatically from one to the other. That is, the expert is far less profitable in live testing. Another very important thing is that the expert makes huge profits in very small amounts of time so it must be having a huge market exposure on live testing. You should be wondering by now why are the live trading statements so short ? Well, if they started in April they should have at least a 5 or 6 month backtest by now. Where is it ? Where, according to the evidence shown by the EA creator, it is most likely that this expert, lime many many others out there, just is not long term profitable and started to go into heavy draw down during the following months, otherwise, the creators would have shown the statements since it would make no sense not to do so.

It is no coincidence that live tests stop at around May, time in which the market started to enter a very interesting market period which put many expert advisors to the test. It seems by the looks of it that the PipMax EA wasn't up to the challenge.

So yes, there is backtesting evidence and live testing evidence. The backtesting evidence is not live testing consistent and the live testing evidence is just too short and suspicious. Why did they stop testing the EA ? Again, the question seems to answer itself. This EA is then absolutely NOT worth buying because first, there is no back-live testing consistency to help us evaluate long term profitability and second, there is not enough live testing to backup the seller's claims in a convincing enough way.

Now, if you would like to learn more about how you can evaluate and distinguish long term profitable strategies and how you can start trading with a free long term automated trading system right now, 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : Pips Miner an Unbiased Review

Today's review was actually a request from a fellow forex trader who wanted me to evaluate the claims and evidence of profitability of the pips miner expert advisor. My friend was almost convinced about buying this automated trading system and wanted me to tell him whether it was a good choice or not before he committed himself to it. I also received a request from a website visitor and another from a newsletter subscriber so I decided to review the system to satisfy everyone's request.

This type of expert advisor is specially hard to review since to the untrained eye it may seem that the pips miner expert advisor actually has a good and substantiated amount of evidence to proof their claims. According to their website the pips miner expert advisor is able to make anywhere from 100 to 800% profits on single months, this are outrageous claims to start with. It becomes even more surprising when you realize that all these claims are based merely on backtesting evidence.

It is mainly because of cases like these that people often think that backtesting is absolutely useless. Backtesting is, on the contrary, one of the most useful tools available for measuring profitability in automated trading but it must be used within it's limitations and it's results must always be verified appropriately (I have a whole section in my ebook explaining this if you are more interested).

Of course, this expert advisor has other characteristics that make you believe it is very far from being long term profitable as it's very high, almost 10:1 risk to reward ratio which means that this expert risks almost 10 dollars for every dollar it makes. The fact that take profit targets are relatively low also makes you believe that this expert may exploit one minute interpolation backtesting errors significantly, something which may absolutely revert it's live trading results. Truth be told, this system looks like it would perform totally different on live testing case in which it would probably put the person's account at high risk.

This people have been selling this EA for a while but they fail to show any live testing results we can use to confirm the backtesting they give us. Well, I have to say that this makes this expert absolutely NOT worth buying, the evidence they show us has no value since the backtesting they show us is not shown to be consistent with live testing results. Again, I would be glad to change this if they provided a 6 month live test to confirm that there is some consistency. However, I am almost sure that this is not possible due to the possibly huge role of backtesting interpolation errors on the profitability of the backtesting results.

If you would like to learn more about which strategies can be considered long term profitable, which ones can't and how you too can start building profits with long term stable profitable trading systems 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisor : Forex Terminator an unbiased review - revised

Today I'll be reviewing an expert advisor I had been putting off for a while, the forex terminator. I had not reviewed this expert advisor before even though I had several requests to do so because I didn't quiet know how to word my opinions about it. After about an hour of thinking about all the evidence given by the creator and evaluating it against all his or her claims I am now going to write my unbiased evaluation of this automated trading system.

Let us start from the beginning. The first thing you see wheny ou acces thef orex terminator website is a big text that says : "His 'Sneaky' (And 100% Legal) Trading System That Just Generated Crushing $2,565, $5,433, $8,320, $60,258... Trades..Completely On Autopilot". After that we see what appears to be a demo trading account screenshot showing these trades taken as profits. Well, there are loads of things that are misleading about this. First, we don't know the account balance or the market exposure necessary to reach such profit values. As I have said before, it depends on your equity whether these trades are good or bad since a 2500 USD profit on a one million dollar account is small while in a 500 USD account it is highly unrealistic.

As a master of illusion, the creators continues to be misleading about the trading system showing us evidence that just does not cut it. If you notice, all live testing account screenshots shown are terribly small and no mention is ever given about the potential draw down levels reached by people that trade this system. For example, the fact that the system was able to double and account on a demo account so quickly would make me RUN away like hell from it. No matter what the strategy of this system is, if it doubles an account on a week it means that it has a HUGE market exposure that probably exceeds account size ! That is, this expert advisors seems terribly risky and was probably engineered to trade that way to show this extremely high short term gains which in the long run could only mean account wipeouts.

Why doesn't he show any long term statements ? Well, the most probable answer is because this expert advisor, as many out there, is just geared to be profitable in the short term with it's high risks and will not work as a long term profitable trading system. Why isn't there a backtest from 1999 showing us how the system performed for the past ten years ? why isn't there a live account from 2008/08 which is the date of the first forward taste to today ? The EA creator would have a year long backtest which would prove or disprove all his claims without any doubt. The answer to these questions is obvious, this is just another EA geared towards the people out there who are looking for an easy profit and don't distinguish a profitable system from a system that would wipe their account like this one.

Of course, this expert advisor is NOT worth buying and again, I would probably run away from any system with a market exposure like the one we see from their very limited amount of forward testing evidence. Now, if you would like to learn what is really achievable in the world of automated trading and how you too can start to distinguish and use long term profitable trading systems 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : ForexRobotGain 1.02 an unbiased review

This week I have focused on reviweing expert advisors I found on my last search for automated trading systems. Today's review will be focused on the evaluation of the ForexRobotGain 1.02 Expert advisor. I have to say that this expert advisor's webpage surprised me a little bit with absolutely no ads, no text in bold captions, etc. However, lets now look at the claims and the evidence that the forexrobotgain EA creators have to offer us.

Well, plain and simple, there are not many claims made by the authors and not much evidence there to back the few. They do say that this was the only robot that worked for the past ten years consecutively and they show you a backtest of a 10 year period to show this. You should take into account when you see this that you can only trust backtesting results when they proved to be realiable against live testing, like in the case of the god's gift expert advisor.

The results this people show us are just not very meaningful since we cannot judge how prone the expert is to exploit backtesting problems. Looking at the statements does not help that much either since the expert advisor seems to handle order closes internally so there is not a very good way of looking at the actual risk to reward ratio. The backtesting statements also show a 24% draw down but I could not actually see any losing trades, meaning that they removed them purposefuly or they failed to load the complete html, both of this things hinder our ability to evaluate the expert.

I have to say that given the fact that the evidence they give is as good as nothing and the fact that they fail to show us that their system can trade consistently under real market conditions this expert advisor is absolutely not worth buying. I will gladly change my opinion if they provide at least a 6 month live test that we could use to gauge back-live testing consistency to see how good the backtesting perfomance actually matches the way the expert trades on the real market.

If you would like to learn more about the realities of the world of expert advisor trading, what affects their profitability, which strategies work and which ones do not 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisor : Forex Insider Pro an Unbiased Review

Today I am gonna focus this post on the review of the forex insider pro expert advisor. As you know, all my reviews are as unbiased as they can be since I don't receive anything for giving good or bad reviews for any expert advisors. I have absolutely no affiliate links or any other ties with commercial expert advisor sellers. I just call them like I see them. The forex insider pro expert advisor is given a great projection by it's creator with the following bold remark :

" Let My Robot Be Your Slave To Make Money For You NON-STOP Even While You're Fast Asleep!"

Well my friends, I never judge expert advisors just by the claims they make, I always judge them by the way in which they backup their claims and the evidence they show us to do so. Looking at the forex insider pro expert advisor, you will see that this expert has absolutely no evidence for any of it's claims. he says that the expert is able to trade with a low balance and a low risk and make huge gains. Where in the world is the evidence for this ? I don't see a live testing statement that can even show us how this expert trades on the market.

I mean, I would hire a money manager without looking at at least several years of his track record. Why would you demand any less from an expert advisor if it is actually going to manage your real money ? Well, this guy doesn't show us anything. All we are looking at are some very simple backtesting screenshots that don't even have adequate modelling quality. Needless to say, we don't know even if the expert has a high likehood of having important one minute interpolation errors because we cannot see any statements that point to how this expert trades.

Are we supposed to buy something that does not even prove it's claims ? Absolutely not ! As I always say, the burden of proof is with the creators of the systems. This system of course, as you see, is absolutely NOT worth buying and it would take at least a 6 month live account with backtesting to match consistency to make me change one letter on this review. However, I am always opened to changes in my opinions if expert advisor creators support their claims adequately.

If you would like to learn more about forex automated trading systems, how to evalute them, what their characteristics are and how to really trade profitably with realistic profit and draw down targets using 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Profit Hunter an Unbiased Review

Today's post will also be focused on the review of yet another automated trading system (just when I think I've reviewed them all !). I found this trading system a few days ago while I was searching the web for expert advisors to review on my website. This expert advisor is called forex profit hunter and it is supposed to be a great trading system. In the word of the author :

"The Secret to Automatically Selecting Winning Trades & Depositing $5,000---$10,000--$15,000 + in Profits Even If You Know Absolutely Nothing About Trading Right Now”

Now after reading all this hype you must think that he may have some very convincing proof to be able to make such bold statements. Well, the truth actually is that this expert advisor creator, as most expert advisor sellers out there, has absolutely no reliable evidence to backup ANY of his claims.

Through the whole sales webpage, the author goes on and on about the reliability of his system and why it is supposed to work for people making money while they sleep. The truth is that he offers no evidence at all to proof that his system can achieve any profitability at all. The only thing that remotely resembles evidence is just a half screenshot of a backtesting statement with some trade pictures after that. What the hell ? I can make those trade pictures myself on metatrader in 5 minutes. I think this guy, as many other trading systems salesmen out there, is treating us like if we where retarded. Guess what ? We are not !

I cannot help to feel some anger everytime I come across a webpage like this. Loads of claims with some extremely bold statements about the profitability of a trading system when there is absolutely NO evidence to prove that. When there is no evidence, you should never believe what sellers tell you. Again, when I say evidence I mean evidence for every claim they make. If they say you'll double your account each month, they should have a one year statement showing you can do that, if they say their broker independent then you should expect tests on at least 15 different brokers to confirm this beyond any reasonable doubt. But we don't see this, why ? because systems like this forex profit hunter are just pure hype with no substance whatsoever.

Of course, this system is absolutely NOT worth buying or even looking at. If you would like to learn more about why commercial expert advisors lose money so often and how you can become profitable too using free long term profitable 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : Shark by forexeasystems.com an Unbiased Review

Today I am going to focus on the review of a very interesting trading system called Shark, made by the people at forexeasystems.com. I have to say that I bought shark almost one year and a half ago and therefore I have a lot of experience with this expert advisor and I feel I have traded it enough to give a deep opinion about it beyond the actual evidence provided by the authors on their website.

First of all, I have to say that I purchased shark because I considered it a likely profitable trading system. The system at the time seemed to have important live testing testing and backtesting performance that showed the expert to be profitable at least certainly from 2007 to 2008. Back live testing consistency was not perfect but it was good enough as to consider the backtesting, although over optimistic still predictive in someway about the experts profitability during past market conditions.

After purchasing this expert and trading it on several brokers and several demo and live accounts I have to say that I utterly and totally dissappointed. I have to say that through all the testing I have done on FXDD, FxLite, IBFX and FxClearing on demo and live accounts I have not been able to reproduce a single month of forward testing results from the people at forexeasystems. I loaded the EA following their instructions, always traded the latest updates but I could never reach, as a matter of fact, even a profitable single month. This expert advisor actually got a live accoutn down more than 30% once, traded on the same level of risk as the account shown on their website.

I don't know why this very important differences between my trading and their trading arises. I tried demo and live accounts on several brokers, and I have got the statements that show this to be absolutely true. However, as I said, I have never been able to reach a single month of profit with this EA. After about a year of trying I finally stopped trying on April when testing from February revealed loses every month and absolutely no correlation with their live or forward testing with my account having much larger loses. My newsletter susbcribers can take a look at this by accessing the trading results zip, located on the root of the ftp server in which the results for shark's trading are included.

I have to say, I would not recommend buying this to anyone as the unprofitability of this EA is absolutely evident to me after one year and half of trading it, as I said, on both demo and live accounts. If you would like to learn more about how you can evaluate expert advisors or how you can distinguish between long term profitable and unprofitable trading strategies 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 !

Forex Expert Advisors : Forex Boomerang an unbiased review

Today's post will be dedicated to the review of an automated trading system that came out the last time I was searching for new expert advisors to review. This expert advisor, called forex boomerang is according to the author everything you should need to get out of your 9 to 5 job. The forex boomerang expert advisor is supposed to be able to double or triple your account on single trades with very limited draw down levels. The objective of this post is to evaluate these statements against the evidence provided by the author and gauge whether this expert advisor has the merits it requires to be considered worth buying and testing.

The person making this website makes several misleading statements, starting from the statement he makes on one of the backtests where he says that 90% modeling quality is the "highest possible accuracy". Even though metatrader does not store tick data it is possible to download tickdata from external sources and have tests without one minute interpolation that give you 98 to 99% modeling quality. The difference between a 90% and a 99% modeling quality backtest can be huge, as huge as changing a massive profit for an account wipe out (this of course, highly depends on how much the expert relies on one minute interpolation errors and mid candle entries for profits).

This guy's claims are just outrageous, for example "10K Turns Into $453,258.28", that is a profit in excess of 4000%. Does he think his customers and the people who access his website are stupid ? I think he does because this statement is just insulting. Look at the evidence provided of the expert's profitability, just a bunch of backtesting. The expert never turned 10K into anything because those trades were NOT real, let's not confuse reality with fiction now Mr. EA seller.

Things just turn more and more odd from here on with absolutely no evidence backing up anything this guy says. There is absolutely no forward or live testing showing that shows that the actual expert's trading even remotely resembles what is achieved in backtesting so there is no way in which we can know that the results shown are not fake or that the expert does not rely heavily on hindsight or other backtesting failures. The system probably does, as you can tell from the unrealistic profits reached in the backtests (which can be achieved quiet readily exploiting any of these failures !). Without any evidence to confirm back-live testing consistency, it is just pointless to show us expert advisor backtests which have a reliability we cannot evaluate.

Trade examples are also pretty pointless since there is no statement to compare them to to see how frequent they are or what the nature of the losing trades actually is. This guy is really fishing for the easy targets with this expert advisor because no one who knows a few things about forex trading would ever purchase a trading system with so little evidence to support it's claims. So as you can see, this expert is absolutely NOT worth buying for the absolute lack of evidence to support the really irrealistic claims of the author.

If you would like to learn more about forex automated trading, why commercial experts fail time and time again and how you can start making profits from long term profitable stable systems 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 !

You don't have anything to lose... What a fallacy !

In the time in which I have been reviewing and using automated trading systems I have come across a countless number of commercial expert advisor sellers and their websites. I would have to say that from all the things they say, one of the worst and most dangerous is their ultimate catch phrase "you don't have anything to lose". Today I decided to write a post about why this phrase is not only totally untrue but also exceedingly dangerous for new traders who don't know anything or too little about the way in which automated trading works.

First things first. The reason why this statement has become so popular amongst expert advisor sellers is because most of them offer money back guarantees. If you don't like their software after a given fixed period of time whatever money you used to buy the EA will be given back to you. So nothing to lose then ? right ? You buy the EA, you use it, if you don't like it, you'll get your money back, no harm done, if it is junk you will get your money back.

Well my friends, this is a big mistake ! You have to take into account all the risks you expose yourself to when you buy an automated trading system. Since the objective of most people is to run the expert advisor on their live accounts for long periods of time, the long term profitability of the expert advisor plays a huge role. Take into account that most commercial junk experts out there are engineered to give you short term profits with a huge market exposure that will eventually cash on your account. If you are trading with your money and you lose it, you risk losing much more than the purchase price of the EA. There is no way in the world in which you should be able to know if the EA is long term profitable with just 6 weeks of testing which is what most of these experts offer as a long term guarantee.

So let's see. Joe buys the Superhype EA which has a 6 month guarantee. Joe trades this EA on demo for the 6 weeks and the expert has actually made significant profits, so no worry, Joe is satisfied with his product and does not want a refund. Now, Joe puts his real money on this EA and at month 3 of running it live the EA goes into consistent draw down and in month 5 Joe is down 85%. Joe lost the 100 USD that Superhype costed him plus 1000 USD he has on his live account. Nothing to lose ? Think again, you have everything to lose when you expose yourself to any automated trading system. The only thing that can give you assurance that this will not happen is to have an EA that fulfills well established criteria for long term profitability, something most commercial experts out there do not do (check my reviews to see what I mean !).

If you would like to learn more about how you can know which experts are long term profitable and how you can profit from automated trading using trading systems with realistic profit and draw down targets 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : Dnafxtrading an unbiased review - revised

On April 27, 2009 I wrote a review about the dnafxtrading expert advisor evaluating this trading system's main characteristics in order to say if it was worth buying or testing. At that moment, the expert advisor creator had too few live results and was not offering any conclusive tests that showed that his EA could trade anywhere near the trading performance we saw on backtesting.

After several months, I can write a second review for the dnafxtrading expert advisor stating what I know think about this trading system. As a matter of fact I am terribly dissappointed because this expert advisor seller just pulled out one of the oldest tricks on the book. After having some weeks of live testing results back in April, the EA creator now has only testing since June 2009 which also shows significant deviations from the behavior the expert shows on backtesting from what I can see.

Why did we have results in April 2009 and now we have only small portions of live testing ? Well, you don't have to be a genious to guess this one right, the expert advisor seller is just testing the expert until he has some profitable results to show and then most likely erases them when he or she starts to see some draw down on the account. This is one of the most unethical and misleading things EA sellers do but it clearly was done in this case as they did have live testing in April 2009, which has now dissappeared. The screenshot of the live results is also misleading as it does not match the live results followed through the link shown above them.

After this reevaluation of the dnafxtrading expert advisor, I can say without any fear or doubt whatsoever that the dnafxtrading ea is absolutely NOT worth buying since the EA creator has shown clearly that if I ever thought there was anything good with his trading system, it does not exist anymore. The expert's results are not consistent with it's backtesting and live testing information has been removed from their website, two definite signs that something is not right with this trading system. This expert now joins my almost endless list of totally worthless expert advisors.

A new review has been written to consider the new third-party verified live tests provided by the creators of the EA.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading, why commercial expert advisors fail all the time and how you can start building up a profitable return with free automated trading system with realistic profit and draw down targets 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 !

The God's Gift ATR, Six Months of Live Testing

For today's post I wanted to write a little bit about the god's gift ATR expert advisor for which I haven't written a post in a while. This expert advisor, for the people who don't know it yet, was a modification I programmed from the original god's gift v 7c programmed by Matt Edmonds. After forward testing the initial EA for a period of one year I decided to add ATR adjustment modifications to make it more self adaptative against changing market conditons. That is, I wanted to make the EA more reliable. If you want to learn a little bit more about this modifications make sure you access the god's gift ATR label on the drop down list on the left side of the webpage.

The god's gift ATR EA has been trading on live accounts since March 01/2009. I have made weekly comments on its trades from its first week of trading for my weekly newsletter and by doing so I have got an excellent picture about its performance, its targets, what it can achieve and what it cannot. Certainly, the god's gift ATR has proven to be reliable and consistent with backtesting results. It has proven through live testing that it can work as I intended it to. The following image shows the god's gift trading from March 01 until it's 6th month trading anniversary on September the first.
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As you can see, the god's gift has had difficult periods of time as it is predicted by it's backtesting but it has always been able to come out of this periods through the use of trend following trades which make it make much more money than the amount it loses during these draw down periods. The god's gift ATR continues to have all the necessary requirements of a long term stable profitable trading system and up until now, the system has fulfilled all my expectations. I am very eager to see how this expert performs for the following few months when we will probably see a little bit more volatility on the forex market.

If you would like to learn more about the god's gift ATR, it's logic, it's trades and how you can trade it profitably in the forex market with realistic profit and draw down expectations 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 this article !

The Indicator Series... The Stochastic Oscillator

Today I will continue my indicator series of posts (which had been a little bit neglected) with a post about the stochastic oscillator which is one of the most popular indicators out there which, by the way, is traded the wrong way in many cases. In order to understand how to trade with the stochastic indicators, what trading systems would benefit from it and which won't, we first need to take a look at the math that defines the stochastic oscillator.

The stochastic oscillator introduced by George lane, simply calculates where price stands against the high and low of a previous amount of periods. That is, you can consider the stochastic oscillator value of as a measure of on what percentage of the range between the low and high of a certain period you are located. The equation that calculates this is as follows:
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As you can see, the stochastic oscillator varies between values of 0 and 100 and as I said, tells you where price is in relation to a certain period's high and low. What does this mean ? Well, it means several things. Depending on the market conditions, the stochastic oscillator behaves differently. When the market is ranging or trending within a channel, the stochastic oscillator will forecast oversold or overbought markets as values near the high of a range are prone to be sold and lows are prone be bought. When the market is trending, things change a little bit since highs are pushed further and further up (lows the opposite) so the oscillator remains at high levels (low levels for down trending markets) all the time and people who are trying to treat that like an overbought or oversold market get killed because they are trading against the trend.

Since we would like to catch trend, which are the most juicy opportunities in the forex market we should only trade the stochastics when they are overbrought or oversold that is, we must follow the reverse of the "traditional" stochastic interpretation. Of course, if you do this and the market ranges, you are always trying to get into a trend that just reverses because the market fails to breakout.

The stochastics has the advantage also of being a leading indicator since it gives signals before the trends actually start. So if you trade the stochastic oscillator with a reversed type logic and a trend following indicator, you might be able to get yourself a profitable system. Although, there might also be the need for the inclusion of volatility type filter and some other creative use of trend following indicators (more on this later !).

All this information about the stochastic oscillator really lets you see how you must know the mathematical basis of an indicator and it's true meaning in order to use it effectively in the forex market. As you can see, a traditional interpretation of the stochastics with a trending indicator makes no sense as they constantly contradict each other and you can hope for a breakeven system at best. Stay tuned for the next post on the indicator series which will focus on the MACD, another very popular forex indicator.

If you would like to learn more about how automated trading systems can be traded profitably in the forex market 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 this article !

To Optimize or not to Optimize ? ... The winalot and EAzeGor expert advisors

If you have been reading my blog recently you may have read my reviews on the winalot and EAzeGor expert advisors made by the easy-ea company. You may have noticed that both of these reviews had a quiet favorable tone to them because I think both of this experts fulfill a good chunk of my criteria for a long term profitable expert advisor. However, I did say in both cases that backtesting from 1999 was missing and that such testing would be necessary to assess long term profitability.

After requesting backtesting results from 1999 the company answered that they did not have such tests because experts were optimized on an 18 month basis and were then traded in optimized settings. This is obvioulsy the reason why such limited backtesting is available on their website, because of course, they cannot show further backtests if settings are bound to change on the middle of the expert's testing.

Now, the big question arises. Is this good or is this bad ? To optimize or not to optimize ? Well, I of course always favor expert advisors that can self adapt to a certain extent like the god's gift ATR because even though there is an inherent lag in the adaptation, the lag is less than 30 days long and the expert just worries about aligning itself against market conditions. Optimization using 18 months of data could also be a strategy you could use, however, it has to be said that if market conditions for the next 6 months are very different from the past 18 months, then the system is likely to fall into draw down but then, it might realign once optimization is done again. The live testing done on both experts confirms at the moment that this optimization strategy works albeit on the changes happening during the past year.

Given this fact, the fact that considerable live testing exists and the fact that the expert advisor's trading style fits many characteristics I demand from profitable trading systems I will say that this experts are worth testing. From next Sunday a demo account will be opened and the testing of the winalot EA will start with testing results being commented each week on my weekly newsletter. Susbcribers should also expect the next newsletter to include demo account investor access information.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading systems and what the necessary characteristics for a profitable trading systems are (and why most commercial experts out there just fail bluntly) 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 this article !

Forex Expert Advisor : London Sunrise EA an unbiased review

After about 8 requests by both customers and website visitors I decided to review the london sunrise expert advisor. I have to say that I had refrained from reviewing this expert advisor because I didn't feel there was enough evidence provided by the author to allow be to write a conclusive review but today after going through the website and the evidence several times, I finally set my mind on it and decided to write this review for the system. As always, this review is unbiased as it can be with nobody paying me anything for saying anything good or bad about the system. As I said in my first post in 2007 and I say today, you have to have a total absence of affiliate links in order to really write an unbiased review about a system.

Now let us start reviewing the london sunrise EA. I have to say, as a sidenote, that their website seems pretty polished and does not have excesive marketing material which I have grown to dislike. The website does seem to try to explain that the london sunrise EA trades EUR/GBP breakouts rather than the scalping FAP turbo tried to do on the ranging periods this pair tends to have. This of course, means that there is an increased probability of catching larger trends but does not necessarily mean that the system is able to do so.

The evidence provided by the authors is quiet small with only two 1000 USD live accounts which have been trading for one and two months respectively. However, trading up until now shows a risk to reward ratio which can be viewed as acceptable with a very intriguing trade that made almost a 10% profit on one of the accounts but not on the other. This makes me doubt things a little bit. Since the EA seems to have an internal take profit mechanism it seems odd that the EA generated a trade with such a high profit when the presence of a trailing stop is not at all evident when looking at the other trades. It seems like the trade was just left open because the EA failed to close it and then it was closed with a huge profit after the market moved in favor of the trade in a favorable coincidence.

We have no way to say this is or this is not the case since investor access to the live accounts is not granted. However, the fact that no trade like this one has taken place on the other live account grants to some extent that my above hypothesis is at worst, plausible.

Another matter of interest is that no backtesting statements are provided by the creators of the EA. Of course, backtesting a pair like the EUR/GBP with positions being closed with low targets as the ones we see on the live tests do hint that backtesting could be seriously flaud for this EA but nonetheless, it would be interesting to see at least a 10 year backtest of this EA to see if any useful information is seen at all.

Of course, right now the evidence for long term profitability for this EA is completely lacking. We have two months of live testing on two different brokers which do give hints about the experts trading style but does not at all say anything about its possible draw down targets and market exposure. Needless to say, I consider the london sunrise expert advisor not worth buying and I would say I would not be able to change my opinion unless we see either a 10 year backtest with a backtest of the 2 months of live testing showing consistency with it or at least a one year backtesting which would give us a better idea about this system.

People often buy this systems without thinking how poorly tested they are, testing takes time but it rewards you with a true picture of your system. Right now you could buy this system and it could wipe your account in a few months, I see no evidence to the contrary, it could also turn out to be profitable. It is just impossible to tell with any certainty right now. As I always say, the burden of proof is on the creator of the EA not on our live accounts so it is extremely unwise to take such a risk with your hard earned money.

If you would like to learn more about expert advisor evaluation and how you can start to profit with a free long term profitable trading system with realistic profit and loss targets 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 this article !

A New Commitment to my Readers... Daily Posting

Through the past couple of years I have not had the best blogging frequency. People who have been reading my blog for a while may realize that I usually have some periods with very high writing frequency followed by periods in which I may not even write at all. Well, this is mainly due to the fact that sometimes I did not have any systems to review, any ideas on posts or I just didn't quiet feel like writing a blog post. However I feel that most of my blog visitors would be happier if I had a certain degree of frequency on my blog posting.

This is why today I decided to commit myself to everyday post writing. For the past few weeks I started to test this approach to see if it was something doable (if I could come up with enough good quality content) and I realized that the more reviews and articles I write, the more ideas come to my head. So yes, I realized I could do it and for this reason you will be able to read a brand new blogpost from me everyday.

With this in mind I decided to also change the layout of my blog a little to make article paragraphs wider (now they are much easier to read !) and make the previous articles and history menu condensed so that they would not be detrimental to my page's appearance, something which is very bound to happen if my blogging frequency increases that much (I wouldn't want to have a label lists that would take you 2 minutes to scroll down).

I really hope that this decision greatly increases the number of return visitors I have and further enhances the opinion of my currently faithful readers about my website. Of course, this will also bring a lot of more quality content and projects to the website so it should be a pretty exciting end year quarter. New posts will be published everyday at 1:00 am EST time. I also added RSS feed subscribing links to the left hand side menu if you would like to receive the posts directly.

Of course, if you want to learn about automated trading and how you too can profit using an expert advisor with realistic profit and draw down targets 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 this article !

Why your losing so much money... Characteristics of most people who buy an EA

During the past few days I have tried to put all my thoughts about EA customers together so that I can get a clear view of their profile. It is very important to know what people usually think when they buy an expert advisor because this shines light into the reason why EA sellers use the tactics they do and it also helps me device counter tactics to at least save some people from the claws of the many unethical EA sellers out there.

So why do so many people lose their money out there on systems that don't work ? What are the general characteristics of the people out there looking to buy an automated trading system ? Well, I have found out through a lot of asking and interacting with lots of traders that this is generally what describes people looking for an automated trading system :

• Lack of Trading Experience : Usually traders who are out there looking for an automated system lack substantial trading experience. Most of them have not been trading forex for more than one or two years and most of them have never had a profitable year of manual trading. However, the majority have actually never traded for more than 3 months and even some have just heard about the forex market, days if not hours before going through the EA websites.
  

• Lack of Understanding : This is perhaps the most important. People looking to buy an EA generally lack the understanding of what can and cannot be done. What can be profitable and what cannot, what makes a system long term profitable and what makes it fail bluntly. People, simply put, do not understand what they are doing. Well, picture yourself buying a train. You have a general idea of what you may want (faster, lighter, etc) but you would have no idea of how this is achieved or how you may verify what people tell you is true.
  

• Bad economic situation : This is probably the worse one since it makes people the most vulnerable. People who are out there to buy experts are feeling quiet desperate about their financial situation or are about to feel that way. I found out that a majority of people looking for experts has been laid off, has gone out of business or are in some type of dire financial situation. This takes me to the next point.

• They want to believe : Since people are in bad economic situations and are also ignorant about what they are doing, this makes them extremely prone to believe whatever people tell them. If it is not true, they don't have the knowledge to know so and if it is... Well... Sadly when people tell the truth, there will be someone out there telling more attractive lies. So if people find an EA that makes X a year (for real) and then they see an EA that says can make 1000 times X and they are told through some almost fictional evidence that it is true, then they will believe the later and lose all their money.
  

• They want results in the short term : Well, of course, if you are in a bad economic situation and you are told you can make a lot of money, then you want to make that money fast. People who look for experts generally want very short term results. And they get them ! Most commercial experts out there are made to produce short term profits, then wipe accounts in the long run. Of course, if people are ignorant, they don't know that profitable trading is a long term thing.

• They want a forex ATM : People usually want to profit the forex market in a regular fashion, with no draw downs and then go every month and take out money from the bank. Like if forex was an ATM, people want to just take money out of it every month. However, the financial markets do not work like a 9 to 5 job and they will not pay you money every month. Profitable trading systems like the turtle system and the god's gift ATR can have several months of draw down. People are not able to deal with this, because they believe it can be avoided.

As you can see, this characteristics are very hard to get rid off and they do make almost all the people who go out there in search for an EA lose the little money they have left and fall into even deeper financial stress. I have even heard cases of people who took lones and were even in a deeper mess after dealing with automated trading system. If you would like to know how you too can become profitable using stable, long term free trading systems with realistic profit and draw down targets 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 this article !