Category: Forex Robot

I am happy to report that my forex trading robot report after one week is an encouraging one. My experimental forex trading account starting from a small $800 base more than doubled after the first week of trading. To be exact I ended the week at a balance of $1707.53. So I am pleased at the first week of results.

However, I must confess that I cheated. Let me explain. I started out trading the Euro and had two successful trades right away, one for a $48 gain, the other for a $50 gain. However, since the forex trading robot I’m using is optimized for trading the dollar against the Euro and I saw a Yen trade that I wanted to make I turned off the expert advisor (the robot) and manually entered the Yen trade.

Most of my weekly earnings came from selling dollars against Yen. That is buying Yen. This move cut short my robot experiment for the week but was profitable enough so that I didn’t mind too much. I’m sure that you can understand.

After only a week trading the robot in demo mode and a week in live mode I can’t yet offer a complete picture of the robot performance. However, I have seen enough to make a few comments.

The forex robot is an impressive piece of software. It integrates very well into the Meta4 trading platform. However, there is a tricky key setting that you must decide upon. The “take profits” setting is really crucial. Since this is a set number of pips you must decide if the 20 pip default setting is right for current market conditions. The higher you go with the setting the larger profit you will have on trades. So if the market is strongly trending you might want to increase this setting.

So far I must say that the forex trader robot looks to be a pretty smart guy. I started live trading on April 3th, 2008, and by Friday’s close had a profit of $168. The impressive thing is that in getting started I set up the forex robot to trade only two mini contracts of Euro against the US dollar at a time. Each mini contract is for $10,000.

Here are a couple of tips to those who may want to try out their forex trading robot. By all means start out with a demo account. This will let you know if the robot has been set up on your computer properly and that it is making trades. It will also let you get a feel for the robot’s trading characteristics. You will want to pay close attention to the draw down characteristics.

Once you go live you will probably experience a delay of a day or two before your account is ready for live trading. The dealing firm has to review and approve your account application and then has to clear the funds that you deposit with them for trading. So you will not immediately be ready for live trading once you decide to go live.

My results would have been better if I had not overridden the robot on one trade. Being a somewhat experienced trader I thought that one trade that the robot entered into had to be completely wrong. So I manually closed out the trade at a small loss. Within an hour the market suddenly went the robot’s way and would have hit my profit target if I had just gone out for a hour or two and let the robot go about its business.

I have a little piece of advice for those who are just starting to trade forex using the AutoPilotRobot. Short and simple it is don’t mess with the forex robot set of instructions and recommended settings that you receive with the software package.

At least until you have a good understanding of the forex robot’s trading habits. 

For me, at least so far, better results were obtained by using exactly the set up recommended in the package of instructions (actually PDF files that you download).

As reported yesterday the first three trades were all $100 winners for a total of $300 in demo mode profits. I then thought that I could go for a bit more profit on each trade. So I changed the setting for profit target. This turned out to be a mistake as I left a zero out of the setting.

Unoh, I must have really confused the little warrior as the next two trades were fairly big losers. One trade at five mini contracts (50,000) lost just over $500. The next trade, after I changed the amount traded to 30,000, lost just over $300.

After these losses I checked the settings again and found my mistake. I changed my settings back to those recommended in the instructions and had three winning trades again for a total demo profit of $575.

I did manually take over from the robot on the third trade today as it just missed the profit target and the Euro started to sell off again. This trade would have eventually been made by the robot at the target price but I wanted to see how going manual would work.

I finally got the Meta4 forex trading platform and the forex trading robot set up and working together over the weekend and turned the fearless little guy loose about 1800 hours Sunday evening.

The first entry trade was made a little after midnight. Let me caution you that if you do give the robot a go take your time in setting it up. It’s not that difficult but you really should read all of the PDF file instructions and explanations before starting your set up.

I recommend that you take the time to watch the videos as well. It’s not really that difficult to get everything running but a small mistake can be hard to find and correct later on.

It is also important to follow the recommendations of the robot programmer and start out trading in demo mode. That way over a few days you will see how the robot goes about his business and hopefully think of ways to step up performance. You will also be able to insure that all is working properly before putting real money at risk.

For example, I made a mistake in setting the robot profit taking level. The PDF instruction had it set at 20 pips in one example and 200 pips in another. The 20 pips places the robot in a scalping position. Since I can see already that the robot is a trend following fellow to set your profit level at twenty pips in a strongly trending market will leave a lot of money on the table. For the USD/Euro I probably should have set it at 100 pips or so.