A Word of Caution about PointBreak
Tuesday, 7th October, 2008
I feel the need to write this update on PointBreak partly because there seems to be some readers anxiosly waiting for it and partly because there is a performance issue of the ea. The thing is my demo account continues to display steady performance with the balance now stands at $36,776 and a neglegible floating loss but my live account is in a big trouble. PointBreak accumulated longs when EURUSD made its last push upward during September 19 – 22, 2008 only to be caught in the strong trend reversal since September 22. My demo account somehow got off unharmed but my live account couldn’t. It squared off the positions with a huge floating loss of over 50% of the balance and then start accumulating net shorts. Altogether 375 trades have been entered into at 128:247 buy:sell ratio. There is a chance of recovery if the the downward push reaches the target around 1.31, about 400 pips away. On the other hand if the trend ends or if there is a correction, the trouble may be deepened.
I guess I need to monitor my live account closely and may have to manually intervene at a point. The ea’s author seems well aware of this problem and hints a manual maneuvering may be necessary from time to time. The later versions of the ea provide tools for such intervention but left it to the users on how it should be used.