ExpertAdvisorTrading.com

PointBreak relies heavily on hedging trades. With the new Compliance Rule 2-43 announced by the National Futures Association (NFA) recently, PointBreak can no longer be used as the Expert Advisor for fx trading. This came at a bad time. My demo account was down sharply to less than USD 8,000 due to indecisiveness of EURUSD. Of course, if the EA was left to run it might have recovered the lost ground once again. But, admittedly a drawdown of that magnitude can hardly be justified. 

The developer has come up with a new Vision EA which continues the hedging scheme but now using EURUSD and USDCHF to avoid the new NFA rule. I’ll give it a try on my demo account but frankly I don’t have much faith. From a risk-reward point of view, the scheme is far from attractive. That’s my conclusion at this point. Will keep you posted.

PointBreak once again resolved the very serious situation, closing over 450 open positions on my live account with a small profit. At one point the account equity was 60% down and the margin went below 100%, a very dangerous situation.

Of course, my demo account also successfully closed all positions with a profit. The balance is now $37,523.

Although this is marvelous, the key contributing factor was the market movement. PointBreak is a trend follower. If the market ranges, it will accumulate losses. In the middle of the latest episode of the eurusd ranging, the author of the ea emailed users explaining how users might manually intervene to resolve the situation, but that would involve predicting market’s next thrust. Luckily I left PointBreak alone and the market move in my favor.

PointBreak is a great trading system but you have to be very conservative. I will try to apply some manual intervention technique next time around to prevent getting into another sharp drawdown.

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.

A preset file is a file that contains all the settings used or to be used with an expert advisor. It is very useful to have preset files since they allow us to safeguard our settings and also to be able to change various settings globally in 1 quick by loading different presets we may have saved. So we use preset files (files with an extension .set) to save and restore specific settings for an expert advisor.

You can access these files in the “Presets” folder which is in your “experts” folder.

To access your ea settings (once the ea is up on a chart), you can right click on a chart where you have your expert advisor, click on Expert Advisors and then on ‘Properties’, or simply click on your chart and press F7. You will have access to the expert settings (2nd tab page => Inputs).

On this tab page where you can change your expert’s parameters, you have 2 buttons on the right corner.

Load is used to ‘import’ the settings saved in a preset file, Save is to ‘export’ the current settings and save them to a file so you can ‘Load’ them again at any time. So preset files are not only a way to safeguard some settings you like for an expert, and retrieve them later, but also the quickest way to change settings on multiple charts / pairs since you can load the same or different preset file on each chart.

While we are waiting for the end-of-week results, let me give you this information on what Expert Advisors are and requirements for trading forex with expert advisors.

Expert Advisors or EAs are soltware programs written in MQL4 to automate forex trading on MT4 platform. EAs not only can analyze the situation on the market and notify you of trading opportunities but also can execute trades on your trading account as well as putting pending stop-loss and take-profit orders.

So, what are the requirements to trade FX usign EAs. Apart from opening an account with one of the online brokers who support MT4 trading, you’ll need a server that runs and connects to the Internet 24/7. There may be some EAs that don’t require you to always turn on your PC and the trading program all the time, most will require it to work properly.

Your server needs not be one with very high specs but just a desktop or a laptop for general uses. I use an old desktop that has been left collecting dust after a recent upgrade. I connect it to my office ADSL router with 1 mbps Internet bandwidth which is shared with other PCs in the office. I figure this fx trading server probably requires a much smaller bandwidth but never test it. You should set the BIOS so that the server automatically reboots after a power failure. To relaunch the MT4 trading program at a reboot, I use a free program called Startup Control Panel to set it up.

You’ll need to remotely access your “EA Trading Server” from time to time. This can be easily achieved through a free service by LogMeIn.

I’ve seen in a forum people talking about a kind of EA hosting service where the hosting guy hosts the MT4 program on his server which is partitioned for each customer. I’ve never tried one so cannot say too much about it. Anyway, my present solution is working fine so far.

Welcome to ExperAdvisorTrading.com.

I have traded forex for about 10 years as a private trader. I started out trading FX over phone with a broker and have since fallen in love with this fascinating thing. I have learnt a few technical analysis stuff which I believe is what most professional traders heavily rely on these days.

A year ago I started trading FX on the Internet but still did manual trading. I had had limited success with my trades until I found PipBoxer, an automated FX trading and management system. Initially I downloaded the demo version, set it up on a demo account and watched the result. The results were not that impressive although profitable. Then I started using the information from the system to trade manually on another Internet trading platform. Suddenly I could achieve more winning trades. In fact my profitability jumped from a slight negative to a 42% positive in just 45 days. So, I decided to buy the full version of PipBoxer and use it for live trading on my InterbankFX account. I will post my weekly results on this blog.