ExpertAdvisorTrading.com

The first bad week for my PipBoxer forex trading. Altogether 24 trades were closed with 12 wins against 12 losses. I suffered a net loss of $829.93.

PipBoxer seemed to get bullish signals on most USD pairs an entered long USD trades early in the week. That’s where the disaster came from. On Thursday USD collapsed across the board taking most USD pairs to outright SLs. The 3 long USDJPY, 1 long USDCAD and 1 long USDCHF hit SLs. There were encouraging recoveries on Friday with a long USDCAD and a short NZDUSD hit TPs.

Not too bad to end the week with the late recoveries especially when the 8 opened trades are also showing a $202 floating profit. My account balance now stands at $10,237.70.

I don’t think this sharp drawdown indicate fundamental problems of PipBoxer. It’s one of those days in forex when things aren’t work the way you like. There’s still a fair chance for me to wrap July with the 5% equity growth target even though only 2 days trading left for the month.

Quite a hectic week with 21 trades closed by PipBoxer. A good 14:7 win:loss and a handsome net profit of $866.81for the week.

I’m not going to get into details here but just to say I’m totally satisfied with the performance of PipBoxer. The bot made good enters and has a very efficient Money Management system. Just one observation here. As mentioned before, I trade all 11 currency pairs and the diversification seemed to play a role here. EURCAD hit outright SL only to be made up and surpassed by outright TP in GBPUSD and USDJPY. 

At the end of the week, there remained 8 open positions with floating loss of $122. Given the past experience with PipBoxer, frankly I’m not too worried.

So my target of at least 5% growth per month has already been over-achieved. My account balance increased to $11,068 from $10,201 a week ago. May be I can start to be more aggressive.

This week 16 trades were closed by PipBoxer with a win:loss of 7:9 but still a net profit of $95.96. This was achieved because the profit trades averaged $51 while loss trades -$29.

The week started with a floating loss of $127 from open positions carried from the week before. It struggled in the beginning of the week but from the middle of the week loss positions started to get worked out. In fact, most of the trades were closed with the adjusted SLs or TPs. Only 2 trades (USDCHF, USDCAD) hit unadjusted TPs outright and one (EURUSD) hit unadjusted SL with roughly 200 pips gain and loss.  So PipBoxer built-in Money Management is playing a significant role here.

At the end of the week, there remained 7 open positions but this time with floating profit of $51. My account balance stands at $10201 againt $10105 a week before.

Somewhat similar results as a week earlier. Assuming this roughly 1% per week growth rate of account balance is achieved by the system consistently, my equity can be doubled in 70 weeks. Right now I trade all the 11 currency pairs with the same 2% VAR setting. I will evaluate performance of each pair after a period of time and may adjust VAR up or down for the pair. My target is to achieve at least 5% growth per month.

Here is a weekly summary of the results of my forex trading using PipBoxer.

This week 10 trades were closed by PipBoxer with 8 wins against 2 losses and a net profit of $99.43. Seven trades hit TP (take profit) and three hit SL (stop loss). You may wonder why I had 8 wins with 7 TPs. What happened was 2 SLs were actually profitable while 1 TP was a loss. Profitable SL or losing TP may sound illogical but this is precisely the beauty of PipBoxer. With the built in Money Management, SLs and TPs are dynamically adjusted to ensure profitable trades or to minimize loss. You can see the log of what exactly PipBoxer has done by clicking on the tab labeled “Expert” at the bottom of your MT4 trading platform.

I need to clarify here that during the course of last week, I adjusted the VAR from 1% to 2% and added $9,000 to my account making the total fund invested $10,000. I already mentioned the reasons why I need to do that in my last post. Together with previous profit, my account balance now stands at $10,104.86. Note that $19.5 was deducted by the broker’s bank as a money transfer fee.

Apart from the VAR adjustment and fund deposit, there was no intervention on my part to this automated fx trading system whatsoever. I only need to make sure the PC runs uninterrupted and the Internet connection is always up. The rest is PipBoxer’s job.

Ten trades remain open with some floating loss. I have witnessed how PipBoxer managed to turn losing trades into profit overall and expect similar results next week.

The detailed statement of my Interbank FX account for Jun ‘07 can be viewed here.

This account is used solely for forex trading using PipBoxer expert advisor. It’s a mini account with initial deposit of US$1,000.

So this first week and first month results look great with 8 profitable trades out of 10 trades. There are 10 open trades with a good floating profit. There was some bumpy road along the way, but luckily PipBoxer managed to stay profitable.

The one issue I have now is the amount of fund I invested may be too small. It will take at least a year before I recover the cost of purchasing PipBoxer. In order to shorten the payback period and actually to make this investment worthwhile, the size of the invested fund needs to be increased. Well, I’ll do exactly that shortly.

Another point to mention is I set Value At Risk (VAR) in PipBoxer at the minimum 1%. This parameter determines how big your lot size per trade will be. In forex it is most advisable to play safe. The maximum VAR allowed by the system is 10% but that is far too aggressive for me. Having said that VAR of 1% may be too conservative. So, I will raise my VAR to 2% and see how things go.

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.

Today is my first day that the PipBoxer expert advisor was put to trade on my live Interbank FX account. I set up all the 11 currency pairs (USDJPY, USDCHF, USDCAD, EURUSD, EURJPY, EURGBP, GBPUSD, GBPJYP, EURCAD, AUDUSD, NZDUSD) for automatic trading. The results:

Closed Transactions:
2007.06.25 10:57 sell audusd 0.8485 sl 2007.06.26 02:40 0.8481 +4 pips
2007.06.25 19:46 sell gbpjpy 246.88 sl 2007.06.26 15:48 246.60 + 28 pips
2007.06.26 08:15 sell eurjpy 165.73 sl 2007.06.26 11:15 165.69 +4 pips
2007.06.26 12:40 sell eurusd 1.3476 tp 2007.06.26 14:07 1.3460 +16 pips

Open Trades:
2007.06.25 10:15 sell usdchf 1.2277 last 1.2284 -7 pips
2007.06.25 12:30 sell usdjpy 123.57 last 123.27 +30 pips
2007.06.26 10:31 sell usdchf 1.2293 last 1.2284 +9 pips
2007.06.26 11:23 sell usdjpy 123.09 last 123.27  -16 pips

So all the closed transactions are profitable – a 100% hit rate! You may notice that 3 closed trades were triggered by stop loss (sl) with just small pip gains. This is due to the risk management by PipBoxer where stop loss levels are adjusted to ensure profitability whenever appropriate. Only one trade hit take profit (tp). There was no intervention whatsoever on my part. Everything got done automatically by the system.

I’m certainly quite happy with these first day results. For me, a good start of a new business venture is always very important. My next report on this fx trading using PipBoxer will be at the end of the week.

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.