Looking for the grail in commercial EAs

What is a commercial EA? It is one that you have to pay to use it, whether a one-time fee or by subscription. So which are the ones that one should go for? Well, there is a fourm you can go check out on Facebook Finding the Best Forex Expert Advisors. These people spent their time experimenting with different EAs, and many are with live accounts. So if you need a good gauge of an EA’s performance, then hear from the ground.

The truth about forex is – you can’t predict the future. You can only guess with certainty based on patterns, technical analysis, fundamentals, news, etc.

Have you ever heard someone said – if I sell, I got stopped out and should have long. But if you long, the same happens and you still get stopped out.

What am I getting into. The market does not wait to be predicted. There are many EAs with different strategies. If you lose money it is easy to blame the EA you have just bought. If you win, you think everything is fine and continue until your equity starts to ebb. Every commercial EA get to be called “spam” because either they are really spam or did not meet your profit making criteria when used at that point in time. Almost every EA you read in the forum has followers and non-followers.

Some EAs are expensive, some are cheap. Does a more expensive EA brings better performance?

MQL5 – a step further for traders

MQL5 is the new programming language MetaQuotes is working on to replace MQL4. MQL5 is similar to C++, whereas MQL4 is similar to Pascal. What this means is that functional programming with languages like C, Pascal, Basic and Fortran has now evolved to object oriented programming using C++, C#.

What is object oriented programming? Well, if you design your program based on objects and then use “methods” to operate on them, you get a cleaner program and your codes are reusable. Also you can get to work on objects rather than a spaghetti of functions. What are objects?

Let’s say you have a table. You define the features of this table: what is it made of, how many legs, what kind of shape. This table object now can be used or operated upon using methods. Methods are really functions. For example you can have a function Place(A,Table), which places another object A (say a plate) on the object table. You can see now that both objects are reusable for other occasions.

I had a quick look at Tetris, a program written in MQL5. Well, EA programming is getting harder and many will find it moving beyond their reach. What traders want are simple tools to automate their strategies and not develop complex programming structures to meet their trading needs. Most of these complex EAs are using more sophisticated algorithms eg neural networks. Today, most people who use NN tend to have them written in C++, trained and optimised. Then when it comes to trading, a simple routine to take parameters from a file as output by the C++ program for use in trading. You can do that all at one go now with MQL5.

But that is only a small percent of traders. The majority just need a simple tool. Most retail traders will be able to pick up MQL4 overtime, after looking at many EAs and templates. But MQL5 is going to be a chore, a pain, and I am beginning to want to yawn at yet another language, another learning curve, rewriting EAs … when all we want is just to make money from forex trading!

Oh I have not talked about MT5 which is the client platform for which will use MQL5 language. MT5 promises better features, better tester, better debugging – anything better is always a welcome. But I hope MetaQuotes will continue their user-friendly platform in the likes of MT4, which is the reason for my preference to choose only brokers that offer MT4. No one has seen MT5 yet, so let’s hope it is for the better.

Automated Trading Championship - wetoea after ATC2008

What is life for wetoea after ATC2008? It took me a while to figure out how to solve the gapping prices, and finally take wetoea for a run at FXDD because this broker has the same server time as ATC. Here's the results so far, pretty decent isn't it?

Started on 31 Mar 2009, the results above is at 24 Apr 2009, with a total trades of 16. Starting equity is $3,000 and it has a decent profit of $1380. Not bad for a month with a return of 46%. Maximum drawdown is 5.5%.

I will let it run autopilot and see how it goes. Unfortunately demo accounts at FXDD is not forever unlike some other brokers. That's it for ATC2008.