Forex Kung Fu

Updated results are now available.

FxBandit is up to 134k - awesome results so far. Bill has sent me some variable modification to FXBandit II to keep it competive with FxBandit I.  I will be changing that shortly.

PipBoxer completed its first trade for a healthy 6% profit. I am adding the results to the menu. I have some changes to make to the PipBoxer setup - I want to keep it inline with the suggested rollout on their website.

Still haven’t had an word from Double Play…

I wrote a couple of other EA vendors to see if they are willing to share trial versions of their code.

I have a new friend in the forex blog world - please check out his site:

http://ckowyong.com/blog/

Wow - I posted the results of FX-Bandit on the menu. I will be posting results daily there. You can see FX-Bandit v1 just went into overdrive, with 25% profit. Version 2 did 10%.

Pipboxer made no trades.

The folks from Double Play still have not gotten back to me on a demo of their EA.

I can’t wait to open a live forex account. Very exciting day.

Brian

What a pain in the ass it is to setup an IRA as a forex account. All the brokerages want you to hire an independent IRA custodian and have them transfer the funds. Most of these custodians want between $300 to $400 dollars a year in management fees. That seems unreasonable.

I did find a cheaper one, but I feel like I am being taken:

http://www.sunwesttrust.com/sdira.aspx
If anyone has any suggestions on this or knows brokerages which can act as an IRA custodian I would love to hear from you.

Good results from FXBandit this morning will post results later tonight.

Bill from FXBandit reached out to me today and sent me two trial versions of his EA, which I have setup per his instructions (1Hr charts for GBPUSD, EURUSD, USDCHF, AUDUSD, and EURJPY.) I am using demo accounts with ODL to test these strategies. Each EA is setup on its own demo account starting with 100,000k. I have left all variables at their defaults until Bill tells me otherwise.

I bought the trial of PIPBoxer and set it up on the 4 default currencies for MT4. I have this EA dedicated to its own demo account with a starting balance of 10k. I did change the risk value from 1% to 10%.

I haven’t yet figured out the best way to evaluate these EA’s - maybe pips per graph? Any suggestions are appreciated.

I have setup these EA’s on seperate instances of MT4 until I can get some guidance on how to trade multiple EA’s in the same installation. I will be setting up a vmware instance on my dedicated server to better support an always on environment.

I am using demo server ODL-MT4, which appears to be on GMT. Can anyone confirm?

All accounts are setup for 1:100 leverage.I look forward to the first automated trade!

Welcome to Forex Kung Fu - where I (Brian Toovey) attempt to chronicle my experiences deploying automatic trading systems in the Forex arena.

I have settled in on a trading platform which seems to be the best tool for automated forex trading: Metatrader 4:

http://www.metaquotes.net/

It allows for automatic trading in the currency markets. Basically you can plug in third party “Expert Advisors,” or trading systems that third part developers have designed to execute trades for you.

For my purposes, I will be starting testing with these three EA’s, or Expert Advisors:

Pip Boxer
Double Play
FxBandit

I will be rolling an IRA worth $5900 from TDAmeritrade to a Forex account on Monday. I will be testing for two weeks on a demo forex account until I am sure the EA’s variables are set right.

What has me a little worried about process involved  is leaving a Windows XP machine on 24×5. I will be setting up a dedicated server at a hosting company to mitigate the power going out at my house or my Internet service failing.

I will be posting daily, weekly, and monthly results as they occur.

My long term plan is as follows:

1) Spend the next six months becomming intimate with every process of automatic trading in a Forex environment.

2) Begin to develop, with the assistance of other smart people, my own Expert Advisor. (If your interested in joining in this effort please sign up!)

3) Move off the MT4 platform and onto my own custom trading platform designed to run on a Linux cluster. The system will comprise two main parts:

a) A self learning back test environment. Basically I want the cluster to analyze and tune different parameters of the custom system to self-learn and self-improve the strategy.

b) Order execution. It must be fast and support all the major forex exchanges.

I very much welcome you follow me down the rabbit hole. Please leave comments or suggestions, as long as they are half way intelligent.