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How To Make Forex Autopilot Better

Tom — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:15:41 +0000

Is it possible to make Forex Autopilot better? The percentage of winning trades for Forex Autopilot is well above 90%, but wouldn’t it still be nice to do something about those 10% losing trades?

As discussed in my Forex Autopilot review, there aren’t too many parameters you can change so you might think there’s not much you can do to influence the performance of your robot, but you’d be wrong.

If you look closely at the performance details of Forex Autopilot for the past 5 years you’ll find a very peculiar pattern to the losing trades. Nearly all of the losing trades occur at the beginning of the month.

In fact, at the end of each month Forex Autopilot closes out any open trades that are losing when the month rolls over to the next. Looking at the data shows most of the losing trades are closed out on the 1st - 3rd of the month. When it’s the 3rd it’s because the 1st was a Saturday.

Why they take this strategy isn’t clear to me yet, but regardless, with such an obvious pattern for losing trades it might be possible to use this information to simply avoid taking certain trades near the end of the month.

The best way to use this information is still being investigated, but to be sure, whenever there is an obvious pattern there is usually a way to exploit it to some degree.

The biggest issue to using this information to our advantage is that although it’s easy to determine what the last trade of the month was in hindsight, it’s not so easy looking forward. The reason being is that these losing trades don’t always open near the end of the month. Sometimes they were opened early in the month and just turn out to be longer duration trades.

A couple approaches being investigated are

Histogram the trades and try and see if there is more pattern indicators that might be predictive of bad trades. For instance, hypothetically if 70% of the bad trades begin in the last 4 days of the month perhaps if we simply don’t trade the last 4 days of each month our overall ROI will improve?
Work on determining the exact rule Forex Autopilot uses to exit it’s losing trades. Perhaps there are certain market conditions that more frequently lead to these end of month bad trades. This might lead to an understanding of how better to exploit this pattern

I’ve received a number of emails about this Forex Autopilot “feature” so I know there are a number of people working on ways to exploit this and I’m confident an approach will be found. Even a slight improvement in performance could mean many thousands of dollars.

If you want to get the absolute most money from your Forex robot then be sure to get your copy of our FREE Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots.

Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots

Tom — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:52:24 +0000

The free Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots is a comprehensive guide to getting the absolute best performance and the most money out of your Forex robot. This guide will help you profit by standing on the shoulders of proven winners.

Forex robots are essentially automated trading systems developed by skilled traders and programmers. These traders have taken their proven strategies and coded them into software so their computers can trade their strategies for them.

While automated trading systems have been a standard staple of institutional trading for some time, it’s only been the last few years that retail traders have acquired an insatiable thirst for industrial strength Forex robots as well. Given the huge money that can be made in Forex It’s understandable why those with less time to devote to trading would turn to and expert trader in the form of a Forex robot.

It’s important to keep in mind that not all Forex robots are created equal and, like any investment, due diligence is a must. Furthermore, if you really want to be successful it’s crucial that the due diligence comes only from your own testing and review for two reasons

marketing hype (go figure)
You need to understand first hand how the robot performs in different conditions in order to have the confidence to trade with the robot on a live account

Fortunately doing your own testing and due diligence is not that difficult or time consuming if you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately too many people think they know what they’re doing only to find out the hard way they were wrong.

The free Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots is written to help non-experts properly evaluate the characteristics of commercial Forex Robots. The guide will show you

The fundamentals behind automated trading systems
How to properly test your Forex robot with the free Meta Trader 4 platform
How to properly perform AND interpret historical back testing results
How to spot B.S. in manufacturer’s claimed performance results
How to determine the market conditions best suited for a given robot
How to draw YOUR OWN conclusions
How to do all of this RISK FREE

Although the learning curve to trade with Forex robots is significantly less than it is to become an expert trader, it’s still vital you take time to learn how to evaluate the robots you plan to trade with otherwise you might as well go ahead and trade it yourself.

No worries though, it requires no risk and only a little of your time, once you know what you’re doing, and the Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots will be there to help your through the process.

Just remember, nearly all of the Forex robots offer a free trial in the form of an 8 week money back guarantee. Furthermore, most Forex brokers offer a free paper trading account which you can paper trade and test your robot or as long as you like. it’s foolish not to take advantage of this and try these robots out for yourself. If it fails your expectations simply return if for a full refund.

Besides, whatever robot you decide to trade with you’re likely going to test it out for the first 8 weeks anyway right?

Go reserve your copy of Guide to Getting Rich with Forex Robots now.

Forex Tracer Review

David — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:09:30 +0000

Forex Tracer is an automated Forex trading system, or Forex robot as they’re often called, based on the free Meta Trader 4 trading platform. The basic idea is that Forex Tracer provides a hands off approach to trading currencies without requiring you to be an experienced trader.

Trading robots are complicated software designed to automate an expert trader’s knowledge and experience so non experienced traders can benefit as well. It’s like giving your money to an expert money manager and like choosing a money manager, you need choose your forex trading robot carefully.

Unfortunately MOST trading robots are reckless failures. Although, like any competitive endeavor, among the many failures there are always a few winners that rise to the top, and Forex Tracer is one of the top.

Our 5 year back tests showed very good results with a very reasonable maximum drawdown compared to most forex robots. For a complete detailed review including our Forex Tracer test results checkout our full Forex Tracer review

Full Forex Tracer Review

Trading System Giveaway Just Got Easier

Tom — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:14:20 +0000

A couple days ago we announced we were giving away a copy of the sold out Forex Profit Accelerator (value $1,947) as part of the launch for our new website. Now we’ve made it easier than ever to enter. (contest details).

We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback in the past couple days about the contest and as a result we’ve decided to make a few changes that I know will create a lot of happy campers. We want to make it easier for you to earn free tickets to the draw as well as to submit your ticket information. Here’s what we’ve done

Email Your Entry Info
Some people thrive on links to their profiles, blogs and other content pages which is why we were having you put the links that represent your entry tickets into the comments on the contest page. Well it turns out some people are not thrilled about the idea of putting their profile links out in the open and asked if they could mail in their entry information. So if you prefer to email your entries you can do so by simply replying to any of our email newsletters and putting the words Grand Opening Contest in the subject line.
More Ways To Earn Free Tickets
We’ve added a few more ways for you to earn free contest tickets.
1. Squidoo - Place a link to the contest page on your squidoo.com lens
2. Hub Pages - Place a link to the contest page on your Hub Page

We realize not everyone hangs out in the same places online so to make it easier for more people to enter to win Forex profit Accelerator we’ll likely be adding additional ways for you to acquire tickets in the very near future (places like facebook etc…)

Stock Market Traders Get To Play Too!

For all you stock traders out there we’ve got something big on the way for you as well. We’re going to be adding a very impressive (and expensive) stock trading course to the prize pool. I can’t tell you what it is just yet because the product in question is not yet on the market, but I can tell you it rocks! We have an evaluation copy and if your a stock trader then trust me, you’re going to want this!

keep your eyes on your email and this blog for further announcements regarding this contest prize pool because it’s going to grow significantly in the days ahead.

Full contest details can be found at

The MrAutomate Trading System Giveaway

We’re Giving Away A $1947 Forex Trading System Course

Tom — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:04:05 +0000

To celebrate the Grand Opening of the new MrAutomate.com site we’re rolling out some fantastic prizes as part of a Trading System Giveaway contest with booty worth over $2000.

We’re totally stoked to be launching this contest because nothing beats giving away top of the line products like Forex Profit Accelerator valued at $1947!

And we’re just getting started. You can expect more goodies to be added to the prize pot very soon!

Here’s the best part, it’s both free and easy to enter. So get in early and get in often because the contest closes October 26th at 6 PM Eastern.

Want to know how you can get more free tickets for the contest and increase your odds of winning by 30 times? Find out at

MrAutomate Trading System Giveaway

8 Simple Tips to Avoid Forex Scams

David — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:49:44 +0000

It is no secret that the Forex market is by far the largest market in the world and because of that it brings out a myriad of scams and rip-off artists. They are like vultures hovering around in forums and blogs just waiting for an opportunity to feed. They can be disguised as forex signal programs, forex newsletters, automated trading systems or robots (incredibly hot right now!), brokers, high yield investment programs, account managers, forex software platforms, ebooks with the secrets of market success, and much more! So the question is how can YOU avoid being scammed by these thieves?

1. Know who you are buying from

If they are a product vendor, make sure they have a phone number on their website. This is not to say that businesses with phone numbers are not scams, but most scammers like to hide behind a website and will not speak with you on the phone.

Call them and talk to a representative and ask them tons of questions about their business. How long have they been around? How were they started? You are basically looking for things that a real company would have answers for.

If for some reason they do not have a phone number and you feel like they are legit, email their support department to see if you get responses.

2. If it seems too good to be true, it ALWAYS is in the Forex market

This may sound a big cynical, but if you’ve been around the Forex market for a while you will understand. Use common sense when you listen to claims made by websites and marketers. If you have read some sales copy and you are thinking you can buy a product and have all your dreams fulfilled there’s something fishy going on… Listen to your gut on this one.

3. Steer clear of companies that guarantee no losses

No one on the planet can guarantee there will not be any losses in the Forex market or in any other market for that matter.

4. Do not listen to companies that claim unrealistic profits

If they say you can double your money in a year or a few months, run like crazy! The sheer logic just does not make sense. If someone could make that kind of return, I can guarantee they would not be selling their secrets for $97 in the form of an ebook…

5. Find unbiased reviews of brokers or programs before you buy them

Now this one is incredibly tricky given all the affiliate marketing going on today (that’s where people recommend a product to you and get a commission if you buy it). You need to hunt for real reviews. Here are some tips on knowing if the review is real.

It is likely a real review if it is: really long and in depth, the person has insider information that cannot be found on the product’s sales page, they show you screenshots inside the product, they allow an open discussion on their review page (huge tip here), and it does not sound hyped up.

6. Keep your emotions in check

You might be wondering where I am going on this one, but the truth is we can all get temporarily sold on something. Have you ever looked at a new car on a lot and wanted to buy it immediately? However, for some reason or another you could not do it that exact day. After sleeping on it you realized that your emotions were ruling your decision and that you really didn’t need the car.

The same happens to us in looking at all these Forex trading programs, software, etc. The sales page might hype us up and we’ll buy based on our emotions. So I recommend that you actually sleep on it for a day or two before buying anything. This tip alone has kept me out of tons of scams.

7. Don’t believe ridiculous historical test results

No matter how much you want to believe historical test data, it’s simply too easy to make any system look good with optimized historical tests. If you want to learn how this trick is done, a great way to get started is to subscribe to MrAutomate.com and we will address backtesting in our mailers.

8. Test the system thoroughly on paper prior to the end of the return time frame

Almost any legitimate program offers a refund/return period these days. It’s usually 30, 60, or 90 days from your purchase date. Make sure to thoroughly test the system in your paper trading account prior to this date so you can return it if you are not seeing any results. Don’t believe them if they try to get you to test it for 6 months (and therefore forcing you outside the refund period..), just return it and move on.

If you have some other tips or tricks that will keep people from getting scammed out of their hard earned cash, please post them here. I’m interested to see what tips we can uncover.

Trading Question Answered | Exits Matter

Tom — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:54:48 +0000

Last week I posed the following trading question to the readers of this blog (last weeks post here)

Suppose you knew a Forex trader who never seemed to win. Sure he’d win the odd time, but over the long run he always lost all his money. It was as though the market had an edge over him much like a casino does over a player.

Remembering that Forex is a zero sum game, which means every dollar lost is a dollar won by someone else, I ask the question

If our friend simply did the exact opposite of what he would normally do would he win $10,000 instead of lose $10,000?

(For the sake of simplicity this lucky duck gets to trade for free so lets assume he pays no commissions or bid ask spread. Lets also assume there are no psychology issues about doing the opposite of what he would normally do. Imagine some way in which he doesn’t even know it’s happening if you like.)

The question was design to illustrate a few things

how different people think about trading and trading systems in general
how quick spur of the moment thinking often leads us astray
and perhaps most importantly, how our exit strategies need to be considered in the scope of our entire trading system

When I ask the question face to face people are often compelled to answer right away because they’re on the spot. 4 out of 5 times the answer seems to be that the trader would indeed win what they would have lost, which by the way is wrong (as many of you noted). People often see the symmetry of the zero-sum game concept and assume the symmetry applies in places where it in fact does not.

The answers left on the question post were more thought out in general than those I get face to face. This is possibly due to the fact that the respondents had more time to think about it and were not put on the spot. It’s really amazing how a little pressure can cloud our judgment.

A lot of answers that were left seemed to have be based on some psychological factors either with the trader or the other traders in the market and what they would do in response.

Although these comments were certainly valid, they were not quite what I was looking for since my goal was to completely remove the human factor, the psychology of the game and simply focus on the mechanics of the situation. My bad. I could probably have stated the question better from the get go.

At one point in the comments I tried to simplify the question a bit by stating that we could imagine the whole system was automated and that we simply flip the direction of the entry and the trading system continues on as it would if it had picked that entry.
Anyway, without belaboring the issue any longer … the answer I was looking for was

There is no way to know because there’s not enough information!

Although I don’t believe there is any way to know if the trader will win or lose, I do believe Matt’s answer was the closest to what I was looking for (yes Matt, I’m going to send you a book). Matt’s comment

what will get him every time is how he exits the trades(those will be opposite from before now too)

is pretty close to where I was going with this question. The fact of the matter is we simply don’t know anything about his exits so we have no way to know what will happen if we simply flip his entry direction. He may win money overall or he may still lose overall.

In almost all cases our rules for exiting a winning trade is very different from our rules for exiting a losing trade. So a trade that might have originally lost our fearless trader $300 might now win him $700. Also, a trade that might have won our trader $300 could now lose him $1000. It all depends on how his exits are set up.

As an illustration … imagine our traders exit strategy on a winning trade is to take a profit and exit after $300 favorable move. btw, Forex Autopilot uses a fixed profit taking strategy like this (I don’t recommend it) . And our exit strategy for losing trades is to bail out once we’re down down 2%.

So in our original case our trader wins $300. Now we flip his trade direction and lets say he loses 2% and exits. Now he could lose $50 or $500 or some other amount depending on where his account balance is at the moment.

Here’s another case to consider … let’s say he has $10,000 and he loses $200 because it moved against him by 2%. So we go back in time and flip his trade direction and he still loses $200! How? Because the trade might now be going in his direction but stalls out at $285 and turns the other direction and eventually goes against him by 2%. He still loses.

The point of all this is that the nature of our exit strategies are often far more important than our entry strategies. With out a solid understanding of our exits it becomes very difficult to win over the long haul.

To often people spend too much time on how to pick a great entry but the real money is made on the exit. And lets not forget, that’s exactly where we preserve out capital so we can play again the next day.

A final note on exits … there have been numerous studies showing that it’s actually possible to make money (albeit not much) with a completely random entry signal as long as our exits and money management techniques are sound. (you can read more about this in the Van Tharp books mentioned in our recommended reading list).

Thanks everyone for playing. I truly enjoyed the discussion.

The Next big Contest

Just want to remind everyone about the upcoming Grand Opening contest that will be announced in a couple days. You’ll have a chance to win over $2000 worth of trading goodies and I promise, No skill testing questions required!

The Rush of Your First REAL Trade!

David — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:16:23 +0000

About four years ago…

I decided it was time to start trading with real money. My paper demo account was overall at a small profit, but that was because I had a few terrible trades early in that slowed me down (or so I thought).

Regardless, I was trading the foreign currency market using a day trading/scalping method. My plan was to trade with the trend and capture small movements throughout the course of the evening/morning. I was trading the British pound (GBP/USD) and the Euro (EUR/USD).

After the first few successful paper trades I immediately funded my broker. However, I did force myself to wait two more weeks until I could prove the method to myself. During those two weeks every trade I took brought me closer to success. I remember sitting there already imagining myself walk out the door of my day job, driving my new BMW, building a new house, that look of pure peace/pride on my wife’s face knowing I could take care of her, the complete and utter freedom, no more boss, no one telling me what to do or when to do it, and most of all no more worrying about money!

So here I am, I have traded for four weeks and I’m a pro… It’s time to start making real money – forget this paper stuff! I had already funded my account with $10,000. I would be lying to say this was money I could afford to lose, but it was money I was willing to risk for what I thought was my one shot at greatness.

After watching the charts for a while, the signals set up perfectly. I decided to take the trade however instead of one lot; I decided to use 2 lots! After all, I was in it to make BIG money FAST. My heart’s pumping, I’m more nervous/excited/anxious than I have ever been in my life. I did the only thing I could do…hit the buy button.

Every pip was $20 and since the spread was 3 pips I was already down $60. A few seconds later it came to break even, then back down to -$100, and then it kept shooting up. It hit $700, and then started to go back down. At $560 I felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest and I did not want to let the market take my profit so I closed the trade. I could not believe it $560 on my first trade! My account was up 5.6% on one trade.

Here I am thinking to myself, “I really can do this”! 20 minutes later after emailing my close friends the victory report, I calmed down and decided I needed to watch for the next move. About an hour later I had my setup again. I bought the GBP/USD again. I decide to use 3 full lots this time. Maybe it could break $1,000 profit this time. I clicked the buy button again…

Instantly my account is at -$90, okay that’s the spread. 5 Seconds later it was at -$270, then 10 seconds later - $540 (I could not believe my eyes), and finally -$810….. I closed the trade. It only took 45 seconds to lose $810. I felt like I was going to hurl and literally curled up on the couch, and shut my laptop. My dreams disappeared. All I saw was failure in my future.

This was my first trading experience I went from an ultimate high to what I felt like was rock bottom. I have since learned that my first trading experience was not uncommon for new Forex traders. I learned that your emotions can make you act incredibly irrational during trades, and that they can keep you from developing a proper trading system as well.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be covering different aspects of trading psychology. I’ll be showing you the silent killer of many a traders and how you can learn from their mistakes to improve your trading performance.

Please post your personal experiences below. I want to know how your first real money trading experience worked out. Did you start off making money immediately? Did you have a major loss? How did you feel? How do you think you emotions played a role in your early trading?

A Forex Question I Bet You’ll Get Wrong

Tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:14:38 +0000

The other day I was at a monthly BBQ with a bunch of forex traders where we basically drink a lot and argue the merits of different trading styles and methods. Anyway, I posed the following question to the group and the answers I heard were pretty surprising.

The question goes something like this

Suppose you knew a Forex trader who never seemed to win. Sure he’d win the odd time, but over the long run he always lost all his money. It was as though the market had an edge over him much like a casino does over a player.

Remembering that Forex is a zero sum game, which means every dollar lost is a dollar won by someone else, I ask the question

If our friend simply did the exact opposite of what he would normally do would he win $10,000 instead of lose $10,000?

(For the sake of simplicity this lucky duck gets to trade for free so lets assume he pays no commissions or bid ask spread. Lets also assume there are no psychology issues about doing the opposite of what he would normally do. Imagine some way in which he doesn’t even know it’s happening if you like.)

Why am I so sure you’ll get this wrong?

Because I’ve tested it and the odds are in my favor so it’s a bet I’m willing to take.

Answer the Question and Win a Trading Book From Amazon?

(not: the contest has ended. Results will be posted shortly)

Lets make this fun … put your answer with an explanation in the comment and when I post the solution in a week whoever I think has the best answer will win a book of their choice from our recommended reading list.

Now obviously there could be more than one winner in which case we’ll take the first one. Also be sure to put your real email in the email field when commenting or I won’t know who you are if you win and won’t be able to send you the prize.

Good luck

Sign up for our newsletter (see sidebar) and RSS feed and you’ll be first in line to hear about our next contest which rumor has it will be much bigger and will NOT require a skill testing question;)

Forex Mentor Table of Contents Added To Review

Tom — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:07:13 +0000

For those who have already read the Forex Mentor review, I want to let you know it’s been updated to include the Forex Mentor table of contents for the 12 disks containing the hundreds of videos that comprise this forex course. The table of contents shows the titles of each video you’ll receive as part of this excellent forex course and is definitely worth checking out.

If you haven’t read the review then be sure to do so as it will give you a better understanding of why we think this course rocks.

As a convenience you can also see the table of contents here

Forex Mentor Table of Contents

enjoy