Hi Dan,

Thanks for sending your live account link.

Have you thought of going back to .01 or .02 micro lots. It's 10 cents for every 1 micro lot. I have seen
people build up their accounts using low lots and then increasing them little by little.

It know it will seem slow as molasses to build up your equity with such small lots but you will stay in the game longer.
It will allow you to see things you didn't see before.

I know because I went through $10,000 + real money by over leveraging my accounts. I learned the hard way.

With small lots you will also get to see how any EA that you are testing performs over the long haul through
various market cycles. When you see that the EA is performing well under most of the market conditions then
you can increase the lots little by little.

Just a thought.

Mike

Hi Dan,

Wow you have been trading for quite some time now!!! I wonder what it was like in those days? It may sound like I am
joking with that question but I'm serious. I wonder how the brokers were, the platforms, the spreads and most importantly the PROFITS were in those days?

I know that I don't have to mention to you how important money management is since you have been trading for quite some time now and also since you have just experienced what can happen if you don't pay attention to it.

I know that you went in a little heavy on the lot sizes because you actually thought this EA would produce a great return and that your balance would increase enough so that it wouldn't matter. I am fairly sure that you came to that conclusion based on the forward and backtests of this EA. I and many others would have probably done the same given the information at hand.

However I now know that no matter if you are trading manually or with an EA that you have to give the trading some time to evolve. The markets change so much every day, week and month that there are going to be times that no matter how good your trading is, you are going to have a few losses or a worse... a string of losses.

I must have tried figuratively hundreds of EA's. I say figuratively because although it may have been 50 or so, I must have changed the default inputs so much that it felt like hundreds of EA's. I always gave the EA the benefit of the doubt. If the default settings didn't work. I made it a mission to make it work. I won't even begin to tell you how much I have learned in the process. Well on second thought, I think I will. It wouldn't do you any justice if I left you hanging there without knowing. :)

Here is what happened for example. I bought FapTurbo in the end of 2008 when I started in forex. The EA did great for a few months until ODL closed my account because they said they don't allow EA's like that. You and I both know why they did that. I am not going to write the reason here in this post or email since I don't know if this message is public or not.

Then I went with Forex.com and FXCM US/UK. I started to do ok for a few months until I started to have losses with real money mind you. I racked my brain and couldn't understand what was happening. That's when invoked the power of the two most powerful phrases anyone could ask oneself, 'Ask and you shall receive.' or 'For everyone who asks... receives; he who seeks... finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.'
 
Now I am not a religious fanatic or anything but I do believe in the power of those words. I will say that if you read the latter quote carefully you will find that we as people in general have to do something first. We have to take some form of action such as asking and more importantly knocking. Things are not going to just happen unless you take some kind action mixed with a little faith or trust that you will find the answer. This reminds me of another quote that I read the other day that is similar to the other ones above but with the element of faith mixed in, 'You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.'

Anyways I did ask and I did knock. And one day it dawned to me like a flash of insight. I had figured out what happened. Most of the losses with FapTurbo was with the EURGBP after 23 GMT. How did I find that out? Something told me to go and look at the statement and compare the winners with the losers for that pair. What I noticed is that most of the big losers were after 23 GMT or 7 pm EST or 8 am in Japan. The conclusion I came up with was that if any trades were opened after 23 GMT or 8 am Asian opening that you were at the mercy of any large movement or trend against your trade. Plus not to mention the EURGBP pair has a higher PIP value than the other pairs. Thus with EURGBP, a 1 mini lot loss per pip was not $1 it was more like $1.33.

So that was my first lesson in money management and also in tweaking an EA to not have as many losses. Now I know that I had to be very careful that I wasn't over tweaking or over optimizing the EA constantly because I needed to know how the EA performed over a long period of time to give it a chance to evolve under most if not all market conditions. However when you do notice many big losses you have to ask yourself what is causing that and can it be fixed. If not, it's time to use another EA.

With respect to Forex Combo I believe it has potential. We just have to give it some time like 3 months or 6 months preferably to tell us what it is capable of doing. The only thing that is painstaking about all this trading stuff is that it takes time. And sometimes unfortunately most of us either don't have the time or don't want to take the time to make money over the long term because we want the money NOW to pay bills or just plain want extra income so we can travel more, go out to eat more often, buy organic foods, buy a bigger house, drive a better car, to donate to your favorite charity such as St. Judes, United Way, Red Cross or any other charity of your choice, to SAVE or to just live a better life.

The real challenge with most forex traders including myself is the limited capital we may have at the moment to make it grow enough to actually make a difference. I actually thought that at the beginning of my forex trading about 2 years ago that I was going to replace the income I was making from my businesses in less than a year. As you well know I was sadly mistaken.


I now believe and it is in my opinion, until I find another reason to believe otherwise, that it if you want to make $10,000 a month in forex using EA's, you may have to have $100,000 amongst 5 accounts each giving you a steady 10% return or $2,000 x 5 = $10,000 a month. This 60% one month and then -130% the next is not going to cut it.

You asked me what EA's I am using.

1) I am using FapTurbo 47 and 50 trading only EURCHF, GBPUSD and USDCHF.
2) I trade using Megadroid using Conservative Strategy only. I turned off the Aggressive Strategy on it.
3) Precision EA but with just a few of the logics or strategies turned on.
3) Some EA's that I had programmed for me.
4) Some EA's that some of my colleagues have given me.

I also manually trade.

As of the new year, I plan to go live with Cloverix, Forex Combo, Forex Crescendo and some other Ea's that I had programmed.

To give you a list of some of the EA's I have tried and believe don't work for me and my risk tolerance are:

1) AutoScalper - Small gains and occasional big losses.
2) Boston EA - Not consistent. Small gains and big losses.
3) Forex Funnel - Martingale and probably the worst. I lost a chunk of money with this one.
4) Forex Killer - Semi-manual EA. Wasn't consistent for me.
5) Gridzilla - I made money with this one but can get potentially huge DD for my tolerance.
6) Robominer - Slow and accumulates a lot of DD waiting for EURCHF or AUDNZD to retrace.
7) Steintiz HAS - To aggressive and not consistent.
8) TradeChimp - Not consistent.
9) Xtreme EURGBP - Made money and then lost all of my gains and a little of my capital.
10) etc.

I have also tried a few managed accounts only to lose 30% more of my capital in each.

I even tried Forex System Selector with FXCM and also Zulutrade. I will go back to Zulutrade since they
appear to have improved the synchronization issues.

That's when I decided to work on finding EA's that work and just manage my own money.

Well Dan that's my story in a nut shell. I am sure my story sounds a lot like yours especially since you have been trading
for 6 years now. I am sure you have seen it all or at least most of it. ;)

Let's keep in touch and collaborate. I am sure we can learn a lot from each other if you are open to it.

Either way it's ok. I enjoy talking to other traders who are humble and that want to honestly get better at trading so
that we can all become better traders and thus become more profitable.

As someone once said, 'We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.'

What has and hasn't worked for you?

Take care Dan.

Mike


P.S. One final note is that it usually takes money to make money. I believe we have to make the extra
capital from somewhere else to invest in this forex trading so that we can let the accounts grow slowly
and steadily with the least amount of DD. I am not sure that it will work the other way around. As I
always say, I would rather get rich slowly and than go broke fast.' Although come to think of it,
getting rich fast isn't so bad either. :)

P.P.S. Email me at Mike@WealthSecrets.com and I'll send you some of my stats pages.