Some Updates

Dear FX Robot Man & Advanced Droid Tactics Readers:

In this update:

1. New ADT v5.0
2. August Performance
3. ForexVPS
4. Forex Bling Bonus

1. New ADT v5.0

As a result of the recent losses that some of you have been experiencing on the Overlap setup I have decided to change the recommended settings. Basically we will only be using Aggressive = FALSE from now on for all charts and all setups in the ADT method.

I have updated the PDF to v5.0 with the new settings, and the corresponding changes to the Risk Tables. Also in the new v5.0 I have expanded the Installation Instructions for the Profile Reset Indicator to include instructions for the Auto Installer, and updated instructions for installing the files by hand.

There is no need to go through the checkout process again for the update. The new version of the PDF is available for download in the Member’s Area of the website. No changes have been made to the Profile Reset Indicator at this time – so there is no need to re-download those files.

2. August Performance

I continue to have connection issues with my demo server, but will be moving to a new ForexVPS account now that they have increased the available memory on their service.

The ADT Overlap and Unified were trading with the old settings and higher risks at the beginning of August so don’t make too much of the performance difference between those two and the ADT Hybrid which came on a bit later with lower risks.

Either way the ADT method shows a substantial advantage over the default MegaDroid settings.

• MegaDroid Default - Loss (-7.2%)
• ADT Overlap Setup - Profit +16.2%
• ADT Unified Setup – Profit +16.9%
• ADT Hybrid Setup – Profit +7.4%

4. ForexVPS.com

I have tried several different VPS services and they all have good and bad features. I know some of you get VPS hosting from your brokers, and there are many VPS options out there. However, I have been reasonably happy with ForexVPS.com and they recently upped the RAM memory for each of their accounts. If you have been considering a VPS host for your forex trading you might have a look at their new specs :
http://www.forexvps.com

5. Forex Bling Bonus

I am guessing that many of you are being bombarded with emails regarding the new Forex Bling package of EAs that was created by the folks at Forex Hope. I purposely do not send my customers very many promotions because most the EAs that come out are garbage. Right now I can’t say whether Forex Bling will be good or not, but I have been following the developers of this package for several years now. They have been around for a while and they support their products. It is offered through ClickBank so if it turns out to be crap then just as k for your money back.

Because many of you will probably purchase this package anyway I wanted to offer you a bonus if you decide to purchase through my affiliate link. http://www.fxrobotman.com/recommends/forexbling

I have have been working on a package of MT4 tools that I developed for myself to make my trading easier and to automate some routine functions I perform. I still need about 2 weeks to write the instructions and get them ready to distribute, but if you purchase Forex Bling through me I will give you some of these tools for FREE:

• “Order Entry Scripts”
  These scripts allow you to enter Market Orders and Limit Orders and set the take profit and stop loss values in Pips as opposed to calculating the exact price each time. In addition, these scripts will automatically calculate your position size based on your stop loss and the % risk you want to take on the trade.
• MetaTrader Restart Indicator
  MetaTrader is notorious for eating up the memory on your VPS server no matter how efficient your EAs or Indicators are. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an indicator that can automatically close and then restart all of your MT4 terminals on the day and time of your choice? My Restart Indicator launches a customizable batch file that will close all of your MT4 terminals and then one by one bring them back on. You can specify the day and time you want to restart, and also tell it to only restart if there are no open trades.

++++++++++++++++
That is all I have for now. As always please feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Best of Luck with your Trading,
Ben

Advanced Droid Tactics Beta Edition is Live!

I am selling 100 Beta Edition copies of my Advanced Droid Tactics eBook for the discounted price of $24.95. Sorry, but I am not offering any refunds or guarantees on this one. Serious MegaDroid traders only please!

Beta Testers will also receive complete access to all future updates and any additional content or video tutorials I make available. You can read the complete details on the sales letter:

http://www.droidtactics.com

Sorry for the Delay!

Let me first apologize. I know it has been a couple of weeks since I have posted any updates or sent any emails regarding the development of my  “Advanced Droid Tactics” eBook.

However, I completely underestimated the amount of time (and money) that was required to complete the Beta Edition analysis, write up and publish a high quality eBook, and then to write, design and activate a sales letter, shopping cart and fulfillment service. In retrospect I should have hired someone rather than doing this myself, but I was trying to save some money and keep the price down.

I have basically used every spare moment of my Forex time (including sneaking some time at my wife’s High School reunion) to write and develop the Advanced Droid Tactics eBook.

I only need 100 people to check out the Beta Edition of ADT at the discounted price of $24.95 and give me some feedback on the setups, the content, and any other thoughts they might have.

Existing MegaDroid Affiliate Customers

I have long promised that all my existing MegaDroid affiliate customers would get a free copy of Advanced Droid Tactics when it was ready to go. I plan to release the Official Edition of ADT sometime on or after Monday, August 10th.

When I release the Official Version of ADT all of my existing MegaDroid affiliate customers that purchased the Forex MegaDroid on or before Monday July 20th (about 50 people) will get a special coupon code that will give them a free copy of the eBook and all other ADT content.

I have decided not to release free copies of the Beta Edition simply because the Beta Edition is a way for me to engage some serious first movers to help me test my setups and to recoup some of my development costs. This will also allow me to offer the highest quality product when the official release is ready in August.

I will have a special discount coupon in the future for any new affiliate customers that purchase Forex MegaDroid through my starting today.

Feedback

Please do not hesitate to send me an email if you have any questions or comments regarding Advanced Droid Tactics or any other Forex systems or products that are on your mind.

I will be building an extensive FAQ and will be recording some video tutorials over the coming weeks based on the Beta Edition feedback and reviews that will be coming in.

Best Regards,


Benjamin R. Cook
www.DroidTactics.com

Ultimate Swing Trader Offer

FX Robot Man Readers:

The team over at NetPicks has released the latest version of their system, the Ultimate Swing Trader, which has been tailored for forex swing traders that don’t have a lot of time to sit in front of the charts. Although I would much prefer to be promoting the more comprehensive version of their system, the UMT Ultimate package, this latest edition is quite a bit cheaper.

http://www.netpicks.com/cmd.php?af=1009689

I have been keeping an eye on the UMT system for probably 2 years or more now, and I don’t think too much has changed over that time. It is primarily a manual trading system focusing on trend trading with a specific set of entry rules and profit targets. The key to the system is that they really focus on maintaining a good risk-reward ratio on every trade, and never over trading.

Although I can’t make the same offer I made on Forex Income Engine 2.0 with a free copy of M5G Cyborg, I have been thinking of a way to sweeten the deal for those of you that want to give the Ultimate Swing Trader a try. Because of various rules about cash rebates from affiliates, the best I can do is offer you a $50 credit toward the purchase of any other EA priced at $97 or higher.

If you decide to buy Ultimate Swing Trader and do not return the system during the 30 day refund period, I will give you a $50 credit on any other EA system you purchase through my website.

The UST system will probably give you monthly points on the order of 250-500 pips which is more than enough to get you 10-20% per month on 2% risk. The price of Ultimate Swing Trader has now gone up to $597 (started at $497) so you should probably have an account balance of $5,000 to justify getting into this system.

Update:

I just learned that there are still some extra copies of Forex Income Engine 2.0 being released right now, so I am still honoring the free copy of M5G Cyborg to those of you the decide to jump on FIE 2.0 at this point:

http://www.customforextrading.com/y/?i=1002680&u=2&l=f75

That’s all for now. I have new live accounts running MegaDroid with my Advanced Tactics setup right now – and I should have the mt4stats pages up for those by the end of the week.

-Ben aka FX Robot Man

Webinar Reminder: Today at 4pm EST

Dear FX Robot Man Readers,

This is a quick reminder about the “emergency” webinar being held TODAY, Thursday, June 18th at 4pm Eastern by Bill Poulos, developer of the Forex Income Engine 2.0 home study course that has nearly sold out in just the past few days.

If you want to know more about the Forex Income Course 2.0, then you should consider attending the webinar. In addition to the free M5G Cyborg license that I will be offering you, they are expected to announce even more bonuses today to sweeten the deal.

Worst case, you buy the course, learn what you can, and then send it back for a full refund within 90 days if don’t think it is worth it. Now, you won’t get a free M5G Cyborg license if you send it back, but trust me, it is not like my feelings are going to be hurt if this is what you decide to do.

If you’ve wondered whether this course can help your Forex trading, you need to register for this webinar immediately.

Seats are limited, and there are only a few hundred left.

(Plus, Bill has a few surprises you’ve NEVER seen before that will be revealed on the webinar that you will NOT want to miss.)

Register HERE:

http://www.customfxtrading.com/y/?i=1002680&u=2&l=f67

Bill’s taking some critical content straight out of his Forex Income Engine 2.0 course and revealing it live on the webinar:

• How to create an “infinite” risk/reward ratio when you trade Forex, regardless of what pair or timeframe you trade…
• Why most traders actually LOSE money when they try to capture a market’s entire move, and how you can turn this into your advantage when you know the exact part of a market move you should be going after…
• …and a TON more.

Forex Income Engine 2.0 Review

(Important: In order to qualify for my bonus offer below, you must use my affiliate links. It is important that you first delete the cookies from your browser history by hitting “Ctrl+Shift+Del“)

Although I personally prefer trading the forex market with auto trading systems such as Forex MegaDroid and M5G Cyborg, anytime there is a major forex trading course launch I inevitably get a lot of questions asking for my opinion.

The latest course being promoted is the Forex Income Engine 2.0 course from Bill Poulos. Mr. Poulos has been selling trading systems for many many years, and I can personally attest to the high quality of his course materials, support, and trading systems. I guess it has been about 2 years now, but I actually did purchase his “Forex Profit Accelerator” course a while back, and one of the first EAs I ever programmed was largely based on the methods I learned in that course.

The courses themselves are extremely high quality! The booklets, cheat sheets, DVDs, customer support websites, system updates etc. They also offer a 90 day unconditional money back gurantee, and they have a good reputation for processing these refunds.

This latest course actually teaches 3 different trading methods that can be applied to any currency pair and any time frame – so it is meant to be a highly flexible trading system that can accommodate a variety of trading styles. Whether you prefer to scalp trade or to swing trade, this course is intended to compliment any trading style.

The only negative thing I ever heard about the first version of the Forex Income Engine course was that the original system had about 10 rules for identifying a setup bar, and some people said it took them quite a bit of practice before they could quickly identify the setup conditions.

Because I personally have not been hands on with Forex Income Engine 2.0, I think it is best to link you to a very well written and comprehensive review of this product for those you that want more information:

http://theforexarticles.com/2009/06/13/forex-income-engine-20-review/

Bonus Offer: Free M5G Cyborg License

If you have been contemplating purchasing the Forex Income Engine 2.0 course, I have actually decided to offer an amazing free bonus to any of my readers who purchase the course through FX Robot Man. So here is the deal, for those of you that choose to purchase Forex Income Engine 2.0 and do not return the product within 90 days for a refund, I will throw in a FREE LICENSE for the M5G Cyborg EA, a $299 value, and I pay for this license out of my own pocket!

The M5G Cyborg EA is considered by many to be one the best EAs out on the market, but because it does not come with a money back guarantee and costs $299, many people overlook it. Well, if you purchase Forex Income Engine 2.0 from me, I will by you a copy of this system myself. You can learn more about M5G Cyborg EA here:

http://www.fxrobotman.com/recommends/m5gcyborg

To go directly to the Forex Income Engine 2.0 sales website (there are only about 200 copies left) you can click here:

http://www.fxrobotman.com/recommends/fxincomeengine

Again, I usually try to focus on auto trading systems, but if you were planning on purchasing the Forex Income Engine 2.0 course anyway, you might as well get a free copy of M5G Cyborg while you are at it. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

As always, good luck with your trading!

-Ben aka FX Robot Man

Forex Derivative, EURO-Blaster and Twitter

Dear FX Robot Man Readers!

I know it has been a long time since my last post, but my summer has been intensely busy since University let out in May. I have been up north in the State to visit Yellowstone National Park with my family, writing my dissertation and preparing for a conference on CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery coming up here in 2 weeks.

So what does that have to do with Forex? Absolutely nothing! I really haven’t had as much time as I would like to devote to forex, but I have been slowly investigating some new systems to begin testing. I am not ready to give any more buy recommendations just yet, but I do have some new demo accounts for you to follow if you would like.

(note: all of my live demo accounts can now be followed on the “live statements” page)

Forex Derivative

A new EA was just released called Forex Derivative 2.0 written by Zack Kolundzic. The EA looks like it has used a former of monte carlo optimization built in Matlab to create the position sizing algorithm (sidenote: I am using Matlab for my dissertation and it is awesome).

http://www.forexrobotman.com/recommends/fxderiv

The strategy itself trades the EURUSD, GBPUSD, AUDUSD, and USDCAD. It appears to be some kind of major swing trading strategy that uses a grid to enter up to 3 positions. My preliminary back testing shows that the system account equity can go into flat or draw down periods last from 10-20 trades. I also have watch the same trades take the account up by 6% and then turn around and close down at -6% . The newest update is supposed to help deal with that issue.

Although I have purchased it for myself, I want to watch how it trades for a couple of weeks before I write up my preliminary review and/or recommendation.

You can follow my Forex Derivative 2.0 Demo Account here:

EURO-BLASTER v2

The EURO-BLASTER trades the EURUSD only on the M5 chart, and uses about every indicator imaginable to determine the trade direction. Once the trade direction is determined, it enters 1 or more trades looking for 25 pips of profit with a massive 350 pip stop loss.

http://www.fxrobotman.com/recommends/euroblaster

The number of indicators being used makes back testing and optimizing the system incredibly slow and daunting. My preliminary tests do show however that the system has the potential to make some serious cash – especially during the last 18 months. That being said, when those stop losses get hit, your account can really get beat up. My thinking is that you would want to try to quickly double your account, and then remove those profits right away. That way, no matter what happens you are trading with “free” money.

This system is a NO REFUND system. Once you buy the system it is yours to keep whether you like it or not. This actually doesn’t bother me. There are so many EA hackers out there stealing systems that I can completely understand while some developers are going the no-refund route.

You can follow my EURO-BLASTER v2 Demo Account here:

Follow Me on Twitter

I have decided to start up a Twitter account for FxRobotMan. You can view my Twitter feed updates in the right-hand sidebar of my website, or you can “Follow”  me on Twitter by visiting:

http://www.twitter.com/fxrobotman

Writing up these longer blog posts and articles takes quite a bit of time, however, I can easily add short little updates on my Forex work  and “first look” behind the scenes notes on which systems I am starting to investigate. I will try to “Twit” between 1-5 times per day, so if you want more frequent updates on what I am up to you can follow me there.

That is all for now. I really need to get some EA programming work done for Angus (don’t worry Angus, I haven’t forgotten about the changes we discussed for your EA I am working on).

Best of luck with your trading,
-Ben aka FX Robot Man

Forex MegaDroid Performance: 2 Weeks

FX Robot Man Readers!

I am pretty excited to write up a quick little note about how Forex MegaDroid has been performing since I got my hands on it. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to quickly read my initial review of MegaDroid here and perhaps my initial back testing results here.

In my initial review I said that if the MegaDroid did not give a return of at least 10% within 60 days I would be asking for my money back. Although two weeks is probably not enough to form a definitive conclusion, I am so far very impressed with the performance of the system.

Risking 10% per trade (which seems high to most, but with 90% wins it actually is quite comfortable) the Forex MegaDroid has returned 14% in two weeks on my IBFX demo account and I have seen similar results on my live money at IBFX as well. Considering that my own personal trading plan is to earn 10% per month, earning 14% in two weeks is outstanding for me.

Because of how consistent MegaDroid has been I will be upping the risk to 20% per trade starting this week.

You can follow my public MegaDroid demo account statement here:

Non-Standard Settings

Based on the discussion comments on the other posts, I think many of you reading this may not be experiencing the same exact trades and success that I am with Forex MegaDroid. Based on the default settings, with 10% risk there should have been roughly 6-7 trades for a net return of 5% over the last two weeks with most of those trades happening in the first week.

I have setup MegaDroid to trade in a slightly different way than the setup in the MegaDroid manual. I still use 10% risk per trade, but the result is that I get about twice as many trades, for 14% return over the last two weeks.

So, what am I doing differently? I have been thinking about whether or not to reveal my setup (it really is just one simple change) on this blog. The problem is that I don’t want to recommend something that is different than the recommended setup when it really hasn’t been tested for very long,

However, as a special “Thank You” to those of you who have purchased MegaDroid from through my website I have a gift for you: In the next day or two I will be typing up a special “Thank You” report detailing exactly how I am trading MegaDroid and I will email these details directly to each of the individuals who have purchased MegaDroid using the affiliate links on my website. This is just my way of saying thank you for supporting FX Robot Man – your support helps to pay for hosting, SEO, testing and analysis tools etc. As soon as I raise enough money, I will also be launching a discussion forum for FX Robot Man as well.

Some Negatives

Based on the types of comments I have been seeing about MegaDroid, the system appears to slightly buggy. It is constantly giving people various licensing and trade execution errors, and I am not sure how helpful or responsive their support team has been either. I personally haven’t had to use support myself, and MegaDroid has been working out of the box for me (with the exception of the GmtOffset which still is annoying).

MegaDroid has announced an updated version however, and hopefully this will correct some these issues.

Despite the annoying marketing hype of the sales page I am quite happy with the MegaDroid as a system, and still feel comfortable recommending it. If you were trying to decide between MegaDroid or FAP Turbo, I would absolutely recommend that you go with MegaDroid. It has great performance without the broker issues that have arisen for FAP Turbo.

Until next time, best of luck with your trading!

-Ben aka FX Robot Man

Forex MegaDroid Backtest

I have only had my hands on the Forex MegaDroid EA for about 36 hours at this point, but it has given me some time to run some back testing, and I wanted to share some of my findings with you. Aside from whether or not you believe back testing or demo testing is even a legitimate practice to begin with, at this point it is all we have for MegaDroid.

If any of you have tried to do any back testing on MegaDroid you a probably running into the same problems I have had – which is getting the GMT Offset setting to work with your historical data. Forex MegaDroid automatically calculates the correct value for this setting in Live Trading, but because of daylight savings time changes, and differences between broker platforms and data banks, back testing is a real pain in the tuckus to say the least. I found that for the FXDD demo terminal I have on my laptop, using a GMT Offset of 2 seemed to work the best for me in testing (even the current setting is 3 for forward testing).

The other problem you will might have when testing over multiple years, and this would be a good problem to have in live trading, is that most brokers limit the size of each order to 50 lots. One of MegaDroids cool features is that it leverages the fact that it never has more than 1 or 2 bad trades in a row, and can have up to 70 consecutive winning trades. So, whenever MegaDroid takes a loss, it doubles the position size to quickly recover that loss. Unfortunately, once you hit that 50 lot limit, MegaDroid can no longer increase the trade size to speed up loss recovery.

What this means in terms of back testing, is that you will have two separate growth rates in your equity curve. If you start the back test in January of 2000 with $500 and 20% risk, by the time you get to the beginning of February in 2003 you have already hit the 50 lot position size limit. Basically this means that from 2000-2002 you would have a monthly compounded rate of return of about 18% per month, but once you hit that 50 lot limit, the monthly compounding rate sinks to 4% per month. It is quite easy to program an EA to trade around this issue, and I am hopeful the developers might make the change in future versions.

330.20% in 2009 (91 days)

On the MegaDroid sales page they claim that MegaDroid has generated a 330.20% return during the first 91 days of 2009. What they don’t tell you however, is what kind of risk and other settings you need to use to achieve that return. So, I left the settings on all of the defaults (with GMT Offset at 2 for back testing), and then ran a back test using risk levels between 5 -50%. I ran the test using an FXDD Standard Demo Account from 01.04.2009 – 03.27.2009. All of the results are reported in the table below. It appears that you would need to risk somewhere between 30-35% on each trade in order to achieve the results claimed on the sales page. The Risk vs. Drawdown is about 1-to-1 here so that may or may not be a bad trade-off depending on your risk tolerance (Return vs. Drawdown anywhere from 5:1 to 10:1);

January 1st 2000 – March 27th 2009

My next set of tests was to run MegaDroid continuously starting on January 1st of 2000 all the way through the end of last week. Again, starting with only $500 and using all of defaults, GMT Offset = 2, with risk settings at 5,10, and 20% I was able to get a picture of what MegaDroid is theoretically capable of. Using 20% risk MegaDroid would theoretically have turned $500 into $3.29 million if you traded it continously starting from Jan 1st 2000.

Here are the Strategy Tester Detailed Statements (90% Modelling Quality):

1. Forex MegaDroid – $500 Starting Balance – 5% Risk Level
2. Forex MegaDroid – $500 Starting Balance – 10% Risk Level
3. Forex MegaDroid – $500 Starting Balance – 20% Risk Level

Just for the sake of comparative visualization, here is a quick Excel chart comparing the equity curves for these 3 back test sessions:

Forex MegaDroid Back Test Equity Curves

Trade Frequency

I am sure the MegaDroid help desk has already had 5,000 emails asking why no trades have been made yet. But, the back testing reveals that Forex MegaDroid just doesn’t trade that much in comparison to other systems. Just a quick look at the Strategy Tester statements above shows that MegaDroid may only take a couple of trades per week. Some months it may make 30 trades, and some months it may only make 10 or 15 trades. The real power in this system is not how much it trades, but the consistency with which is wins trades. My back tests had a slightly lower Win % than the sales page, but testing from 2000-2009 and getting over 90% wins with a favorable profit factor is a pretty big accomplishment.

Conclusion

I still think that Forex MegaDroid may be worth a try as long as you keep in mind that you very well might want to ask for your money back if it doesn’t generate at least a 10% return before the money-back guarantee expires. I know many of my readers pretty much hate or won’t go near any Clickbank products because of their well deserved bad reputation, but if you can look past all of the over hyped marketing crap, there just might be something underneath the hood with MegaDroid.

Only forward testing will give us the truth about MegaDroid’s claims, but at this point, I can only rely on the back testing and on forward demo testing. If it survives the forward demo testing, then I will likely start testing on a live money account. Time will tell.

All the best!

-Ben aka FX Robot Man

Forex MegaDroid Review

–

Update 7.20.09 :

I have just released a special eBook called Advanced Droid Tactics that introduces a new way to setup MegaDroid so that it trades more frequently and hopefully earns many more pips!

http://www.droidtactics.com

FX Robot Man Readers-

Many of you have been bombarded with promotional emails from every major forex affiliate promoter regarding the newly released Forex MegaDroid product. Since many of you have emailed me about my opinion on this matter I thought I would quickly type up my impressions. Hopefully this will be one of the more objective Forex MegaDroid Reviews you will read – some good comments and some bad comments.

Also, I went ahead and actually purchased Forex MegaDroid just now so that I could look under the hood and do some forward testing and back testing of my own. If it doesn’t return 10% within 90 days I will ask for a refund, but 10% every 90 days is enough for me to hang on to most products.

The 3 Criteria

As with any products I consider, I quickly analysis them using the 3 criteria I have mentioned elsewhere on the blog: 1) Back Testing, 2) Forward Testing, 3) Price versus Performance.

1. Back Testing

The Forex MegaDroid promotional page gives obviously back tested results for each year, year by year, from 2001 through 2009 claiming the robot returns anywhere from 300% to 800% per year in each of those years. You will immediately notice that back testing statements and the settings used for each year are missing. Whenever the strategy tester statements are not supplied, and the EA settings for the back testing are not revealed, I get skeptical – primarily because it becomes difficult for me to replicate their results.

2. Forward Testing

Unlike FAP Turbo and many other legitamate forex products, Forex MegaDroid provides no forward testing demo accounts or live accounts that you can follow. As many of you know, this is a real sticking point with me. If your EA makes a minimum of 300% per year and you aren’t willing to setup even a $250 live mini account and publish the live results – then I become skeptical.

So, as a service to my readers, I will be publishing my forward testing demo results from Forex MegaDroid for all the world to see. I just barely bought the product and got it setup on my forex computer, so no trades have been made yet, but you can follow my MegaDroid account here:

http://fxrmmegadroid.mt4stats.com

3. Price and Performance

If the MegaDroid actually delivers a minimum return of 300% per year – even if that requires very aggressive settings – then most people with at least $250 should be able to justify purchasing the product for $97-$149 dollars. In a quick back test I just finished, using 10% risk from Jan. 4th 2009 through today, the MegaDroid generated 77% return with a 16% draw down. So, I’m guessing this thing returns more like 50-150% per year if you were to use the conservative settings that most people would be comfortable with.

At 50% per year this would mean you would need a minimum of $149/0.25/0.5 = $1,200 in trading capital to justify the purchase. If it returns 100% per year, you could start with $500-600. For the purposes of this Forex MegaDroid Review, or any MegaDroid Review for that matter, you should probably discount the results to whatever you think an acceptable drawdown is. If you are okay with a 5% per month return, then you probably only need to risk 5% with this EA.

Conclusion

As with most new forex products on the market, this one seems to be over hyped, but the strategy itself appears to have some merit based on my very preliminary back testing. My advice would be that you are probably safe giving this one a try, but if this robot doesn’t return at least 10% by the end of June, you should probably ask for a refund.

By claiming it gives 300% per year, that is a high expectation to give people – so again – if it doesn’t return 10% per quarter – send it back.

-Ben aka FX Robot Man

P.S. Don’t forget to follow my forward test results that will accompany all of my Forex MegaDroid Reviews of this system at http://fxrmmegadroid.mt4stats.com

Gomega Xray Review

I have been receiving a couple of emails asking my opinion about the Gomega Xray Forex Autotrading product that is being sold this week by the folks at Quantum Research.

I have been following the products of Quantum Research since 2007, and I think this is a good opportunity to apply my new rules-of-thumb for evaluating forex products, to their GoMega Xray release. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend you take a minute to read the first half of my article “FAP Turbo Return Expectations, Part 1″ to learn more about my rules of thumb for evaluating forex product claims and pricing. After you have read the section called “Claims in the Forex World” come back to this article.

Quantum Research has released several products over the past two years, Gomega is just their latest system in development. Included in the family of forex robots they have released are ForexProfitPro AT (FXPP), GoMega v1.6, GoMega ITS, and now GoMega Xray.

As soon as you become a Quantum customer they give you access to all of their future updates and systems for free, which is a nice benefit of the way they handle their business. That being said, I would say that the performance of these systems has been underwhelming – especially in late 2007 and early 2008.

The Quantum Research Product Family / History

The ForexProfitPro AT system really struggled through 2007 and most of 2008 and didn’t really start making money until the financial crisis started around the end of August of 2008. Since Aug. 2008 the the FXPP AT v2 has actually performed quite well (especially if you only trade it the first half of each week).

The original GoMega v1.6 is an extension of FXPP AT, using some of the same types of signals, with an additional filter. The system only trades the GBPJPY 4-Hour charts, but has probably been one of the more pleasing systems Quantum has released. Many customers actually find themselves only trading this system rather than  the newer and more universal GoMega ITS and GoMega Xray.

I am not sure whether or not new GoMega customers will be allowed access to FXPPv2 or GoMega v1.6 or not, but that would be a nice bonus if they did since both of these systems seem to be performing quite well in the current market conditions.

The predeccesor to GoMega Xray was what the customers generally refer to as GoMega “ITS”. The ITS is the new custom indicator that is the foundation indicator of the system – this indicator combines the behavior of all pairs to assess the strength or weakness of each individual currency, and then combines them to determine the trend of any one currency pair combination. It is actually a pretty neat idea, and we are seeing more of these types of indicators popping up.

In practice GoMega ITS proved to a bit complicated and difficult to trade. Since you could trade so many time frames and pairs, with different settings for each time frame and pair combination, the whole thing was/is a bit of a headache to get setup initially. In addition to the logistical issues, many customers found that it was quite challenging to find the right basket of currency pairs and timeframes to trade that would actually give decent performance. Pretty much all of the lower time frames seemed to struggle, and only the 1-Hour charts and 4-Hour charts seemed to be favored by the customers I corresponded with. Even then, the performance wasn’t on the order of 500%  per year, although depending on the basket traded,  it may have met the 20% per year standard. But again, only if you could build the right basket of currency pairs and chart time frames.

The latest release, GoMega Xray, is the result of Quantums efforts to improve the inital GoMega ITS. They have reassessed some of the trade logic, postion sizing, stop losses and targets, additional indicators to filter out trades etc. They have also simplified many of the settings – not all of them – but it doesn’t appear to be as cumbersome as the previous version,GoMega ITS.

It is too early to tell how GoMega Xray will perform, but if I had no experience with Quantum or GoMega at all, I would apply my rules of thumb from the aforementioned article. Using that as a starting point, we can then ask under what conditions you might want to consider or not consider purchasing GoMega Xray for $4,997.

Evaluating the GoMega Xray Claims and Pricing

This new version, GoMega Xray comes with a new price tag of $4,997. Ugh.  The money back guarantee basically says that they will guarantee that you earn a minimum of 5% every 90 days (20% per year), and they also require you to prove with live trade statements or demo trade statements that you followed their instructions to the dot before they will give you a refund.

Compared to FAP Turbo with a price tag of $150, unconditional 90 day money back guarantee, and a 60-90% chance that you will make 10% in any 90 day period (based on my own analysis) – I think GoMega Xray becomes a hard sell for any trader with less than $50,000 of real money in their trading account right now.

So lets go to my rules of thumb one-by-one:

1. Backtesting
   GoMega Xray gives you a download-able Excel spreadsheet for their Top 5 performing currency pairs on the 5 and 15 minute time frames. This is pretty typical for Quantum research. They basically ran a 1 year back test for each pair and then merged the results into a spreadsheet so that you can manipulate the risk settings and generate a hypothetical equity curve. For the 15-minute time frame they claim a combined return of 550% over the course of the previous year while only risking 5% at any one time.

   First, 1 year is generally not enough for my tastes. That being said, I also know the complexity of back testing a strategy such as theirs that relies not just on the historical prices of each pair, but of all the pairs, as is the case with their ITS indicator. So, one year is probably okay given the feasibility. I am also confident that they haven’t done any hard coded curve fitting – they do curve fit by optimizing settings – but they probably don’t hard code different settings for different historical time spans just for the sake of inflating back test results.

   If you asked people who purchased the GoMega ITS system a couple of months ago, and asked them if their results matched the results they were told to expect based on these back testing Excel spreadsheets – I think they would likely say no. Although you may not earn 550% , there is probably a decent chance of making some money with the system, but not life changing money. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and this is likely the case here. I think it is more reasonable to peg my expectations based on their money back guarantee.

   If they are only going to guarantee 20% per year – I am going to be skeptical about making 550% per year. Not all systems perform great during all market conditions and years, so 20% is a good number to work with I think. Most systems over hype their results, and GoMega is probably no different, but at least they give us a baseline of 20% to work with. The fact that they actually guarantee some level of performance is nice – and that is usually the trade off with guarantees for every system: They either don’t guarantee any performance, and just have an unconditional money back – or they guarantee some level of minimum performance conditional on proof that you used the system correctly.
   
   

2. Forward Testing
   If I had to levy a complaint against Quantum Research and the GoMega family of products, I think it would come down to Forward Testing. I really feel like they shouldn’t release their products without providing any type of forward testing over at least 3 months (this goes for all system developers – not just Quantum). They probably do forward testing in-house, but if they do, they never seem to provide those account statements in their marketing. They have a community of customers that are perfectly willing to forward test the products, and I would like to see them not sell a system before it has had at least 3 months of forward testing and beta testing that they are willing to share with world in their marketing.

   I’ll say again, legitimate systems typically provide forward testing results on a daily or monthly basis. This standard is finally bleeding over to the the relatively cheap Clickbank forex products as evidenced by the live statements provided by FAP Turbo.

   Finally with GoMega Xray we see some evidence that they may move in this direction as they have just posted an FXDD statement with 13 days worth of trading. This is a move in the right direction, but perhaps too little too late for my taste. 13 days is not enough trading history to be relevant especially when the product is only on the market until Saturday. If they ever re-release GoMega Xray in 3 to 6 months, and at that time provide similar FXDD account statements for 3 to 6 months – that seems like a much better situation for the skeptical system buyer.

3. Price Matches the Results and Your Budget
   The Quantum products have always been priced in the range of $2,000-$5,000. When compared to systems that are $150, $500, or even $1800 these prices may sound outrageously expensive to you – but – the price is neither here nor there depending on what type of trader you are and how much money you plan to trade with. Quantum typically provides good customer service, and the system strategy itself can probably accommodate much larger account sizes than you can reasonably trade with systems like FAP Turbo.

   So, is the system too expensive for you? How should you approach trading GoMega Xray once you actually do purcahse it?

   If we base our performance expectations on their money back guarantee of 20% per year, and assume a comparable 25% performance fee per year for one to two years, you would need a starting account balance of $40,000 – 60,000 in order to justify purchasing GoMega Xray for $4,997. This probably disqualifies about 90% or retail forex traders.

   If the system actaully achieved half of the 550% claimed in the back test, then you could probably get away with a starting account size of only $5,000 – but I think this is a an unrealistic expectation and a very aggressive position to put yourself in.

   If you do in fact purchase the system, I highly recommend you DO NOT trade with real live money until you have done 3 months of forward demo testing. Setup a reliable demo account with FXDD that will only be running GoMega Xray, preferably on a VPS or other “always on” server setup, use exactly the same settings that they recommend (probably on the 15 minute charts), and then leave it alone and let it do its thing for 3 months.

   If it does not give you that 5% return during those 3 months, then save/print out a Detailed Account statement from the Demo account and use that as your proof of results to ask for your money back.

   If on the other hand you are satisfied with the results after 3 months, only then should you consider switching over to trading with real live money.

Conclusion

I really wish Quantum would provide forward testing results so that people could have a better idea of what to expect from actuall performance.

That being said, the folks at Quantum Research are in it for the long haul. They have been developing and releasing systems for many years, and are don’t seem to be a fly-by-night operation. They give good customer service, and they give all of their customers free access to all of their new systems and product updates.

If you are considering purchasing GoMega Xray I would highly recommend that you have at a minimun $20,000 in your live trading account, and probably more like $40 – 60,000 would be even better. If you do not have this kind of money to trade the forex market with, then you are probably better off considering other system whose performance and pricing are better suited for your budget.

Please just don’t slap $5,000 on a credit card thinking you will earn 550% per year on your $1,500 account and that all your problems will be solved.  Ask yourself, would I be okay paying $5,000 if it only returns 20% per year? If the answer is no, then you probably don’t have enough money to justify purchasing this system. If the answer is yes, then it may be worth a try given the money back guarantee.

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