Meta-Trader - IamFX Live week one

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

As promised here's a report of my first week live trading with IamFX. I opened up a new account with $2000 and the plan was to trade Megadroid and Scalper X with 5% risk which is roughly equivalent to 10% risk on a $1000 account.

My thinking was that the narrow spreads would make up for the fact that they charge commission - about $1 per round trip on a 0.10 lot. Also, the abensce of spread widening would allow the system to take trades which would not execute on Forex.com. The results of my first week's trading can be found here.

The first thing I noticed is that the ScalperX opened up trades very quickly and readily - more so than the demo feed from IamFX. In fact, ScalperX traded every day Monday through Thursday while the same system on the demo account from IamFX only traded Wednesday and Thursday! Strange to see such a difference and it suggested the broker was somehow manipulating the feed to make the EA's trade. Recall they get paid a commission on each trade plus the spread.

I've been trading the scalpers for almost a year and I know their logic pretty well. One important feature is that if the take-profit is not hit within one hour after opening, the system will close the trade at any profit whatsoever. It will not take a small loss between 1 and 2 hours after opening. The stop loss will only kick in after the trade has been on for 4 hours or more.

Well with IamFX, the system was taking small losses! My only conclusion here is that the system was closing the trades when they were profitable, but I was seeing 3-4 pips of slippage on execution! This of course negates the commission and the whole benefit I was trying to acheive from going to this broker!

This affect was even more pronounced on Wednesday. See that $10.19 profit on Wednesday? That should have been a $20 profit that where the price literally slipped at 5 pips on execution. Also, the reverse trade that got taken immediately at close of the first trade trade close opened immediately with a -$10 loss! And that trade should have closed at a small profit per my explanation above instead resulted in a small loss!

Well after 3 days of trading, I was almost ready to throw in the towel. On Thursday though, things seemed different, and I saw spread widening at the 5 pm entry window, so the system didn't trade until almost 5:30 PM. These trades closed with decent profits, and was able to bring the trading into the positive for the week.

Megadroid did trade once during the week and took a -0.90 loss. The same trade made about 3 pips on the demo account and the demo account took a 15 pip-profit on a trade not taken on the live account.

Final score for the week with 1.3 full-size lots transacted is a profit of $14.13, commission paid $13.62. Observation conclusion is that executions on Forex.com are much better and even though the spreads are higher there's not much slippage on execution.

This all is a mute point anyway since this account is being moved over to CMS Forex as of next Friday. I thought was worth sharing anyway. Take care and stay tuned for some some robots setup and analysis from Asirikuy.