Meta-Trader - What goes around ..

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

Whew! Its was a roller-coaster week in Forex with some surprises, some good news and some bad news. Before we get to the specifics, check out this screen shot of Teyacannani from Asirikuy taking a sell order on the EUR/USD.

Daniel's stuff is getting better all the time and as I mentioned in a reply on his blog Mechanical Forex, he is single-handedly advancing the science of trading with the Meta-Trader platform more than any other person on the planet.

Now onto this week's developments.

The shocker came when I found out that my new account with IamFX, which was supposed to get transferred to CMS forex, will instead be transferred to........Forex.com!

This is a mixed bag since my other live accounts are already with Forex.com. The good news is that I can sign this account up for pip rebates with Trader's Choice FX. The pip rebates account for an extra 1% or more of annual return, so its definitely worth the effort. On the downside, my efforts at broker diversification have been dealt a minor set-back. All things considered though, not a bad development.

The other downside from this week's action came with another 30% loss from Q-Diamond EUR/USD after climbing back from a 30% drawdown, this system has once again given back its profits and sent the account back into drawdown. Also, it ended the week with an open loss of abount $83 which is another 8% of the original deposit. The bright side is that its still demo money, reinforcing the point that you should trade new systems for many months before going live. Now onto the good news.

Q-Aussie had another solid week and is now up 17% since its start on 8/30/2010. It was disappointing to find out that AUD/USD is not considered a "major" and is therefore subject to 1:20 leverage under the new NFA rules. The majors (GBPUSD/EURUSD/USDCHF/USDJPY) get 1:50 leverage under the new rules.

I have an interesting story to tell regarding my newly funded account at IamFX. I decided to let this system trade out it's last week running a Megadroid v1.21 and ScalperX combo. Things went well and as of Tuesday's close, I was up nearly 2% adhering to my "1% a week" mantra. Unfortunately on Wednesday, things went south as Megadroid got stopped out for a 40-pip loss wiping out gains for this and the prior week.

Here's where it gets interesting. On Thursday I pretty much ignored this account thinking it had no chance of making up the prior day's losses. Instead, it was surprised to see it up about $55 in open trades. Knowing the SL and TP characteristics of this system I figured it would exit with a gain before then. After 1 hour or so beyond when these trades should have closed, I went down to the computer in the basement and found my profits almost gone, and the trades still open!

I tried to close the trades manually and the trade was accepted by the platform but not executed. Instead the MT platform just said "Order Sent" and gave me a cancel box to cancel the order. I started to get concerned and tried to call IamFX on the phone. After 10 minutes of hold time, it occured to me that these people probably had all left the office and were out at the pub! I figured if they were going to be out of a job tomorrow, why should they care? Just let the customers hang out to dry!

Now I was getting concerned. I had 2 positions open and in profit, but no way to close them. I tried IamFX chat support, sales and got a guy named Christopher. Long story short, he stayed with me on chat for over one hour. He looped in CMS Forex support who indicated their servers were down. He was able to get the trades closed for about a $50 profit leaving me with a 2.7% in 2 short weeks of trading this account. The results can be found here.

As Cramer says, "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good."

Lesson learned: If you broker is going out of business or moving your account - don't trade with them up until the very last minute! There is some chance the employess will walk out on the job and leave you hanging. All credit to Christopher though, he stayed with me and did the job. I sent a nice e-mail to his boss in thanks.

The Megadroids were quiet this week and picked up 1 or 2 pips.

Finally, I added a new portfolio this week called Atinalla #3 from Asirikuy. This account is designed to be NFA compliant. It trades 2 different systems across 4 pairs. The system took a good profit of about 1% of the account, but gave it back on a similar trade the day after. After a few days on the bench, it came back and shorted EUR/USD on Friday and went out for the week short EUR/USD and up about 0.5% of the account since opening it less than 1 week ago. You can follow that account here.

Okay, i'm exhausted and ready to call it a week. I'm boxed in with family business most of the weekend. So i'll catch you next week. Get some rest and have a great weekend.