Meta-Trader - What's wrong with AT4?

Welcome back Meta-Traders and Happy Halloween!

For a Halloweeen Trick or Treat, let's take a look at my under performing account Atinalla #4.

In order to achieve my annual profit target of 30-60% per year, every account in the portfolio must be operating in top form. And we have a related mystery on our hands with my Atinalla #4 Portfolio from Asirikuy. Based on historical simulations, this account is supposed to return an average of nearly 75% with an average draw down of about 16% However, the link above shows that my account is down -7.26% for the year. What’s the deal?

First of all, we know this is a bad performance by way of comparison. Asirikuy has a total of 7 live accounts running Atinalla #4. Each and every one of them is up at least 20% with the best of them (set to double risk) being up almost 60%! There’s even an instance running FXDD with 1:50 leverage, just like mine. So what gives Meta-Traders?

Peeling back the candy wrapper, I found these facts:

I started trading Atinalla #4 in this account on 1/21/2011. Prior to that, I was running the “Live Twin Scalpers” (Megadroid and Swissie Scalper) in this account. If I filter the account from 1/1/2011 to 1/21/2011 using Myfxbook, I can see the Twin Scalpers lost -2.36% or about -$44 in that 21-day period. I noticed that Myfxbook seems have duplicated each trade (both winning and losing) between 1/21/2011 and 2/18/2011.

Once I noticed that, I took a look at the FXDD Report viewer, a web site provided by the broker for this purpose. According to FXDD, the Twin Scalpers actually lost the same amount, -2.3% or about $44. This means that Myfxbook was reporting the percentages properly, and the duplication of trades was just a display problem.

Then I filtered the account using Myfxbook starting on 1/21/2011 to the present and found the account is down -6.17%. However when I view the same period with the FXDD account viewer, it indicates the P&L is only -$17.28 which is only 9/10’s of 1% or 0.009. Who is correct here? It’s hard to say, so I filtered the account using the FXDD viewer for the entire year, and found I’m down only $62 or about -3.2% of the original cash in the account of $1904!

Another possible conclusion is that FXDD is using a larger starting balance than FXDD for the same period. This is possible since I deposited money into this account and disbursed to my other account from here. If so, this would appear to be a bug in FXDD since it should consider the balances only for the period in question.

Conclusion #1

Myfxbook has some reporting distortions, and I’m not down -7.26%, I’m actually down -3.2%.

Part of that could be due to the fact that FXDD performs a back office netting operation which allows the trader to avoid NFA-imposed restrictions related to FIFO and Hedging. So reporting is clearly part of the problem, but clearly not the whole problem since I’m still losing money.

Conclusion #2

Part of the loss in this account was incurred before I starting trading Atinalla #4 in this account.

What about the performance of Atinalla #4 for the first 21-day period when I was not trading it? How much profit did I miss during that 21 day period?

According to 3 of the instances on Asirikuy, I lost out on between 8% and 24% of yearly profits during that short time period! This makes sense since I’ve found that the Forex market tends to make big moves the first week or 2 of the trading year. I’ll do more research on that and perhaps write a separate post later in the year backed by some statistics.

Conclusion #3

I missed out on a minimum of 10% profit for the year by not trading Atinalla #4 in the 21-day period from 1/1/2011 through 1/21/2011.

What about the rest of the trading year? What can we gather from the data regarding that period?

Taking a deeper dive, I took a look at the performance of each individual system. Daniel’s systems make this easy since the text printed along the upper left of each expert screen shows the P&L for each individual system. Look at each instance (currency pair plus expert) 5 of the 8 instances were profitable. Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 losing instances lost more than any of the other systems putting the account into the red overall.

Here’s where it starts to get interesting. Of the 8 systems instances on Atinalla #4, I am trading 4 of them in other portfolios and for 2 of the 4 with the same broker. This allows for a head to head comparison between the 2 instances. What did that comparison show?

Unfortunately, this thread didn’t pan out for comparison purposes as cleanly as I wanted because the balances earned on the Atinalla #1 portfolio were reset, and the profits shown were not since the beginning of the year, rather since the last balance reset. However it was useful in one regard – I noticed the instance running Watukushay #5 (aka Atipaq) against USD/CHF didn’t seem to be placing its daily limit orders to buy above and sell below the market.

The Atipaq – USD/CHF instance is important since its one of the best performing instances. I checked Atipaq / USDCHF on my “Atipaq Full Portfolio” and it has returned $365 since it started, but the same instance in my AT4 account has only returned $66!

So I took a look at the expert screen and sure enough, it was not creating daily orders at on a regular basis like the one that runs as part of “Atipaq Full Portfolio”.

Conclusion #4

My Atipaq – USD/CHF instance as part of my Atinalla #4 Portfolio is screwed up.

Meta-Trader creates 2 sets of logs as follows:

- General Meta-Trader messages under MetaTrader folder\Logs

- Expert-specific messages under MetaTrade Folder\Experts\Logs

Looking at the General logs, I found nothing but an occasional failure with uploads to MyFxBook.
Looking at the Experts\Logs, I hit pay dirt as follows:

20:58:35 stdlib USDCHF,H1: loaded successfully
20:58:35 WATUKUSHAY_NO5 USDCHF,H1: Error info: 3 description: invalid trade parameters
20:58:36 WATUKUSHAY_NO5 USDCHF,H1: openSellOrder-OrderSend: instrument: USDCHF order size: 0.04 open price: 0.8585 slippage: 30 stop loss: 0.8631 take profit: 0.8512
20:58:36 WATUKUSHAY_NO5 USDCHF,H1: Error info: 3 description: invalid trade parameters


Okay so what's the cause of this error? I look a look and the only thing that strikes me as strange is that the pricing is 4 digits, but its a 5 digit broker. The other trades for this broker show all 5 digits.

Is that the the answer? Check back later to find out and enjoy your day!