Weekly Update - Even more on the 'Driod

Welcome back Forex Fans.

Its certainly been a wild week in the forex and equity markets. EUR and GBP broke down to multi-month lows versus USD. Global equity markets took a slide as the risk aversion trade was back on. Funny how when things get dicey, the money floods back to the USD - as though the US is some type of paragon of fiscal responsibility!

In the end, we don't care because the best robots will make money in nearly any market conditions, right?

On that topic, let's take a weekly look at robot's i'm following. The Megadroid pulled in 3.5% for the week on the demo side, but some indications are that live accounts only turned in about half that much. Even at half the demo account, a 1.6% weekly return is pretty good versus my new "1% a week" mantra.

The Forex Pip-Zen has a series of small losses after about 5 straight winners. It has now put up a gain of 0.08% (8/10 of 1%) for the 3 weeks I've been following it. My 30-day trial is going to expire in another week or so, and at that time I will probably drop it an add another commercial robot. I'm strong considering springing for "Forex Nightfox" which I've been following with some interest over on http://www.driven2success.com/.

The 2 God's Gift EA's from Daniel Hernandez have been pretty unspectacular. God's Gift (GG) EUR/USD is down at 3.5% year-to-date and GG GBP/USD is up about 3.5% year-to-date. GG GBP/USD had some good sell trades on the GBP selling first at 1.5913 and again at 1.5764. Both trades were exited with a 15-20 pip gain and would have made much more if they held on. I think these trades are being closed by the trailing stop value which is pretty tight at 30 pips. Anyway i'm of the mind that a small winning trade is always better than any type of loosing trade. Even with well timed signals place in the proper trend direction can turn into losers. So better safe then sorry.

I continue to be fascinated by the Megadroid, and how it can be so bloody consistent. So let's see what other information we can glean from this robot.

First, we know it trades only EUR/USD in a narrow 3-hour window from 4PM to 7PM EST. As we saw last week, this the least busy part of the forex trading day. It clearly uses the server time normalized for GMT to determine when to trade.

Next, the system goes thorough a series of messages that go something like this:

Reviewing Price Range
Checking volatility
Monitoring Spread
Determing Direction
Assessing Market Volume
Upward Impulse detected
Upward Impulse fading 00:47:43
Downward Impulse detected
Determing Direction
Calculating Proabability
Assessing Market Volume

And so on. Now its quite possible that these messages have little to do with operation of the robot, and are there just to entertain people like myself.

One interesting thing is that it detects "impulse" moves up and down, then starts a counter which counts down to zero starting from some value (1 hour?). I've also seen similar time-based behavior on a trade where if the trade is on for some period of time (and perhaps starts to get close to the other 21-hours of the day it doesn't trade), it will close the trade at a small profit rather than let it stay open.

That's what little I can report about the mystery that is the Megadroid. I have some more ideas, but that's enough for now.

Enjoy your weekend and check back later,

Chris