Meta-Trader - System Q Crash

Welcome back Forex systems traders.

Once of my favorite new systems System Q had a spectacular crash this week giving back nearly 25% of its equity in 2 short trading days.

This was a disappointment since I had high hopes for this system and believed it could only sustain this type of loss on a large gap in the underlying - which we did not get this week. Instead, we got a hard sell off of EUR/USD prompted by a rush back to the dollar as the "risk trade" came off in the face of a nasty sell-off in global equity markets.

So what's the lesson learned? Know your system! Based on back-testing history I expected a 30% drawdown with this system. But I believed that could occur only if the system got caught on the wrong side of a news event, or other sudden change in the market. At least I look Daniel Fernandez's advice to demo tests your system for several months before going live. For the time being, i'm sticking with the system to see if it can recover.

In other forex robots action, God's Gift EUR/USD picked up 15 pips and God's Gift GBP/USD was idle this past week.

Megadroid Demo and Megadroid Live came out of their summer slumber this week. MD Demo picked up 12 pips and MD Live picked up 5 pips and probably would have picked up more if not for a mishap on my home computer. This small change was enough to get both accounts out to new equity highs.

The new Megadroid v1.3 installed last weekend seems to have gotten Megadroid off the bench. v1.3 traded 3 days while the v1.21 (on FXDD and IamFX) only traded one day. It does make the point that EA's need to be tweaked occasionally due to changes in the market.

Scalper X had a fine week picking up 33 pips. The Asian Session seems to have returned to its former character where moves between 5PM and 8PM EST are "thrown back" by the end of the Asian Session. This effect caused a -60 pip drawdown in the Megadroid's to come back to exit with a slim 1-pip profit. It's nice to have an edge that given enough occurences, comes through true to character.

Atinalla #1 had an interesting second week. It got caught long EUR/USD going into last weekend, so it got trounced on the USD strength this week. Atinalla #1 is now down about -6.1% so far this year. At one point this past week, it was down about -10%. I'm still trying to learn how to identify each systems individual trades through the comments and magic number. More to come on that.

Finally, to those of you reading this blog looking for coding and system development, I have promised but have not delivered much lately. So stick with me and perhaps I can get the double-doji indicator and EA out by the end of this weekend.

Have a fine weekend, all.