Meta-Trader Account Copier

Welcome Back Forex Traders.

Let's talk a look at Meta-Trader Account Copier which is available for free download from the vendor Forex Tester Software's web site. The idea is to copy trades from one MT4 account to another.

I'm considering it as a way to overcome the fact that some experts tend to trade well in a demo account, but poorly or not at all in a live account. We know the brokers can manipulate the spread, but are they also manipulating the data feed itself to defeat EA's? Will it work? Who knows but I think its worth a try.

Anyway, the program is provided as a pair of MT experts. The Signal Provider EA is setup on the Meta-Trader that generates the signals. The Signal processor EA is setup on the Meta-Trader that executes the trades. Inputs to both EA add some nice options and are worth a look.

Signal Provider side settings:

• Destination MT4 folder that will receive the trades
• A multiplier to increase or decrease the trade size by a constant factor
• Options to remove a Prefix or Suffix from the symbol

Signal Processor side settings:

• Source MT4 folder that is sending the trades
• Price difference in pips that you are willing to tolerate between the price on the signal provider and the signal processor
• Options to add a prefix or suffix to the symbol. In my case, I had to add FXF to the symbol since the processor (FXDD) does not use the prefix, but the processor (Forex.com) does.
• An option to manually confirm trades before they are executed on the processor side
• An option to reverse orders. There's a blast from the Zulu-past.

Anyway, the plan is to setup my FXDD Megadroid demo as the provider, and setup a Forex.com signal process, also demo for now. Then i'll see how that goes and if the results are okay, I might try it live. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Cheers and enjoy your Saturday.

Weekly 'Bots update - 3/12/2010

Welcome back Meta-traders.

Here's a update on this past week's action with the forex robot's i'm following.

God's Gift GBP/USD came roaring back with 2 winning trades. The first picked up 66 pips and brought the performance to even for the year. The second picked 78 pips and put the robot up 8.4% for the year. So far its been a saw-tooth type equity graph, which is consistent with the author's long-term performance of the system shown here.

God's Gift EUR/USD picked up 11 pips and is down just over 10% so far this year.

On the Megadroid side, there were no trades on the live account, and 2 trades on the demo account which picked up 8 pips. This was a bit of a dissapointment after least week's identical trades between live and demo. I took a look through the journal to see if I could find any evidence of spreads widening, but could not find any. It could be that its harder to find, because the journal is now filled up with the data publishing, so it could be getting lost in the shuffle.

I'm considering a product called Trade Copier to copy the trades from the Megadroid demo account to a new, live account. The problem there is that i'll be subject to spread manipulation, and other potential issues with the trade copier process. I'm willing to try it, but I want to keep the original account intact. The account is up 7.5% for the year which is pretty respectable and I don't want to mess with it.

Thats all for now, check back later and thanks for reading.

Meta-Trader - Revealing hidden indicators

Welcome back Meta-Trader fans.

Most commercial expert advisor attempt to hide or obfuscate their logic to make it more difficult to figure out how they work. And this makes perfect sense because if the logic of an EA were widely available, any money making edge using the EA had would soon be lost.

A commercial Expert Advisor is distributed to the buyer as an ex4 file, which is a file compiled from the original code written in the MT4 language. Some of the reasons ex4 files, rather than mq4 files, are sold include the fact that ex4 files run more efficiently than mq4 files, ex4 files cannot be changed/damaged by the user without very specialized knowledge and techniques, and because the developer would likely want to keep the logic of the EA secret as long as possible. Even with ex4 files, it is still possible to get broad hints about the way the EA works if, during backtesting, the indicators are displayed in the backtested charts. However, many developers have found other ways to hide the indicator 'secrets' of their EA's. One way is through the use of the MT4 function 'HideTestIndicators(TRUE)'.

After back-testing an Expert Advisor, you can click on the "Open Chart" button to see a historical chart showing the entries and exits for the back-test period. Normally, the indicators used by the Expert will be drawn in the bottom of the window as shown above. The obfuscation comes if the EA developer calls the HideTestIndicators() function to prevent the indicators from appearing. If you have the decompiled ex4 file (ie. an mq4 file), and you understand the MT4 language, you can examine the source code and find any indicator functions. Even more easily, you can find calls for the HideTestIndicators() and simply comment them out.

Then back-test the EA, click on the 'Open Chart' function, and voila, the hidden indicators are revealed. As an example, we can see that one of my favorite scalping EA's makes use of the CCI (Commodity Channel Index) and the RSI (Wider's Relative Strength Index) both on 15-minute bars. We can also notice that one or both of those 2 lines are heading down when a buy is triggered, and heading up when a sell is triggered.

In fact, I believe that some of the geat scalping EA's, including EAKAIN and Megadroid use this sort of sort of indicator logic - buy when the indicators say things are getting oversold, sell when the indicators are saying things are getting overbought. There are a number of other conditions also regarding time of day, and daily range before conditions are put on.

Once the EA takes a position, the position is exited once the profit target is hit (10 pips), or the stop-loss is hit (40 pips) or after one hour time out, EA will exit at break even or any profit if CCI and RSI are back above their midpoints, 0 for CCI and 50 for RSI.

Thanks for reading and more to come.

Weekly Bots update - 3/5/2010

Welcome back Forex fans. Here's a quick weekly update on the robots i'm following.

Megadroid had a pretty decent week and picked up 20 pips on both the live and demo accounts. This week's Megadroid trades were exactly the same in the live and demo accounts.

Another interesting thing to point out - I backtested Megadroid for 2010 year to date using the same risk setting I use in my live account (0.05). The results were very close to what I got in my live account, +7.5%, although the trades were not identical. I'm not sure what this means, but I thought it was worth pointing out since it may address some concerns that back-tests results will differ substantially from live results.

In other action, God's Gift GBP/USD dropped 54 pips and is down about -5.9% on the year. God's Gift EUR/USD picked up 9 pips but remains down over 10% for the year. The developer indicates these robots trade flat to downish most of the time and typically make their yearly gain in just a few big winning trades. So it will be interesting to see how it all works out.

Anyway, check back later because I have some good stuff coming up in a post over the weekend.

MetaTrader - 4 cool things

Welcome back MetaTraders.

I continue to be amazed by the MetaTrader platform and I learn new things about it almost every day. Here's a few of the cool things I've learned recently.

1) When viewing charts of price history, you can change the scaling on the chart by putting your mouse over the price scale on the right hand side, holding the mouse down and dragging up and down. Also while mousing around on the chart area, you can view past chart action by dragging the chart to the right. But as soon as a new tick arrives, the chart will snap back to the present, so this can be a bit annoying when the market is active.

2) When back testing, you can click on the Graph tab to see a equity curve of the system as the test proceeds.

Also note the volume bars and green equity line in the graph. If you see cases where the volume bars increase and the equity line goes down (like right around bar #25 in the chart above) the system has properties of a 'Martingale'. In a Martingale, the loosing trades are added to in increasing volume. If the trades comes back your way, great, you are a winner. But if the trade continues to go against you, you can suffer a large loss or wipe your account. Be careful of systems that use Martingales.

3) Select Tools, History Center to manage the historical data available for back testing. Before back testing a new system on a currency pair, go into history center and double click on the pair being testing. Now double click in each time frame in sequence from M1 all the way to Monthly to back-fill all the history available from the broker.

In come cases, the broker might not have enough history to perform the 10-year back testing that is part of my routine. If that's the case, you can export data from another installation of Metatrader to a file using the 'Export' button. Then open up history center and import the missing data using the 'Import' button.

I've found that FXDD has more history than Forex.com. Those are the 2 MetaTrader brokers i've dealt with so far.

4) The last cool item is statement publishing. MetaTrader allows you to publish your statements free to the Internet so you can view them from anywhere and share them with your friends. Setting this up is easy.

- Visit one of the free statement publishing sites such as http://www.mt4live.com/ or http://www.mt4stats.com/

- Create a separate account on the site for each demo or live account that you wish to track. You have to come up with a unique account name for each account you want to track. You can register a number of accounts all under the same e-mail address.

- Take the publishing information provided by the site and populate your MetaTrader platform under Tools, Options, Publisher Tab.

- Now wait a few minutes and your data will appear on the Internet for all to see!

Using that feature, I've created URL's where you can track the performance of each of the experts I'm following in the upper-right hand corner of this blog:

Megadroid demo:
http://fxmmddemo.mt4stats.com/

Megadroid live:
http://fxmmdlive.mt4stats.com/

God's Gift EUR/USD:
http://fxmggeurusd.mt4stats.com/

This one had some Forex PipZen trades mixed in which confuses the results. Just deduct $26 from there results to get the actual God's Gift result.

God's Gift GBP/USD:
http://fxmgggbpusd.mt4stats.com/

I'm working on post that covers the topic of how MetaTrader programs communicate with the end user. This will contain some interesting tips on how you can figure out the logic behind some of commercial EA's including Megadroid.

So check back later for that and enjoy your day.

Cheers to Canada

Cheers to Canada for a hosting a great winter games!

Cheers to all Canadians including my buddy Sir Redford - who probably had nothing do to with the games. But I don't care, anybody who makes his blogger icon his national flag has something to be proud of.

I have lot cooking under the covers which hasn't been showing up this blog lately. So if you think this blog has been a snoozefest lately - I dont blame you. But stay tuned because some day, somehow, it will all come out. But for now the words of the Canada national anthem....

O Canada!

Our home and native land!

True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,

The True North strong and free!

From far and wide, O Canada,

We stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Forex Robots - Megadroid Demo vs Live results

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

Sir Redford suggested that I take a look at the differences between the live and demo Megadroid results. This lead to some interesting findings.

I was overstating the results of the Megadroid demo account by a few percent since my results accidentally included the last 2 weeks of 2009.

The Demo account traded 26 times, and the live account traded 17 times. That's almost a perfect 0.65 Fib Ratio!

The demo account is on FXDD and the live account is on Forex.com UK so different brokers might account for some differences in results.

Anyway, I saw several times when (right at about 4PM), the brokers widen the spread to 4 pips. This activates the spread-monitoring technology and puts Megadroid out of business for about 45 minutes or so. I've seen the brokers do this on Monday and Tuesday, but allow trading on Wednesday. Its almost like they know they have to give you something, or you won't remain a customer.

The net result is that the live Droid only makes about 65% of what the demo droid makes. That coupled with the infrequent trades using Droid, makes the results flatish versus what they could be. So the Droid algorithm is great, but you don't get enough good changes to use it.

What's the answer? Apply Megadroid to multiple pairs and you get EAKAIN.

EAKAIN is currently #2 on the Forex Peace Army Expert tests and was up a whopping 14% for the week. This one is really spectacular.

And the #1 robot on the list is ......... the Fusion EA Bot from the guys over at the Forex World Cup. This one was up 18% for the week! This is what I call an EA and leaves Megadroid in the dust!

It's clear that I can do a whole lot better than 1% a week with the super EAs.

This is getting good.