I got a shelling from one of my penpals yesterday… well not one but two of them.

One called me stupid while the other called me lazy…. Good thing about communicating via messenger is I could easily change the subject….

I have to admit but they were spot on, it was wrong of me to not do any backtesting, I shouldn’t have run away from that subject with them. Because it was kind of true…. I was stupid to allow other people to dictate my opinion about an EA or even more stupid enough to think that doing demo test for 1 to 2 weeks was enough and lazy because I got into a few problems with historical data and loads of EA to tests.

Few weeks ago… I did do backtesting… but I stopped… well because I had a lot of things to do, and a lot of EA to test. It’s really tedious and I have to wait for a long time before I put the EA live but it needs to be done. Those are excuses of a stupid lazy bugger…

If I want to succeed in forex whether manual or automatic… I need to be smarter, work harder and most importantly be patient. I have none of them what so ever…. No wonder I failed miserably in manual trading… will this be the same for automatic trading?

I hope not… gawd damnit!! So now I have to get myself back on track…

I need to backtest first. Period.

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I would like to apologies to those who wrote in and am still waiting for a reply from me. Over the past few days I have been ignoring my emails. It’s difficult to balance everything all at once. Life, friends, family, work and of course over the past few days the emotional roller coaster ride of the market.

Yes, like many of you out there using FAPT…. I too have been hit by recent losses. But not as bad as what these guys have written to me… I have received numerous emails request asking me for REMExpert… Maybe because I have mentioned that it could be an improvement to FAPT… Well, I will write more about that soon.

But I must say, it’s not that I do not want to response to their request. My blog is not at all popular, and emails request is pretty manageable. It’s just trying to find a balance… Hmmm…. ok… it’s not about finding a balance. Maybe it’s about licking my wounds a bit… Ok Ok… licking my wounds greatly.

Like most of you, because of some losses. One tends to start searching for answers in other areas. Most of them who read my blog are now looking for REMExpert to be their savior.

I too was looking for an avenue to run away from the losses that hit me, and had to ignore all the email requests. How do I fulfill other peoples request when even my own search for some direction or answers have not been found.

Anyway, while licking my wounds of losses. I also started to do some thinking…

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Backtesting has become a bane for me… It really makes me wonder why do I need to do backtesting. I mean backtesting is a good way to check if an EA is at all any good as they claim it to be. Most forex ea seller just don’t publish their backtesting results…

And if they do, how to you verify it? Well, you verify it by doing backtesting I suppose.

But some EA just can’t be backtested because of the dll files…. I don’t know I have been trying to find out how to backtest EA which has dll files. FAPT mentioned in their forum how one can back test it… but it seems that no one has the problem with backtesting it… But I do… it’s weird.

While browsing and searching for a way to backtest the EA with dll files, I suddenly realize that there are already so many information about certain EA on the forum and on the internet… You can practically drown on all these information. Backtesting results, forward testing results, live results… comments here comments there, settings here and settings there…

(Explain why I have been quiet for sometime now on my blog)

Anyway, then it hit me! Why the help should I reinvent the wheel?? There are already so much information on the forums, why bother wasting my time backtesting certain EA? I am not optimizing it? I just want to verify it…

Most of these forums has already verify the backtesting results and most of them are forward testing it, either live or demo. And forward testing results are far better than backtesting results as the community says…

I guess I really need to refine my way to cut short my guidelines and maybe jump straight into foward testing the most interesting EA…

So at the moment I am not going to backtest any or most of the EA because it has already been done on the forums, I am going to jump straight into forward testing. If it yield good results. I am then going to put it live… As simple as that… why make my life so difficult…

And another thing is really great about browsing through forums is that not only do you get verified backtesting and forward testing results but you sometimes get some more additional information about the EA….

Interesting…..

I seem to be having trouble backtesting… Over the past few days I have been browsing forums and a lot of members seems to think that backtesting is not a good way to find out if an EA works or not.

They seem to say and a lot of other places seems to echo this sentiments. ‘EA are being programmed and back tested to "curve fit" to work with historical market data’

But isn’t that how a strategy is suppose to be tested to know if their guidelines and parameters work?

How else will you be able to test out your strategy?

The debate and goes back and forth does not help me to decide if I should continue to backtest an EA before I spend time demo testing the EA….

Or even put faith in an EA before I purchased it.

That was how I bought EA Shark and EA FAPTurbo. While EA Shark showed promised, forward testing wise did not yield me good results… Only FAPTurbo was more successful

Piptronic was aquired free, it’s backtesting was great but forward testing was a failure because of the big drawdown. Forex Rising also seems to look good but have not testing it out yet…

On top of that, most broker does not allow data download anymore via MT4. I have to download from a server and then import it into my MT4…

So what am I to do? Continue with my principle that each EA needs to be backtested before forward testing it? Now I am only human and I sometimes bend my principle to find my convenience …

With only 24 hrs a day… I need to bend it… But this is a trait that suggest that if I don’t follow my principles, it will be very difficult for me to be a successful forex trader. But why should I want to be a successful trader when I have robots that may or may not perform well for me?

Ok… that’s another post I will leave for next time. But I believe I need to review my principle to backtest an EA before demoing…

There are a few monitoring EA sites, which I can use it as a basis to justify my own curiosity to demo test it myself. So that might cut the corner of backtesting each EA that seems interesting…

Hmmmm…. that’s a thought….

Well, I won’t call this update. Rather an extension to my previous two posts ‘EA Piptronic ‘ and ‘EA Xtreme EURGBP ‘.

I manage to find my report on my old demo account. I have not really shown or share the reason behind why I stop demo-ing EA on a broker account. Fore instances, I only continue testing EA Piptronic on FXDD and Masterforex and stopped on Alpari and continue testing EA Xtreme on Alpari and stop testing on FXDD and Masterforex.

Well, this is the reason why. Just before my internet connection screwed up on me this was the results…

EA Piptronic on Alpari (Click graph/picture to see statement)

EA Xtreme on FXDD (Click graph/picture to see statement)

EA Xtreme on Masterforex (Click graph/picture to see statement)

So… I still believe not all broker are created equal. That is one of the reason why we really need to test the EA on your broker on a demo account before you put it live. And not all EA are stit. What works for one broker does not really work on another…

Be wary when you want to buy or purchase an EA. Check out what broker did they use to show not only their backtesting results but their forward testing results. If their broker used are not the same as yours then probably you might want to hold off on buying that EA. Until you are sure that it can work on your broker.

If the EA is sold under clickbank.com then probably that is a different story. You can buy it and demo test it out on your broker. If it does not perform as expected within 8 weeks then you can return the EA and request for a refund. If it does work then….

Ok… this is another one of the most interesting EA I have come across… EA Xtreme EURGBP. If you visit their site http://fxgtc.com you will see that it performances is really really outstanding… Good backtesting… and it is selling at $499 a pop!! This is how confident there were with this EA.

There were also posting forward tests… I was caught with this but at $499…. erm…. kinda hesitant. But luck has it I found the free copy over the internet… (Oh and Piptronic too was found free on the internet, I have uploaded both these EA) Don’t know if it was wise or not, but if you go to their sales site, you will see that they are selling not only the ex4 files but they will also GIVE TO YOU the source code for this EA. At $499… maybe it is worth it, but somehow or rather other some ppl were generous enough to float it free on the internet…

Anyway this version that I got over the internet could not be backtested. It has something to do with the dll files. So, I skipped the first procedure of backtesting till 1999. (The site has already posted this backtest. I guess I have to take their word for it) And dump it into all my broker. Unfortunately, again due to the misfortune of the 3 days internet disconnection, I manage only to salvage some results. And the results was EA Xtreme only works well only with Alpari…

Alpari (UK) (Click graph below to see detail demo forward testing statement)

So what else can I say, I ran this EA LIVE!!!

Rumor has it that this Xtreme is the backbone of FAPTurbo… but…. rumors could only be rumours or could it be true… I notice Xtreme only trades around the same time as FAPTurbo. And it is said that FAPTurbo only trade on low volume hour. Coincidently, that is what XTreme does. Both FAPTurbo and Xtreme trades the EURGBP pair, FAPTurbo trades an additional 3 pair. Lastly, both these EA trades very well with Alpari UK and not any of my other brokers account… COINCIDENCES?

Live Account
You will be able to identify the trades for this EA as I only traded 0.01 lots on my alpari account. If it proves profitable, then I would increase the lots…

Ok… I have been testing out Piptronic for the past few weeks already. Both demo and live. By my own guideline, piptronic has actually passed my first test which is to backtest this EA since 1999.

(Click on graph to view backtest statement)

As you can see, the result is pretty much linear. Interesting no? This sort of graph is the same as the one I saw before which was EA Shark. My only concern was whether the dip around 2008 was the same sort of trend you see with EA Shark, that it does not seem to weather all market conditions. I can not explain this but can only assume that the data used for this backtesting was not exactly consistent.

Anyhow, this sort of a graph would obviously test my curiosity and see how it performs on a demo account. In the span of 2 weeks including the 3 days which my internet connection was broken, I found that piptronic works well with FXDD and Masterforex.

It was pretty impressive so I took the plunge and put it live on my FXDD and Masterforex account. But at the same time I continue to demo test Piptronic on both these brokers. Just to test consistency…

Anyway… below are the my demo account standing as of 18/03/09.

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I just got a comment from Allen on one of my post ‘Cracked EAs ‘ I thought I should highlight it on this new posts. As I am about to share may prove to be interesting.

Yes, I have been reading forums and sites about what Forex Maestro is all about. And if you demo it all trades are taken with a comment ‘FirebirdV36′ on it.

I found Forex Maestro EA for free and have also tested it on demo. And I can see that this is to be true. A lot of forex site and branded Forex Maestro as a ‘reverse’ engineered forex EA, rebranded it and selling it for a whooping $197!!!

As of today, my demo testing of Forex Maestro has not been profitable. But I must say my demo test has not been organized that well. I put two or three EA in one demo account and thus it does not really show a true account of what Forex Maestro does.

Well, I have backtested it and below is the graph of the backtesting of Forex Maestro.

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