There are countless EAs out there and I tried and tested many. They don’t all have the same behaviour when it comes to :
1) Computer crashing
2) Computer reboot (normal)
3) Shutting down your MT4 platform (voluntarily or by accident)
4) Losing power
Some will completely “forget” the trades they took when one of the above happens. It all depends on how they were programmed (and other factors, I suppose, I am not a programmer).
But with respect to the EA we’re using here, I can state a few things. In cases 1, 2, and 3, the robots will continue their work as if nothing happened. But in the case of 4, they will not remember some of the trades if you lose power. I have experienced this twice. You will see that the little triangle it puts to show entries has vanished. This is your cue that you now need to manage these open trades manually. However, the robots still work fine and will re-enter new trades. They just won’t close the open ones. Oh, and they won’t forget “all” open trades. They will remember some (the older ones, I think). My husband is a programmer and his take is that the EA temporarily stores some info in memory and when you shut down your MT4 platform, it transfers the temporary info into some sort of more permanent memory table. So when you reboot or restart your MT4 platform, it links to this memory and continues doing its thing.
But if power is lost, the EA kind of “didn’t have the time to” do it’s memory back-up thing for some of the trades, hence the lost info.
On a related note, I noticed something last week that might be useful for you. It has to do with controlling the bots. I’ll talk about that next time.
Go to article 19
Article 19 - April 5, 2009 - Incredible gapping!
I don’t understand what’s going on my friends, and I’ve seen some “terrible” gapping before, but take look at this:
Look at this!
Here’s a close-up of gbpjpy:
That’s an over 900 pip GAP! Now, as you can see, we’re not in any trade (unfortunately) in this pic because it’s a new account I opened this afternoon because both of my observation accounts show “no connection” for some weird reason – and I also don’t have a feed on the site I rely on when this happens (http://www.forex-markets.com/quotes.htm) and ALL their pairs are N/A at the moment, so this is freaking me out a bit.
Come to think of it, this crazy volatility is probably why I don’t have a connection, probably brokers are protecting themselves or something. Anyway, wow, we’ll see how it all plays out.
April 5 – later
Phew! I went to check out some forums to see what others were saying, but no one was speaking of any gigantic gaps ?!?!? So I logged in to my real (live) account, and guess what? No gaps! Here is the same pair as above (gbpjpy) but in my real account:
I feel a bit stupid and thought I’d delete my “gap panicking” post but I’m leaving it here so if anything like this happens to you, you’ll know what to expect. What happened is that over the week-end I had no connection and probably my broker was doing some major maintenance and the server my demos were linked to were literally trashed. So some data was “lost” and this is what caused the “gaps”. I still can’t connect to that server, so I assume it’s really dead. I lost my account balances info (can’t access anything) but fortunately I had generated statements and copied/analysed the numbers over the week-end. Still, it’s quite frustrating because my demos weren’t supposed to expire for another month or so. Ah the joys of brokers!
So now, I need to do what I explain to you in the instructions file, that is, open new demo accounts, and do the set-up thing. Fortunately, with the set files and templates, it’ll all be done in a jiffy. I’ll be back once I’m done.
Go to article 20
Article 20 - April 7, 2009 - The joys of broker games
Since I reinstalled everything on Sunday, not one single trade was taken. Today is Tuesday, and nothing has happened. I keep getting this strange error message:
I contacted a programmer about this. In the meantime, I need to find another broker.
Go to article 21
Article 21 - April 8, 2009 - Strong trending and strong ranging
I just finished setting everything up with my new broker. I’m not seeing any clear direction yet, as my “new” platforms have only been up and running for a few hours, but we can see that the group isn’t agreeing on the overall direction. I took 2 pics to illustrate. The first is eurgbp which clearly still shows strong trending. Now, had this trade been taken, it would have generated if closed right now, about 500$ (remember that eurgbp’s pips are worth about 1.75$).
Isn’t this a beautiful curve? (I feel like a man, saying this…).
On the other hand, look at usdchf for the same period:
This one is doing some perfect ranging. Our TP would have been met on the first down move, another trade would have been taken on the up cross and TP met some time close to the long green wick there, I don’t know if you can see it clearly. So 160 + 160 = 320 pips in 5 days.
Of course the reflex is to say, trade eurgbp with the trending approach and usdchf with the ranging one. But that’s not how the system works (but nothing stops you from doing just that). What we’re observing right now is that our systems are showing us that we don’t have a clear go ahead for either approach. I know it’s totally frustrating, but I don’t decide what the forex markets will do, I can only observe and be prudent at times like this. That’s why I call this approach Forex Leader. And I’ll repeat it again: patience is probably one of the hardest things in forex, but it’s also the one you need to cultivate because it’s the one thing that will preserve your account.
So in the meantime we’ll see if I get the error message again with my new broker. If not, well it would mean that it’s my old broker’s fault. I’ll see if I decide to switch brokers or what at that time. The one I chose is FX Open (they got a good score on the broker rating site) but I’ll let you know if they’re any good or not. By the way, they’re based in Mauritius – I consider myself pretty knowledgeable in terms of geography, but I haven’t got the slightest clue where this place is. Of course, like we all do now, I’ll Google it and let you know. Can you guess where Mauritius is? Off the bat, I’d say in Greece or maybe Italy or something.
Go to article 22
