Friday, August 29, 2008

What Happened to Forex Autopilot in August 08?

Back in April, we all asked the question, "What happened to Forex Autopilot in late April?"

Before that, the Forex Autopilot system appeared to do well by making most of the profits via BUY signals during the strengthening period of the Euro currency. Therefore my other questions were - "Can the FAP ea also make the SELL signals and perform as good when the downtrend has begun?"

According to Marcus & his team, the FAP system is capable of detecting the change in direction based on its inner parameters and therefore it can make SELL signals. So I was convinced.

Now in August, we should raise the question once again "What the heck happened to Forex Autopilot or Euro in August?!" The FAP was found to be in a big drawdown mode as the Euro currency finally lost its ground against the dollar. At present, there is no way for the FAP to crawl back this month as it could post its biggest losses to date.

We could clearly see that the down trend has started...but the FAP was unable to make consistent sell signals. What has gone wrong? Has the FAP failed to detect the change in market direction?

The answer actually lies in the inability of FAP to open an opposing trade to offset a trade that is already running. In August, it was the BUY position which was last opened on the 5th. Since then, then euro had almost tanked 1000 pips. This eventually resulted in an large drawdown.

In other word, the FAP program could only recognise one open trade in one chart and will refuse to open a second trade or counter trade. Other keen FAP user was spot on to suggest opening two separate charts and setting up two FAP programs so that on one chart it only enters short positions, and on the other it only enters longs. (This could be achieved by using the magic number feature.)

I am not sure this is the long-term answer for FAP. But if the sell mode could be initiated for this month, it would obviously make some sound profits, instead of the hefty losses (see report). The Forex Autopilot program definitely requires some sort of right human intervention and its autopilot mode couldn't keep us long in the game.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I apparently chose the worst possible time to test this EA as I opened it up during the big drawdown in August. I thought I could make it work for me if I set the MaxOrders variable to 2 or 3, instead of 1. My thinking was that in such a clear downtrend, the FAP would open the new trades as sell orders and I'd be back in the black. No dice. The EA loves to buy and it continued to place buy orders which went on to blowup my demo account. Two things that were successful in this downtrend were to set the paramaters to "short only" as well as putting the EA on the USD/CHF. This worked great as FAPS loves placing buy orders on this currency as well. However in backtests, the USDCHF pair doesn't work well; only when the Euro drop does FAPS do well with USDCHF.

Lloyd said...

Nice info with the USD/CHF. This might also be useful when trading with the FAP system: When you see a strong trend that is firmly in place - it could be signalled by the daily or even a weekly chart - simply follow the trend by setting to either long or short only. Sometimes, this is more effective than the automated FAP alone. August 08 is definitely one of those months.

Lloyd

Anonymous said...

I had exacty the opposite.. It recognized the down trend and went for the sell bigtime and then the Euro swung back and it's blowing my demo account up with the losses. Thank God it's a demo account.

Lloyd said...

You'll be wiser next time round. Simply set your own risk size per trade, i.e. reducing your lot size etc.

reggie landicho said...

Hi Lloyd!

I'm in a great dillemma right now which one to purchase, Forex killer or Forex autopilot. Kindly give me your insights, and i will definitely take your words for it.
Thanks,
Reggie

Lloyd said...

Reggie, just drop me an email. I can find some info for you.