experience with expert advisors?

Hi! I have been trading on forex about 2 years and my strategy was catching some pips. Maybe I hadn’t enough experience maybe it was psychology factor, but I have lost two my deposits.
Eight months ago I have started to be interested in Expert Advisor, I bought about three EA, but result wasn’t successful in spite of that that they promisedfantastic result. And in the January of this year my friend suggested me EA by Juka Trade. I didn’t trust any expert by then time. But positive trading experience with expert of my friend has convinced me to buy it. And my result isn’t fantastic but I have stability profit.
And I decide to share of my experience with people who interesting in trading with EA, I know how it unpleasantly to lose money with the expert, when you buy hope to be successful trader.
If somebody have positive experience of trading with EA I will be glad to listen your story.

How can someone share experiences when you have your PM blocked?

Not very good. I found that every commercial expert advisors do NOT work. I found this out the hard way - by researching their past data from other people's trades. They lie and manipulate their backtesting data to influence you to buy their EA.

Stick to a good and simple system. I'd recommend Peter Crowns' DIBS method since it has proven to be successful. Low win rate, but high ROI. Who is Peter Crowns? He is a successful and generous trader who has given us his secrets of trading breakouts.

My own experience has been very positive, but of course, I create my own EAs.

Some commercial EAs have impressive winning streaks in the right market conditions (e.g. FX AutoPilot). Some use Martingale (e.g. Trade Goose), which requires sufficiently deep pockets to weather the drawdowns ... otherwise, a margin call is just a trade away! Some sell grid-traders (e.g. AutoFX), and a few are actually quite respectable, but again, you need deep pockets to weather the drawdowns. Some are carry-hedgers (e.g. Freedom Rocks), but again, the right market conditions are necessary for consistent profits.

Also, you might check out third-party referee-type services such as Collective2, which monitors automated trading systems by the hundreds, and tracks their performance over time.

Another place to keep an eye on is MetaQuote's Automated Trading Championships (ATC). Every year, they run this comp, and the top EAs perform brilliantly. Last year, someone used a neuro-net EA & blew the rest of the field far, far behind in his smoke.

I've been entering since the ATCs began since 2006, but haven't placed in the top 25 yet. One of these days ...

Also, some brokers offer monthly comps, and some of them are categorized for automated traders only.

Another resource is FXCM, which tracks EA performance of the EAs which it offers for free usage to its clients. You can even build a portfolio of their EAs to your liking.

Hi Dave,
are u able to explain me what neuro-net EA is? Is it connected to other recources outside of fx market?

Onu

Hi Onu,

You can certainly use any kind of data (whether within or outside of spot FX charts) in a neural net EA, but at least for the purposes of the ATC last year, the neural-net EA was completely self-contained to work with only the chart price (That EA functioned on M1 EURUSD).

Simply put, a neural net is an algorithm which mimics the functionality of neurons (e.g. in the brain), and it has the capability to learn from its experiences. Neural nets are used in all sorts of ways and are particularly effective tools to find patterns in data. Whereas a conventional program does exactly what it is coded to do (and nothing else), a neural net can effectively go beyond the boundaries of its programming and "learn" adaptively. In effect, it enables a certain artificial intelligence in the program, allowing it to learn from its actions and come up with a solution which may not have been anticipated by its programmers. In this regard, it mimics the function of neuronal connections in the brain, which can learn and respond to stimuli.

Neural nets are applied in all sorts of ways, from scanning security camera images for suspicious faces/activity, to handwriting and speech recognition in PCs, to giving robots human-like fuzzy logic, to filtering email spam, to creating smarter chess and other strategy game programs, to helping physicians interpret test results to diagnose diseases, and on and on ... and of course, to analyzing financial data, something it seems particularly well suited for, since there's plenty of raw data which is pattern-rich.

A very nice overview there Dave, well done!

NN is a pretty interesting field in itself and "Better", the guy who won the championship, is proof of that. I think a lot of newbies followed his progress and then mistakenly think they can emulate it. It's not that simple and takes a high level of programming skill.

Read the interview with him to get some more idea.

http://championship.mql4.com/2007/news/303

Lux

Thanks, Lux,

Yes, you're absolutely right: the term "neural networks" is as broad as the term "indicators." There's an endless variety of methodology & approaches, not just in the coding, but also in preparing the training data set.

For a very readable introduction to neural networks, I would recommend Laurene Fausett's Fundamentals Of Neural Networks. And for very germane, primary research on neural networks applied specifically to trading the spot forex markets, papers by Jingtau Yao et al are very informative.

become a good manual trader first, then worry about how or what EAs to use.

just my 2 cents...

EAs in general have higher drawdown than a good trader.

Nonsense, since i trade self created EA i m a pretty successfull trader with an average ROR of 6% per month on own account.. Since 3 month nonstop in the top ten of Varengold Bank competition. No manual trader could trade 24/5 w/o big draw downs.

nobody said you had to trade 24 hours a day

good point..... but a system can do it, so why waste time on manual trading?