Forex-Tools-Cafe Blog

One thing you see on all robot sales pages is one or two pictures of good trades. It is worthless.
A MA cross system EA would lose money in the long run and still give you beautiful, high profit trades in the mix.
In other words, any system catches a few good trades. That does not mean anything is positive over time.
Only if they show you continuous time over many days would that data have any value. And no one does that.
So, you are getting a sales pitch and you know the chart data is worthless. Now do you buy the thing?

Another issue is stop loss. If the results are shown in a text window where you can see each trade over a period of time,
look to see if the stop loss column is 0.000. If it is, the robot does not use a stop loss. And they may claim it does.
They lie. All they have is the intention to get out at some point. That is an “internal” stop loss. That is NOT a
real stop loss. If the broker does not have that stop loss in their records it is not real. If power is lost, and
the robot can’t run, then you are totally vulnerable to maximum loss because the broker thinks you are not using a stop loss.

Don’t buy robots that don’t know how to trade with a reasonable stop loss.

That same text window of all trades can be used to plot the trades on a real chart if you have enough data. It’s a pain,
but you can get a feel for how skilled the robot is at entry and exit. If you see it making really stupid entries and
exits, you might reconsider buying it.

Just some thoughts after looking at hundreds of robot sales pages. Be careful.

Leo, the pdf (Classic_Boundry_Breakout_Strategy.pdf) is fixed for download. Wow, no one till now, was able to download it?
Sorry, I don’t catch all these small errors so I depend on feedback.
Thanks, John

Thanks to Leo for raising this issue. Over the past year, I changed RSI_Magnifier and that killed the operation of the trend line alerts for use with the RSI_Magnifier. Only took a few changes to fix it but it waited for someone to say something. You are all encouraged to give feedback. Sound off. I’ll try to fix things if possible, but sometimes, not unless someone shows interest. You can download RSI_TrendLinesAlerts again and the new version works, but can’t be tested until the market opens next week. Since I did not change any of the code to sound the alarms, it should work, but let me know if it does not. John

Well, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Nothing Good anyway. A trader named Casey Stubbs from Winners Edge Trading gives a video on his technique and everyone loves it. Even Tom Strignano. But I think it is a scam. Stubbs shows you every trade he supposedly made over a week and he catches all the big moves and claims he made 1600 pips. BUT, he ignores all the chatter trades that would have lost money , but his “rules” don’t address how to avoid the losses. So it looks like a scam because his rules say nothing about how to avoid the choppy, flat market trades. So, his big gains were acquired without following his own rules. His site

Maybe he is saving that critical information for his “product” which comes later. Anyway, if you have a perspective on this, please post.

I’ve been receiving affiliate emails for this MBFX system. Based on the single chart he shows on the sales page, I think it is a scam.

That indicator looks like the I-REGR channel which you can download here for free. That channel is a rewriter.
The lines change at every tick to keep themselves aligned with the price structure. But they change as they move forward. The trades he shows on the chart will not happen. The lines don’t stay where they are as the open bar moves forward in time. Download my version of the I-REGR which will scroll backward in time and you can watch the curves move up and down. They never fall in the same place unless price is moving in a straight line.

I suggest you don’t buy that thing. Just my opinion.

Scripts are great things. I did not use them at first – didn’t even know what they were. The names of the ones that come with Metatrader are pretty useless. I toss them away first thing and put in my own scripts. The latest versions of these scripts are called Fixed Risk, because they set the lot size to keep your risk at a known level. They also kill the order if it would put you over your maximum risk.

Place all these files into the /experts/scripts/ folder and open them from there in the editor.

You have to set both the per trade risk and the total risk. And the stoploss min and max and the account balance. All this is set inside the TrendLine buy and sell files that end with the “.mq4″ end tag.
Open the mq4 files inside the Metatrader editor.

You will see :

// Start of user modified variables
bool UseLMT_StopLossFromScreen=false; // if false, will use last high/low stoploss.
bool UseActualBalance=false; // if false, will use myAccountSize for the account balance.
double myAccountBalance=3100;
double perTradeRisk= 3.0; // per trade risk, percentage of your account
double MaxOpenRisk=10.0; // max allowed risk percentage for all open trades.
int slippage=3;
int BarsLookBack=8;
int MinimumStopLoss=50; // in terms of the old 4 digit pips, not the new 5 digit pips
int MaximumStopLoss=120;
int StopLossOffset=5;
// end of user modified variables.

UseLMT_StopLossFromScreen set to true lets you use this with LMT a well know trading system.
Set to false, it will find the last high/low stoploss.
UseActualBalance lets you set it to the real account or any arbitrary value you wish.
myAccountBalance is the balance you wish to use if you don’t want to use the real value.
perTradeRisk and MaxOpenRisk are the two risk percentages you need to set.
MinimumStopLoss and MaximumStopLoss also need to be set to limit the size of your stoploss.

All these are in terms of the old 4 digit pip which is ten times bigger than the 5 digit pip.

Once you have made these changes to BOTH mq4 files ( not the ‘close’ scripts but only the Trendline
buy and sell scripts) Hit the compile button in the menus of the Editor:

If it compiles without an error, you are home free. If you get an error, a typo is causing a problem, either fix the typo or open the original files again and redo the same changes.

I love these scripts because I know they will always give me the lot size for a given risk. As the stoploss varies in size, the lots will vary in size but the risk will stay the same.