My Personal Top Ten Expert Advisors
I have to stress the personal nature of this Top Ten because, as I have explained before, I haven’t been (and don’t plan to be) the most methodical of testers. It is quite possible that I have not given some EAs sufficient time to prove themselves. However, the reason for my low tolerance for failure will be evident soon enough! However, I’m going to start with the most important stuff and get my bare bones Top Ten in before the cut, with the explanations and justifications available after the More tag, for those who are interested. So – lets take it from the top, starting with the 6 which I have running on my live account at this very moment.
1 Eazegor running on GBPJPY, from Easy-EA.com
2 Winalot running on the GBPUSD settings, also from Easy-EA.com
3 Winalot running on USDCAD ( guess where from)
4 Forex Megadroid, operating on EURUSD, available from a million affiliate links
5 Euro-Blaster, also on EURUSD, available from a different family of links
6 The Zone Ranger running on EURCAD, from those nice people at SelectFX
Then come the remainder, which I plan to try again as soon as my account grows a little more….
7 Your_Lucky and Thunder4wd on EURGBP, from Abdul Rahman via a very long forum thread
8 Robominer on EURCHF and AUDNZD from the Forex Goldmine
9 FapTurbo, available from literally everywhere (but I might as well use my own link!)
10 Excalibur, Merlin, or maybe Bernard’s new neural net offering from FX Reports
For an explanation of the whys and wherefores, take a look behind the cut, but be warned that the first graphic you will see is Not for the Faint of Heart!
This is the confessional bit, so just to establish without a doubt that I am a flawed fellow pilgrim, rather than any kind of expert, take a look at my forex journey of the past 15 months.
This painful path would take more explanation than anyone would have patience to read, but suffice to say I have explored many of the available ways of losing money in the forex market and have distilled the following essential lessons:
1 I can’t trade manually for toffee, and any time I am tempted to try it again my friends are authorised to give me a sharp slap
2 Martingale methods will empty your account while you sleep
3 Grid trading EAs likewise….
4 In-running drawdowns can outlast your patience and bankroll
5 Buying a higher priced EA does not guarantee a better return - it just means that a different type of marketing has worked on you
6 Glitz and hype does not necessarily equal scam
7 Absence of same does not imply worthlessness
8 Backtesting tells you nothing. Forward testing on a demo account tells you very little. Only results obtained in your live broker account with real money can be relied on
9 You haven’t really made a profit until you’ve taken something out of your account and banked it….
10 There is something about a list that makes for compulsive reading.
So, its probably about time to justify the Top Ten list and to explain why some of the entries are very little known. I should first make it clear that the principal criteria for an EA to remain live are that it should not kill my account (of course) or cause a serious in-running drawdown. Eazegor has been live for me on and off since January, because it hasn’t had any serious absolute drawdowns, even though it has occasionally given back in-running profits. In my own trades I have seen over 1200 pips of net profit using this EA, even though I have intervened and interfered constantly, invariably at the cost of further profit. Had I left Eazegor completely unsupervised for the past 6 months I would have seen profits of over 3,000 pips (and had I not had certain other adventures, these would have been based on a larger account size). What Eazegor shares with Winalot (2,000 pips of profit since Jan) is excellent customer support from Jeremy their developer, who has always been very prompt at responding to my questions and requests. I originally found both of these EAs on Ebay, displaying very low-key marketing, and a very attractive entry payment scheme, where you could pay a small fee for a month and then get that amount discounted from the full price if you decide to buy. A proper website is now up and running, but still fairly subdued and English in its marketing approach. If Jeremy had decided to market these EAs via a standard Clickbank affiliate program, the world would have heard of them by now. But since he hasn’t, it falls to me to tell you – these are the real deal.
At the other end of the marketing spectrum, both Forex Megadroid and Euro-Blaster sport the full multi-coloured, multi-font, full-throttle marketing page. But since I’m a sucker for this kind of copywriting I hadn’t reached the end of either pitch before I was reaching for my credit card (metaphorically speaking, since a) I’ve memorised those numbers long since and b) I probably used Paypal anyway). And so far I haven’t been disappointed in either. Despite Euro-Blaster opening 5 positions at once until you change the defaults and despite Megadroid trading infrequently, they have jointly added 700 pips to my account in the past 2 months. The past 2 months, by the way, is the part of the graph above after about trade 4,000 where the account balance starts to drag itself up the slope again,with the help of my top 4 EAs.
The Zone Ranger is a recent addition, which I have only been testing for a few days. It deserves a mention because it is present on my live account and because the few trades it has done so far have all been winners. I also like the helpful style of the developers, in their mailings and in their contributions to the Facebook forex group.
I like the trading style of Robominer when it is working well, but find the drawdowns a big pain when it is going against the market. Over time it seems to iron itself out, but in the meantime it causes nervousness and also ties up capital which you could be using for less resource-hungry EAs. When you’re bootstrapping yourself back up from a £200 rebuy, you can’t really take the long-term view. When I can spare the minimum recommended £2,000 per currency pair per 0.01 lotsize, I will test the waters again.
FapTurbo has a great support infrastructure, after a shaky start, where a hugely successful launch overhwelmed the vendors. However, I have found it frustrating to see weeks of crumb by crumb profits being swept away by one big overnight loss. This has happened to me several times. I still feel I ought to give it another try because a) it did well for me before Christmas b) people I respect are still making money out of it and c) this was the EA whose overnight success caused ODL UK to close down my account. Between FapTurbo and Robominer, around 2,500 pips of profit were produced from the EURCHF pair, in the following rather raggedy fashion.
FapTurbo and Robominer
Auto-Scalper
Autotradingsolution
EasyExpert
Fapturbo
Forex Boomerang
Forex AutoCash
Forexeasycash
FXBandit
HenryFx
Hydra-2
myfxovereasy
pipsleader
piptronic
Pipzu
Robotrader
scalp_net
steinitz_has_mtf_directional
steinitz_has_mtf_hedge
Xtreme EURGBP
This is a great article, Mark. As you know, I am new to EAs, have had a lot of guidance from you personally, and have had mixed results with the ones I have tried. This article is to the point, and gives a refreshingly honest view. I appreciate that you fully admit that you don’t test methodically – the one true test is if it gives you steady results on your live account, without giving it all back on a bad run.
Thanks Jon – I’ll probably have to change my views on at least one of my picks over time, but that’s why I’ve got so many caveats.
Hey, that’s understandable – your opinion is based on experience to date, and if the experience changes, then your opinion is entitled to change too.
I’ve been also testing Forex MegaDroid, using a VPS so I don’t need to keep my computer always on.
And my opinion is that it is great so far.
For the first week of this June (2009) I’m gaining 4.7%.
I’m keeping 0.15 as risk level
Lot size 0.1
Not too bad at all.
I will keep testing it.
Cheers
Amedeo
Yes – despite the hype it turned out to be a sound product. I wish it would trade more often, but it’s more important that it makes money when it does trade!
Very nice to see an honest input on a site that actually is not trying to sell me or others something but rather shares an honest opinion on software that has been tested on a live account.
Excalibur has been sold out and I am pleased to see a note here related to that program . It has proven to be very successful, has had losses and has recovered from them ten times over each time.
Anyway no commercial ads here. Again look forward to seeing more traders here and their input as well.
Am working on he NFA issues and with MT5 being released soon look forward to seeing how many programs will stay in the arena and adjust their programs to the new platform.
Will forward the new Enterprise Edition of Excalibur as soon as it is finished and will follow your results closely.
To Success
Bernard aka Merlin
Thanks Bernard – appreciate your kind words and already keenly anticipating the next EAs to be added to your collection.
Hi Mark,
Just found your site and very pleased I did, thank you for what you are doing.
I run Megadroid and Euro Blaster on two Alpari UK accounts. I start them trading on a Monday at 9.05am UK time, Megadroid with £600 and set to buy 1.0 lots and Euro Blaster with $1000 set to buy 0.2 lots. Then on Friday morning I stop them both and bank my profits so I am ready to start all over again on the following Monday. So far I have banked nearly £4000 in twenty weeks.
If one of my accounts is wiped out I will replenish it and start over, this I have to except because of the high risk settings I run but to me so far it’s like running a retail business where I would have to stock up every so often to continue trading.
I haven’t used Euro Blaster from the start, I used Fap Turbo. Looking at your top ten I may trial one of those because to me I must keep up with the best robots to keep my income coming in.
Good luck to you and all your members /visitors.
To add to my previous post I find a VPS is essential and I use ForexVPS which is highly recommended by me.
Pleased you like it – and thanks for insight into your method – it looks to be very sound. As I have said before, you don’t really have a profit until it’s sitting in your bank. If you are going to expand your repertoire I would recommend looking at the EAs from Easy-EA.com. I have done further pruning and only these and FX Megadroid have survived, based on their performance since the start of June. Let me know how much Euroblaster has contributed to your profits and I might consider reinstating it. Watch out for another post soon with my updated results. Cheers, Mark.
Hi everybody. I just found this website and I’m surprised that your words and experience match exactly with ours. Unfortunately I was not able to get the megadroid running as it always shows a mistake “authentication” and the support team so far could not help me out. I’m currently testing the pip turbo and see some amazing results as long as you are trading the recommended currencies. So far all other EAs failed miserably. thanks for this site!
Welcome Andreas – I’m trying to remember whether there were any quirks in the installation of FXMD, but other than finding the clickbank receipt there wasn’t anything to do. Shame as this is definitely one I would recommend. Take a look at the Easy-EA offerings too if you haven’t already. And scan down some of the other review sites I’ve listed, as I’m never going to be as methodical or forex-focused as the other guys.
My account was wiped out by experts from Halcyon and Renegade FX. Forex Megadroid bought it back from the brink of oblivion and cost ten percent of the price I paid for both expert advisors. The brokers are widening the spreads on the Asian session because most developers are emulating fap turbos trading strategies.
Haven’t even heard of Halcyon and Renegade – increasingly hard to keep up with the flood of EAs being marketed. Anyone else being ovewhelmed with spammy promotions from the fapturbo crew and a zillion affiliates?
Site revisited. As of Jan 13, 2010. Is the top 10 still relevant ?
Most of the comments still hold up pretty well. My account was run down by cash withdrawals during 2009 rather than losses, so I gradually reduced the number of EAs employed. As you will have seen from more recent posts I am currently running only 1 EA, WinPro from Easy-EA.com, over all 6 of the pairs it currently supports and am more than happy with its performance. In the interests of diversification I am likely to add in some further EAs from the list as my account grows. One caveat is that I don’t think that scalping western pairs in the overnight eastern sessions is viable any more – it was big news at the back end of 2008 but was pretty much a spent force by early in 2009 (although FapTurbo still has many adherents).
My next main post will deal with my current recommendations and target portfolio across all bots, not just EAs.
Mark,
Interested to exchange email with you.
Discussion on good VPS deployment & reviews of potential commercials EAs (>$300 value)
Pls do e-mail me at sergeidekker25@hotmail.com
Done. Welcome aboard!