How To Get The Most From Megadroids Settings

There has always been a bit of a criticism levelled at Forex Megadroid. Ok it may make winning trades, it may make money, it may be probably one of the best trading robots we have every used… but it’s all just a little bit boring! While it has continued to perform well on our Alpari UK trading account of late, it has hardly been raising the levels of excitement here at Forex Technical Chartist.

However to be excited by a Forex robot is somewhat to miss the point. We can point out many trading systems where the frequency of trades is high and the level of excitement also. But ultimately what matters are the results. This is where Forex Megadroid wins. It goes about its business when it sees fit. It is not trying to be exciting; only profitable.

We have read several times of traders wanting to meddle with the Forex Megadroid settings. Perhaps this is why Megadroid gets criticised as there are hardly any. Yes they are boring and the only real thing of note that can be changed is the risk profile. This affects the percentage of your account that this placed on each trade.

There are of course easy ways to ‘nudge’ the robot to trade more frequently and bring about some more excitement. The simplest way is to open multiple 1 hour charts and configure them at a GMT offset to the main chart. This effectively fools Megadroid into looking for trading opportunities either side of its standard window. Using 3 charts (one at default) and one either side with a +2 and -2 hour GMT offset is probably one of the better configurations we have used and will certainly see more trades triggered.

But then surely this misses the point of buying a commercial Expert Advisor. You don’t buy a car and then reengineer it yourself, so why would you buy this robot only to spend time configuring the Forex Megadroid settings yourself?

Sometimes being boring and following a slow steady path is the way to results. We do of course still love the Trend OSOB EA we have been reporting on. But we have to say we are still getting to grips with it. Even after adding the adjustments we mentioned in our previous post we've still seen 2 losses since our last update. So despite also recording a good number of winning trades, we remain on the poorer side of break even over the last two weeks. We are however still up since testing began.

No such losses with Forex Megadroid however. Just plain and boring Forex Megadroid settings out of the box. Perhaps now it is timely to recall the story of the Hare and the Tortoise? I think we all know the answer as to who won that race. Go buy a Mega tortoise and you’ll win the race in the end.

Read Our Full Forex Megadroid Robot Review >

Trend OSOB Expert Advisor Week 5 Live Test

Wow! A great week on Trend OSB which collected us an impressive +75 pips this week!

Certainly not bad for an automated system which required us to just start up Metatrader and leave running for the week! Performance since testing began is now running at +161 pips.

This week the trades were evenly split between the EURUSD pair and the GBPUSD. Six trades in total. We are still running the extended profit target of 15 pips on the GBPUSD pair as opposed to the shorter 10 pip target on the EURUSD. Interestingly though we have not yet hit a loss on the GBPUSD pair since including this in our test.

This may have something to do with the tweak made to the GBPUSD settings (commented on in our previous post). This tightens up the entry criteria a bit and therefore, going forward, we are going to implement these changes to the EURUSD pair, while at the same time increasing the profit target to 15 pips on the back of the GBPUSD success.

So here are the live results from last week as shown on our account:

Why we like the Trend OSOB Expert Advisor

What we like is not only that the EA is free but also that performs without the hype surrounding most automated trading systems. We also like the strategy behind the system. It is easy to understand and above all it is simple in its execution.

We have long been advocates of simple techincal trading systems. There is always a big temptation to overload charts with indicators and seek out the most complicated algortihms for trade entries when carrying out any form of  trading. This is especially true of many automated commercial systems which use this next 'big thing' approapurchasing ch to marketing their systems. The reality is that most of these systems are simply 'dressing up' simple trend following stratagies to entice unsuspecting buyers into making a purchase, in the belief that they are buying into something unique.

The trend following system used by Trend OSOB is however easy to understand. It uses an hourly trend following sytem and enters trades on overbought or oversold readings on the 5 minute charts. Simple and yet effective in our books.

You can find out more about the Trend OSOB expert advisor on the Donna Forex Forum boards, where you can also download the EA for free.

Trend OSOB Expert Advisor Week 4 Live Test

As we mentioned in our previous post we are now running the EA on both the EURUSD and GBPUSD pairs on the 5 minute chart.

Trading on the additional pair has certainly helped our results this week. Three trades on the GBPUSD, all pocketing +15 pips helping to counteract a loss we picked up on the EURUSD earlier in the week. The net result for all trades this week was +23 pips.

Our running 4 week total is now up +86 pips which is certainly encouraging performance.

We have been running a slightly modded version of the settings on the GBPUSD pair. Instead of just running the default osciallator overbought and oversold settings, these have been 'tweaked' ever so slightly to try to improve the accuracy of entries.

The RSI_OB_Level has been moved out to 73, while both the StocOS_level and StocOB_Level have been moved to 30 and 70 respectively. Take profit has also been moved out to 15 pips while the stop loss remains at the default 72. We don't take creadit for identifying these settings but thank the member of Donna Forex forums who recommended them following a backtest of the EA.

It's difficult to know exactly as to whether these changes will have a made a material difference to performance after only two weeks. However with all five trades taken on the GBPUSD having won far, we are more than happy to continue with them for the time being.

And of course if the performance holds up on the GBPUSD pair we may also considering adopting them on the EURUSD. TAQNGZNK3TME

Phoenix Rising?

A profitable week when there seemed to be no stopping the Phoenix Forex Code with 7 winning trades !

These results put the EA back on track and move us into positive territory at the end of Week 3 of our test. Again we chose to trade only Mon-Thurs switching the EA off on Friday. 

A 63 pip profit over three weeks is not to be sniffed at and provides a realistic indication of what this EA could achieve given less volatile markets. In fact compared with how some EA's have been performing of late this could be considered positively impressive! 

Given our general positive review on this EA so far our next sentence may seem somewhat confusing. While we have been impressed by the Phoenix EA we have taken the decision to stop testing it. Why? Well our time spent in the internet trading rooms has uncovered a similar, more configurable EA... and it's FREE!

The Trend OSB EA uses the same algorithms to calculate trade entries and exits and was developed as a free alternative to the ever increasingly available commercial EA's which simply tweaked core strategies.

The EA contains a number of settings which can be used to emulate several commercial EA's including the Forex Phoenix Code and Forex Zappa. Certainly our simulatenous trial tests reveal that the Forex Code is emulated at pretty much default settings, as we got exactly the same trade entries and exits over the last few days trading

Because of this we are new switching to using Trend OSB for the remainder of our testing.

The Trend OSB EA allows several settings to be tweaked under the hood. Not only does this mean that the strategy criteria can be refined for the EURUSD pair, it also allows the EA to be used across other pairs. We will post more on these settings in later posts.

Initial tests on the GBPUSD has so far yielding 3 winning trades. Ok so this is really too early to start getting excited, but nevertheless it perhaps shows the potential to run this EA across multiple pairs.

Anyway here are the latest results for the EURUSD

Week 1

+9 +9 -72 +9 = -45

Week 2

+9 +9 +9 +9 = +36

Week 3

+9 +9 +9 +9 +9 +9 +9 = +63

In our next post we will be taking a look at the indicator settings to see if we can eek out some more performance from this EA and of course providing an update on how our EURUSD and GBPUSD trades are perfoming.

In the meantime hop on over to the FREE indicator section on www.donnaforex/forum to take a look at the EA for yourself.