Greetings FapTurbo
owners or curious visitors. I figure it’s about time for a performance update on my FapTurbo trading accounts. As the title hints at this post won’t bring good news. Yes, FapTurbo “long term strategy” running on the M1 chart blew up two of my accounts. I had FapTurbo v16 running in long term strategy mode on one account and in both long term and scalper mode on another. Unfortunately FapTurbo running in long term strategy mode opened several short positions in the 1.25xx region.
Here are the specific losing trades taken from my hybrid account (FapTurbo long term + scalper):
143640645 2009.03.02 01:04 sell 9.36 eurusdm 1.2571 1.3073 1.2431 2009.03.16 12:21 1.3069 0.00 0.00 -131.02 -4 661.28
143647418 2009.03.02 02:30 sell 9.21 eurusdm 1.2584 1.3086 1.2444 2009.03.18 12:26 1.3083 0.00 0.00 -134.14 -4 595.79
143649944 2009.03.02 03:19 sell 9.17 eurusdm 1.2576 1.3078 1.2436 2009.03.16 12:22 1.3073 0.00 0.00 -128.38 -4 557.49
143654555 2009.03.02 04:22 sell 9.30 eurusdm 1.2555 1.3057 1.2415 2009.03.16 12:12 1.3057 0.00 0.00 -130.22 -4 668.60
143661666 2009.03.02 06:50 sell 8.70 eurusdm 1.2589 1.3091 1.2449 2009.03.18 12:30 1.3091 0.00 0.00 -126.66 -4 367.40
On this account I started with $5000, the account balance peaked at $16000 and in the end crashed down to $200
And here are the losing trades taken on my FapTurbo long term strategy only account:
143640643 2009.03.02 01:04 sell 4.98 eurusdm 1.2571 1.3073 1.2431 2009.03.16 12:20 1.3065 0.00 0.00 -69.72 -2 460.12
143647419 2009.03.02 02:30 sell 4.90 eurusdm 1.2584 1.3086 1.2444 2009.03.18 12:26 1.3078 0.00 0.00 -71.34 -2 420.60
143649945 2009.03.02 03:19 sell 4.88 eurusdm 1.2576 1.3078 1.2436 2009.03.16 12:21 1.3069 0.00 0.00 -68.36 -2 405.84
143654556 2009.03.02 04:22 sell 4.95 eurusdm 1.2555 1.3057 1.2415 2009.03.16 12:12 1.3057 0.00 0.00 -69.28 -2 484.90
143661667 2009.03.02 06:50 sell 4.63 eurusdm 1.2589 1.3091 1.2449 2009.03.18 12:30 1.3089 0.00 0.00 -67.46 -2 315.00
On this account I started with $5000, the account peaked at around $12000 and then crashed to $110
As you can see on both accounts FapTurbo went short at the exact same price (as expected). But the forex gods conspired against my poor accounts and the euro went into bullish mode almost right after those trades were opened. I believe the cause was fundamental in scope having to do with the Federal Reserve announcing that it would implement a policy of quantitative easing (aka printing money - resulting in inflation). As a result the Euro surged and my trades got a royal beatdown by the market. On both accounts I’ve had FapTurbo running with the default settings which meant the stop loss was set at 500 pips and this stop loss was easily hit as the Euro continued to climb.
Why did this happen?
Well, I believe my accounts got destroyed due to the following reasons:
a) I was running an older version of FapTurbo (v16) which I believe has a money management bug. I’ve set FapTurbo to risk 1.0% of my account but as you can see by the position sizes there is no way those positions represent only 1.0% risk. At the time I setup this account the fapturbo crew allowed only 1 max demo account per customer for newer version (beyond v16) so in order for me to test FapTurbo in all 3 possible combinations I had to stick with this older version which still worked on multiple demo accounts. Later on though the FapTurbo crew rescinded this policy and allowed unlimited demo accounts but I neglected to update it on this account thinking it should still be “good enough” - for sure I did not expect it to blow up the account. Would this loss still have occurred had I been running the latest version? I don’t know, but something insdie me tells me that it most likely would’ve still occurred, but probably the loss wouldn’t have been so great because newer FapTurbo versions have a more “accurate” money management formula (what determines the lot size)
b) The second reason is that I was running with 5 maximum open positions which essentially means my risk level is multiplied by 5! Combine this with the overly excessive lot size caused by the money management bug and you have a recipe for possible disaster. In retrospect I should’ve just set it to max 1 position, but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
Hopefully you can learn from my experience and not repeat the same mistakes. First of all make sure you’re always using the most up-to-date version of FapTurbo. Second, if you’re a conservative trader make sure you do not go beyond 1 to 2 maximum open position, and also lower the stop loss to something less than 500 pips depending on your risk tolerance. For this I would suggest you do some backtesting. Or if you’re not all that skilled with running a backtest with MetaTrader 4 your best bet is to visit the FapTurbo Forum and borrow someone else’s settings. Here is the forum link:
http://www.forexautopilotforum.com
Now that I can have an unlimited number of demo accounts I’m thinking of restarting my testing but this time using the latest version of FapTurbo (I believe v37 and 45pro at the time of this post). However I still prefer using FapTurbo in SCALPER MODE ONLY. It is by far safer! The only challenge with running FapTurbo in scalper mode is hunting down a good broker that has tight spreads on the pairs it uses (eur/gbp, eur/chf, usd/cad, gbp/chf).
I’m running FapTurbo on a IBFX account but I would not recommend this broker as the spread frequently goes above the max limit during the time FapTurbo is set to trade. Whether this is purely due IBFX’s liquidity providers or a deliberate ploy to thwart FapTurbo traders I do not know, and probably have no way of knowing. So with that in mind your best bet is to avoid IBFX when using FapTurbo. I’m not going to get into which is the best broker to use as then this post will drag on page after page. So what I suggest you do is once again visit the Forex Autopilot Forum where you will find plenty of info about what brokers other FapTurbo traders are having success with.
In conclusion, I still recommend FapTurbo overall. I still think it is a pretty good EA, and you can make money with it, but you have to do your homework first. Personally I recommend using it in scalper mode only, but others may disagree with this opinion. And if you’re going to be running it in scalper mode it is PARAMOUNT that you find a broker with low and STABLE spreads on the scalper pairs (like I mentioned above).
That about does it for this post folks. To visit the FapTurbo homepage see this link. To visit the FapTurbo Forum see this link (I HIGHLY recommend this as one good place to start “doing your FapTurbo homework”)
I wish you all the best of luck with your FapTurbo trading - or with trading in general.
Oh, and one more thing, I’ll try to post an update on my FapTurbo account running in scalper mode only. I’ll probably have this update up on the blog sometime during this week. To give you a hint, this account is in a healthy state.
Cheers,
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