MB Trading : No Trades
GO Markets : No Trades
InterbankFx : No Trades
FxPro : No Trades
Alpari UK (Mini-1) : No Trades
Alpari UK (Classic): No Trades
FXDD : No Trades
AxiTrader : No Trades
Forex.com : No Trades
Alpari UK (Late) : 1 Trades: 1.7 pips
TRADE DETAILS: Open Close Profit
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Alpari UK (Late) Sell: 0:41:10 1.30159 -> 1:41:51 1.30142 1.7 pips
Settings - All accounts using Megadroid 1.30
- Alpari (LATE) : autoGmt = false: gmtOffset = 2
- Other accounts: autoGmt = true
Hi Richard,
I just started following your posts here (very nice of you to take the time by the way) and I have a few questions if you don’t mind.
I have a live standard account at FXCM and I just started their demo MT4 account and added the Megadroid to it Sept 16.
I left it on overnight and up to now it has done nothing, it keeps checking but it hasn’t taken any trades. All is in the default setting, nothing changed.
I noticed the server time shows an hour ahead of the UTC time and the gmoffset is 0. Is this right or are the server time and UTC time supposed to match?
I think I read in the manual you should change the S1 and S2 numbers to something random, I haven’t as yet but would this make a difference?
I think you also mentioned you had problems with FXCM before (I’m pretty sure I read somewhere the megadroid guys recommended FXCM UK, though I am on the FXCM LLC, US one I think), will it not work with FXCM?
I read you were saying that v1.30 trades from 4pm EST and mentioned it does not trade 24 hours, I’d rather not leave my computer on 24hrs a day so if it starts at 4pm, do you know what time it trades to? Between 4pm and ?
Thanks for your help, really appreciate it 🙂
Elvis
Hi Elvis,
Why it hasn’t taken any trades
First of all, as you can see from my results, Megadroid only places 6 to 12 trades per month. Sometimes it doesn’t trade for a whole week or more. It’ll only place trades if it receives a trade signal based on the market price action.
There are many reasons why trades could be lower. I wrote THIS article detailing some common reasons:
Gmt settings
I set AutoLocalGmtOffset = true and AutoRemoteGmtOffsett = true. These settings should ensure Megadroid trades at the correct times regardless of the Broker Server time.
S1 and S2 numbers
When a MT4 EA like Megadroid places a trade, it can issue a unique identifying number to the MT4 server that it can subsequently use to manage that trade (i.e close it, or modify the stop/tp). S1 and S2 are just the numbers assigned to the 2 types of Megadroid trade. They can be anything, so long as they’re not zero and are unique numbers.
Some people believe that brokers track certain identifying numbers, and advise that they should be changed regularly. I personally don’t bother doing this. From my experience it doesn’t make any difference.
When to the leave computer on?
It needs to be on between 4pm and 6pm EST to get the open trade signals. If a trade gets placed, it’ll need to remain on until the trade closes. That can sometimes take up to 12 hours or more.
A VPS could be a solution.
FXCM
I’ve personally had poor experiences with FXCM over the years. I tried using Megadroid there in 2009, but the trade count was incredibly low, and when I did get a trade it was often slipped and the closing of the trades was unreliable. The performance was so far behind my other brokers, I decided to stop trading Megadroid there.
I’ve also had issues with poor quality trade execution on their other trading platforms (eg ActiveTrader).
Hi Richard,
I was out of town so could not actively follow your posts. Anyway what do you think of 1.3 now, On an average megadroid takes a huge loss every 2 to 3 months
and unfortunately this happened when the new version was launched. But your point of earlier trades at 4 pm and temporary loss thereafter still stands.
I personally dont think these guys wont do anything stupid to an EA which worked well for more than a year. They might have thought about the new rules, volumes, broker interventions etc. September so far was good. Lets hope it remains the same.
Hi Georjee,
The Megadroid version 1.30 performance seems to have improved after a rocky start. Even though the September profits have been modest thus far, they’ve still been able to cover most of the August losses, and there’s a chance they’ll be covered completely by the end of the month.
It’s interesting to note the new 1.30 trade times (i.e 4PM EST start) have been giving more trade signals this month.
It’s hard to know what to make of these results at this early stage. I suspect it’ll take another 2-3 months to draw any conclusions.
I’ll continue to trade all the accounts (except one) with the default auto-gmt settings.
I couldn’t find in the manual where it says trades are only opened between 4pm and 6pm EST. Can you direct me where you got this information?
Also, with CFTC lowering leverage to 50:1, I’m trying to maximize returns within the reduced leverage space. 0.60 risk is now the upper limit, but only if you trade a single trade at a time and have recovery turned off. Have you tested with aggressive turned off to see what the results are? Should I run at 0.60 with aggressive off, or 0.30 with aggressive on?
Returns seem to be better with recovery off and lot size twice what you would normally risk, although the drawdown is larger especially when you hit 2 losses fairly close together.
Hi dr zeus,
4pm to 6pm
It’s not stated in the manual, but if you run a backtest you’ll see the trades opening in a time window one hour earlier than they did with version 1.21. I wrote to megadroid support, and they confirmed that this change was made with 1.30.
I’m not exactly sure what will happen after the DST changeover. That will be interesting.
Aggressive and recovery mode
I always trade with “aggressive” on and “recovery” off.
I think recovery mode is a bad idea, because it’s based on the presumption that a trade has a higher probability of winning after a few losers.
As to whether to trade with aggressive off and double the leverage, I guess it depends on how well the performance of the S1 trades compare to the S2 (aggressive) trades. If the S2 trades were performing poorly, it would make sense to turn them off, and just increase the leverage on the S1 trades.
From my observations the S2 trades seem to be performing about as well as the S1 trades, although I’d need to do some analysis of the data to confirm that.
Richard –
How often does the S2 trade though? I’ve only been running live since July, and I’ve had aggressive turned off, so it looks like S2 doesn’t trade very often. Turning aggressive on would then limit your returns since you could use a max risk setting of 0.30 in order to get both systems to trade.
You’d probably need to use a lower setting than that really, since if S1 opens and goes into drawdown then you would need some margin available to open the S2 trade.
Otherwise, trading with aggressive off lets you use a risk of about 0.60 (maybe a bit lower like 0.58).
I had a quick look through my trade records.
For the Alpari (mini-1) account..
Sep 2010: 10 trades total – 7 x S1, and 3 x S2 trades
Aug 2010: 7 trades total – 4 x S1 (including one -45.7 pips loss), and 3 x S2 trades
July 2010: 9 trades total – 4 x S1, and 5 x S2 trades
June 2010: 9 trades total – 5 x S1, and 4 x S2 trades
May 2010: 15 trades total – 12 x S1, and 3 x S2 trades
So it seems there is more S1 trades on average, but often the trade count is similar.
I assume it’s similar on the other accounts, but I haven’t had time to analyze the data in detail.
almost one month 15 days now. megaroid has not taken a single trade. at this phase what will happen