HomeDaily ResultsMegadroid Results: Mon 8th July 2013

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Megadroid Results: Mon 8th July 2013 — 8 Comments

  1. My broker offered to put me onto a Pro account (probably because I trade > 20Lots/day with all my robots). Yeh, right. ‘But I’ll pay $7 commission per Lot….’ I said. ‘But you get a better spread and more trades’, he said. So I tried it.

    After several months I analysed my Megadroid results of the Pro account and compared them to a Standard real account I had been also running at the same time with the same broker and here are the results :
    Pro account: Trades= 79, Pips= 376
    Std account: Trades= 42, Pips= 174 (similar to Richard’s results)
    But what about the commission you say! Well the commission worked out to be 20% of the profits, so if we reduce the Pro pips by 20% we can compare them to the Std account: Pro pips (adjusted)= 300 compared to Std pips = 174.

    (20% commission is acceptable to me but another robot I use pays about 50% of the profit in commission!!!)

    I wont reveal the identity of the broker because you will think I work for them…but opening a Pro account is something to think about. Ask if you’re eligible!! Let them earn a bit and they will let you win a bit more.

  2. Hi aspro,

    A you pointed out, if the better spreads/order execution of a so called “Pro” account offsets the cost of the commissions, then it’s OK.

    When you say $7 commission, I assume that’s round-trip i.e after opening and closing the trade. That’s effectively 0.70 pips.

    I mostly trade US stocks and options, and all these trades have commissions, and vary depending on what exchange the orders get routed to. The spreads don’t vary i.e. will be the same regardless of what broker you use.

    Spot forex is very different, because there’s no real exchange, and the broker is effectively the market maker, and the commission is built into the spread by their market making software. When they charge you a separate commission, they usually decrease the spread to compensate.

    But you really need to keep an eye on them. Several years ago I traded on one of these “Pro” accounts at FXDD. The spreads were lower, but they charged commission. Initially it was OK, but after a few months I noticed the spreads gradually increased to the same as their non-commision accounts!

  3. Hi Richard,
    thanks for your feedback on the Pro accounts. What is the simplest metric to keep an eye on the spread? One could use pips/trade. In this case Pro = 3.79 and Std = 4.14. Pro could look worse because those extra trades it is taking are less profitable. But its the number of trades that is boosting the profit in the Pro account. So I guess Pro pips/month compared to a standard account is the ultimate metric short of laboriously comparing every trade where both accounts open the trade at the same time.

  4. Total pips per month minus the commission cost i.e 0.7 pips per trade.

    So if you get 10 trades that total say 50 pips, then the adjusted total = 50 – (10 x.7) = 43 pips

    As you said, you should get more trades through because of better execution.

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