Have people given up on AutoTrading? I will soon be starting with my live account and wish there was more first-hand information/experiences with auto-trading. I have read every thread in here and have been to the fx245 website, but it's still not enough for me. I just posted in another thread explaining that I will be starting in January with TAB signals. I plan to also start a blog so that there is more information for people like me. Have people simply given up or are there autotraders out there in the silence. It seems to me that the same problems are occurring with autotraders as manual traders. People get greedy and pick terrible, champ of the week, signal providers only to watch their account evaporate by 50% the next week when they go on and move on to the next weekly champ. Pick stable providers, keep it to a few and increase your size as your account balance allows you to do so. I ran a spreadsheet doing just this on TAB's signals for all of 2007, you'd be amazed at the profits one could have realized.
TAB stands for "Team Aphid Bird", it is an extremely conservative system that is well known on collective2: http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/systems.mpl?session=1&want=publicdetails&systemid=24737836 They offer their signals with fx-auto through FXDD and FXCM, however, they recommend you use FXCM as FXDD has had major problems with slippage on their signals as well as other signal providers. I have set up and just funded my FXCM account and it should be ready for auto-trading within the next couple days. TAB doesn't trade during the end of December so I will start my trading with them in the new year and begin a blog that shows complete transparency of my results.
I don't know anyone who has made consistent, LONG TERM profits with autotrading forex. Especially in a market maker account. It could be due to what you said, changing systems too much, or risking too much. I do know that the market makers are also a major factor working against you. Hunting, freezing, slippage, bad fills, bad spreads, etc... My advice would be to do it in an ECN brokerage account. At least you can eliminate or minimize that factor against you. The problem is that I don't know of any ECN brokerages that offer those autotrading systems. The answer to why that is, would certainly be interesting! Meanwhile, I would like to have a look at that spreadsheet for TAB in 2007, if you could provide it.
I could provide it, yes, but not right now as I'm at work. As far as ECNs for auto-trading they do exist. I know Collective2 has a way to hook into IB to auto trade any of the strategies there, but I don't know the details on how to do so. To be honest, I'd take this route, but I don't have the funds to start an IB account right now.
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to retract that. The C2 to IB is only for developers routing orders to C2, it's not possible to route C2 entries to a traders' account.
That is what I found too. It looks like the only way to autotrade with IB, or any other ECN, is to autotrade your own system(s). I found an API bridge that connects MT4, Trade Station and many other platforms to the IB TWS platform. Allowing you to use those other platforms with IB. That is a major advantage, but then you still need your own autotrading system or EA. As for opening an account with IB, if you are only going to trade forex, the minimum is quite low, I believe.
I have EAs that are profitable, but unfortunately I am not a programmer and I would like to tweak a couple things on them. For instance, they implement hedging where a simple stop could be used. These were written for me by a friend a while back and he's usually unavailable now to help modify the code. They would be suitable, but I know IB doesn't support hedging.
Yes, since IB does not support hedging, that is another major negative for them. Along with their horrible platform, but at least I have a solution for the platform. Also, they do not carry many cross pairs that other brokers do, such as NZD/JPY, which is one of my favorites for the carry trade. For these reasons, I am looking for another broker too, but it has to be an ECN, and there are not many to choose from. I also trade options and futures, so I will keep my IB account for that, but I definitely want a better broker for forex. They all leave something to be desired. None have everything. You need more than one broker to get everything, it seems. There are a few very good forums that deal exclusively with MT4 EAs and indicators, where I am sure you can find someone to tweak yours. If you need help finding them, let me know, since I already have them bookmarked, I think. If I could find a good EA that was consistently profitable, I would surely be using it. I have demo traded a lot of them, but none were good enough to live trade with. In the meantime, until I find one, I am just manually trading, much less often.
I didn't mean for this forum to turn into a personal discussion. I'm still wondering if there are people out there using fx-auto for their auto trading. Like I said, I think I have developed a "portfolio" that will give stable, long-term returns, but I shall see once live trading begins. Has anyone been auto-trading for a good while and had any decent results?