Boston Technologies Robot Loses Money

Whilst browsing around the Boston Technologies website idly looking for a technical support number to call I noticed that they were offering a "free, very promising, MetaTrader 4 Expert Advisor".

I know that there's no such thing as a free lunch, but in all the circumstances I couldn't resist the temptation to download it and do some backtesting. The first thing I noticed was that unlike us here at the Trading Gurus they don't supply the source code for their EA, only the executable version. That means you have to take their word for it when they explain that:

This Expert Advisor is using the cross of 2 moving averages: A fast moving average and a slow moving average. When the moving averages intersect for the first time, a trade is opened. Then when the moving averages cross again the initial trade is closed and a new opposite trade is opened.

Their backtest results did indeed look promising, so I copied their BostonTechMA.ex4 file into the experts folder of one of my MetaTrader demo accounts. Firstly I tried to get backtest results as close as I could to theirs, by using the same input settings and timeframe. This is the equity curve I ended up with:

Hindsight is wonderful thing, especially when you're a trader, so I ran another backtest using the same input settings over roughly the same period but for this year rather than last year. This is the rather different equity curve I ended up with:

I expect George Popescu at Boston Technologies was right when he pointed out that:

For best results the Expert Advisor should be re-optimized at least every 2 months to adapt to the present market conditions.

Just in case you fancy doing some re-optimization of your own on a moving average crossover robot I've added one to our library of example robots. As always, I've included the EA source code too.