Forex MegaDroid Grinds to a Halt

I don't know about you, but when I use a forex trading robot I expect to be able to upload it to my server, set it running, then wait for it to start trading. Beyond that, I expect it to keep on trading whatever accidents might befall it, including recovering gracefully after losing its connection to the internet for a while, or restarting after an unanticipated server reboot. It seems that in the case of Forex MegaDroid this was far too much to expect.

I figured the beginning of May would be a good time to review the performance of the MegaDroid, with a month's results to pore over. It only trades EUR/USD, so there wouldn't be a whole lot of poring involved.  First of all I tried a backtest covering the five weeks starting on March 30th (the day Forex MegaDroid launched), using the same parameters I had used for my initial tests. Nothing happened! No trades, no graphs, nothing whatsoever! Then I checked out my test virtual private server.  The MegaDroid was sat there, it's little face smiling happily back at me, assuring me that it was waiting to trade.  However the logs told me a different story – no trades for days!

After pouring myself a nice hot cup of tea and pondering all this for a while, it suddenly occurred to me that the MegaDroid running on the VPS had informed me quite some time ago that an upgrade was available.  I had clicked the "OK" button, but thought no more about it until now.  I checked my inbox, to discover a couple of emails from Forex MegaDroid support informing me that versions 1.10 and 1.11 had indeed been released during April.  Neither email mentioned the fact that the MegaDroid would cease to function if I didn't upgrade, but further investigation confirms that is what happened.  Not only would it stop trading, it would stop backtesting as well!

Instead of poring over a month's test results I found myself poring over the version 1.10 and 1.11 manuals instead.  No mention of upgrades in the version 1.0 or 1.10 manuals, but added to the 1.11 version was a section that said:

Attention: Upgrade required: This means that a required upgrade is available and the system will not trade until the upgrade has been installed – please visit the download page and obtain the updated version as soon as possible.

Hopefully you can begin to see the Catch 22 here by now!

Further reading of the email from Forex MegaDroid support on April 18th revealed what I assume to be the cause of all this aggravation:

Users who have accounts with ECN brokers will find that the robot is now able to place trades… unfortunately, connecting with ECN brokers requires significantly different logic in the trade placement code which we have now implemented – our apologies for overlooking that issue in the initial release.

This gives one pause for yet another thought – How much testing did Albert and John give the MegaDroid before unleashing their creation upon an unsuspecting world?