Forex MegaDroid Live Test Results for June 2009

Here are our first set of Forex MegaDroid live test results, which cover the month of June 2009. Here at the Trading Gurus we recommend forward testing any new forex trading system on a demo account for at least three months before even thinking of trying it using real money on a live account. However our loyal readers have been asking to see some live results. After 2 months testing on a demo account with no major disasters for the MegaDroid we decided to start live testing using a modest initial deposit of $500. On an account that supports micro-lots this is sufficiently large to allow the Droid's money management system to start trading with more than the bare minimum position size. It is also a reasonable sum of money for someone new to forex trading to be prepared to lose. As you have hopefully realised by now, newcomers to forex trading do have an unfortunate tendency to lose money.

As you can see, in our live test Forex MegaDroid was profitable for the month, with 7 winning trades and only one tiny losing trade. This apparently rosy overview does, however, gloss over all sorts of interesting details.

Alpari (UK) Ltd.

Account: xxxxxx		Name: Gurus MegaDroid Live Test						Currency: USD		2009 July 3, 22:59
Closed Transactions:
Ticket	Open Time	Type	Size	Item	Price	S / L	T / P	Close Time	Price	Commission	Taxes	Swap	Profit
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.03 12:15	balance											500.00
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.03 23:41	buy	0.08	eurusd	1.41444	1.41074	1.41929	2009.06.04 00:45	1.41492	0.00	0.00	0.24	3.84
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.04 23:12	sell	0.08	eurusd	1.41956	1.42416	1.41456	2009.06.04 23:24	1.41842	0.00	0.00	0.00	9.12
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.10 00:10	sell	0.08	eurusd	1.40784	1.41102	1.40284	2009.06.10 00:31	1.40684	0.00	0.00	0.00	8.00
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.10 23:08	buy	0.08	eurusd	1.39704	1.39136	1.40204	2009.06.10 23:25	1.39822	0.00	0.00	0.00	9.44
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.11 23:45	buy	0.08	eurusd	1.40937	1.39419	1.41437	2009.06.12 00:20	1.41037	0.00	0.00	0.08	8.00
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.12 00:58	sell	0.08	eurusd	1.41111	1.41782	1.40628	2009.06.12 02:27	1.41115	0.00	0.00	0.00	-0.32
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.15 23:39	buy	0.04	eurusd	1.37831	1.37497	1.38315	2009.06.16 00:08	1.37934	0.00	0.00	0.04	4.12
xxxxxxxx	2009.06.23 00:06	buy	0.04	eurusd	1.38561	1.38082	1.39142	2009.06.23 03:48	1.38596	0.00	0.00	0.00	1.40
										0.00	0.00	0.36	43.60
Closed P/L:												43.96
Open Trades:
Ticket	Open Time	Type	Size	Item	Price	S / L	T / P		Price	Commission	Taxes	Swap	Profit
No transactions
										0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
										Floating P/L:		0.00
Working Orders:
Ticket	Open Time	Type	Size	Item	Price	S / L	T / P	Market Price
No transactions
Summary:
Deposit/Withdrawal:		500.00		Credit Facility:				0.00
Closed Trade P/L:		43.96		Floating P/L:				0.00	Margin:			0.00
Balance:		543.96		Equity:				543.96	Free Margin:			543.96
Details:
Gross Profit:		44.28		Gross Loss:				0.32	Total Net Profit:			43.96
Profit Factor:		138.37		Expected Payoff:				5.49
Absolute Drawdown:		0.00		Maximal Drawdown:				0.32 (0.06%)	Relative Drawdown:			0.06% (0.32)
Total Trades:		8		Short Positions (won %):				3 (66.67%)	Long Positions (won %):			5 (100.00%)
Profit Trades (% of total):								7 (87.50%)	Loss trades (% of total):			1 (12.50%)
Largest		profit trade:						9.44	loss trade:			-0.32
Average		profit trade:						6.33	loss trade:			-0.32
Maximum		consecutive wins ($):						5 (38.72)	consecutive losses ($):			1 (-0.32)
Maximal		consecutive profit (count):						38.72 (5)	consecutive loss (count):			-0.32 (1)
Average		consecutive wins:						4	consecutive losses:			1

The first thing to notice is that we have changed some live account and ticket numbers, along with the account name. Then notice that the format of a MetaTrader live account report is rather different to a backtest report.  If you take a look at the "2009 Live Update" on the Forex MegaDroid website you will see that their results are in backtest format, and not live account format. Maybe like me you are wondering why that is?

Then compare the real trades the Forex MegaDroid robot made on the Trading Gurus live account with the pretend trades it made in the backtests shown on the Forex MegaDroid website.  Notice any similarities over the month of June? There are some, but they're a bit hard to discern. Let's take the first trade as an example.

In our live test the Droid bought on our behalf 8 micro-lots at a price of 1.41444 at 23:41 on June 3rd. Then it sold them for 1.41492  at 00:45 on June 4th for a profit of 0.00048, or 4.8 pips.  On 8 micro-lots that works out at $4.04 in real money.  However our account only got credited with $3.84.  It seems as though even though we don't pay any commissions when we trade foreign exchange, from time to time we have to part with some of our hard earned profits to pay for something called "swap".

Strangely there is no swap column visible in the backtest results helpfully provided by the Forex Megadroid team. For their first trade in June the Droid pretended to buy on their behalf 19.95 lots at a price of 1.4142 at 00:49 on June 4th. Then it sold them for 1.4152  at 01:43 on June 4th for a profit of 0.00100, or 10 pips. This resulted in a credit of $1995.00 to their non-existent account. No deductions for swap.

Obviously the MegaDroid team are trading much greater size with their imaginary account than we are with our live account, but what about the other differences?  The times of the first trade are not the same, for example.  As one of our readers helpfully pointed out, the Droid relies heavily on an input setting it calls GmtOffset. According to version 1.11 of the Forex Megadroid manual they use FXDD to supply the historical data for their backtests, and that data requires a GmtOffset setting of +3. Taking 3 hours off the reported time of the MegaDroid team's first trade in June means it opened at 21:45 Greenwich Mean Time on June 3rd.  Our account is with Alpari UK, and their live quotes require a GmtOffset setting of 2, and also contain an extra decimal place compared to FXDD.  This means our first live trade opened at 21:41 GMT on June 3rd.  Having done this exercise the times of the two trades are now much closer, but they are still not identical.  Neither are the profits.  Somehow the Droid managed to make more than twice as many pips trading pretend money as we achieved using real money!

We leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to work out any other similarities between our live test results and those of the Forex MegaDroid team.  If you try this for yourselves please bear in mind that we did have one or two problems keeping the Droid running smoothly on our VPS during the month.  It's certainly possible that our version of the Droid missed a trade or two because it had seized up for a while. More about that in future posts.