Ray the Random Robot Finally Comes a Cropper

As a couple of our more perceptive readers have recently pointed out to me, Ray the Random Robot's equity curve (the live version of which you can see proudly displayed to the left of this post) has recently suffered an obvious "blip". Here's an enlarged version of where Ray's up to today, preserved for posterity:

Ray the Random Robot's equity curve on September 27th 2011. Spot the "blip"!

There are any number of lessons that you might wish to take away from the fact that after almost 11 months of fully automated live trading (albeit with pretend money) Ray's artificially stupid trading brain has finally come a cropper, and he's somehow just managed to avoid wiping out his entire account by the skin of his shiny metal teeth.

1. There seems to be a slight bug in Ray's "emergency escape" code. His account has recovered from what myfxbook describe as a "73.07% drawdown", but not to new equity highs.

2. Using a Martingale money management system will always ultimately end in tears.

3. According to myfxbook Ray's "profit factor" is currently 1.12, but his "expectancy" is -3.0 pips. How on earth could that come about?

4. After all the recent excitement in the markets in general as well as in Ray's own account he is about to post his first ever losing month.

Ray the Random Robot trades over 100 lots!

5. As you can see from the list shown above of Ray's trades on September 14th, he much prefers to trade at 1/10 of a lot. However to escape from his dire predicament at one point he found himself trading over 100 lots of EUR/JPY. Ray doesn't recommend that you do this at home!

6. Perhaps most importantly, for the moment at least, Ray has demonstrated how easy it is to create a MetaTrader 4 "robot" that can produce a very nice equity curve for 30 days, 60 days, or even 300 days. Please make sure you don't waste your hard earned time and money buying such a monstrosity on ClickBank, Plimus or wherever, even on the recommendation of your friendly local neighbourhood forex broker. If you're still not convinced of this by Ray's recent results, then please take a look at what happened when BuruTrader blew up for additional evidence.