Welcome Aboard!!

[pharoh777]

Hello Everyone!!!

Welcome to our new EA test lab where we hope to achieve success in all facets of trading. Since our other experts and professionals here blow me away with manual trading, I felt I could contribute by sharing my EA experiences. In case you didn't know, expert advisors, known as "EAs" are programs that you can have make trades for you 24-hrs a day whether you are at your terminal or not. As one can imagine, that opens up lots of opportunities AND many risks. My goal here is to "filter" out bad EAs and find the ones that can help us make money. We will avoid the bad ones, and squeeze the most juice out of the good ones so that we can have a relaxed and better time making our manual trades. I have found that if you have a few profitable EAs working for you all the time, you won't be as likely to force your manual trades because you don't feel like you're missing anything in the market. You just take the choicest trades with high probabilities of success, and don't jump to get in the market just to trade (trust me, I LOVE trading, but we have to remember we are doing this to MAKE MONEY, not make trades).

But first a little about myself. My name is Omar Eltoukhy. I was born in Swansea, Wales and am the product of a Scottish mother and an Egyptian father, but was raised in sunny California, USA. It has lent itself to giving me an interesting perspective on life and has enriched many of my experiences. I first got interested in investing when I was about 13 or so and bought my first stocks at 14 and had tripled the account by the time I graduated high school. I made my decisions based on which companies I liked and thought had a compelling product. Of course, being 18, I spent all the money on girls and partying in college! Didn't get back into investing till 2001 when tragedy struck New York. Although the country was in turmoil, the market screamed at me to buy things and I listened. Life intervened and I ended up spending all my profits from that swoon and rebound to keep my life afloat during difficult job times. Again, in 2008, I watched as the market killed many investors and decided to get involved again. This gave me my seed money for what I realized I wanted to do: TRADE! Investing was fun, but trading is income. I wanted to be more nimble than simply looking at fundamentals and waiting sometimes months or years for the market to catch up.

Then I discovered forex! Oh boy, here is a market that runs 24-5 and look at the leverage!! Little did I know what was lurking behind the TV ads for the first brokerage I tried. I bought my first EA (FapTurbo) and went about my forex trading career. I WAAYYY over-leveraged every trade and had no idea what I was doing. I tripled my account in the first month, only to blow 80% in a matter of 5 hours a week later! I thought, "There has to be a better way!". Many products, EAs, systems, and countless dollars later, I discovered Forex Mentor Pro and have been a member from the beginning.

Interesting thing happened. As I learned from Marc and Dean how to trade the "real" way, I discovered my EAs (the good ones) were performing better as well. Why?? When you know the market you trade and how to trade manually a couple things happen:
1) You can quickly discern a good EA from a bad one

2) Since you understand HOW your EA trades, you can make the "executive decisions" on when to trade it and how to trade it most effectively

So my personal trading philosophy is this: Use ALL the tools in your arsenal at the RIGHT time and MAKE MONEY! I'm going to do my best to help everyone make as much as possible with the best EAs to compliment our rock-solid guides as we learn to be better manual traders. I want everyone to know as well, that I am someone who is very passionate about everything he does, and I welcome respectful criticism, because if I am not being challenged, I am not learning. If I am not learning, I'm not getting better. If I'm not getting better, I'm not making as much as I should be! Let's make this a joint effort to go BIG and we will all succeed!!!!

Kindest Regards,
Omar

[marc walton]

Omar has been a member of forexmentorpro.com since the beginning back in the summer of 2009. He is always a pleasure to talk with as has such a positive mental attitude. Recently he wrote to me to let me know that he was now doing so well with his forex trading (50% account growth in 2011) that he was now looking forward to becoming a full time forex trader. He kindly posted a review of forexmentorpro here in the forum which you can find at the bottom of this page: Forex Mentorpro review

We also got to talking about forex robots & eas. I explained that apart from Million dollar pips which has made me a small profit & some decent rebate, I have had nothing but bad experiences with them & would never place them on a bigger account. Omar then blew me away but explaining that he uses a basket full of eas alongside his normal trading and that he made 50% from MDP alone on his ea account last year!

He explained that he applies very strict due diligence before he tests an ea on demo account. If that test is successful he moves it to his live account. Omar explained that his success is a combination of due diligence, settings, the right broker per ea and finally his manual trading experience.

Omar has very kindly offered to share everything he knows about eas with us here in the forum, including his successes & failures AND his personal settings which have helped him be profitable. I look forward to his contribution & I know that you will make him welcome and hopefully lets see if we can finally make some money from forex robots, welcome Omar

[noiseman]

Hi Omar I have been following Marc and Dean for some time now and have been gradually gaining confidence to trade more regularly but as my work pattern has changed I find myself with more time available during the day which has led to my problem of overtrading. They say your patience grows as you get older but I find the reverse as I feel the need to get things done more quickly as time goes quicker.
As such I have been looking at EAs so that I feel "something is happening" without me watching smaller timeframes!!
I look forward to your opinions as much of what I have seen so far seems to have unbelievable performace (in the adverts anyway)
Jim

[pharoh777]

Hi Noiseman!!!

You bring up an EXCELLENT point!!! First off, thank you for your comment. Marc and I have discussed this exact phenomenon and that's why we both thought this might be a great addition to Forex Mentor Pro. I too, love to trade and spent my early forex career always trying to make something "happen". I think that learning how to really know and trade the forex market is a skill that is priceless (thank you Forex Mentor Pro!!!) but it does lead to wanting to take a bunch of trades because you want to put the skills you've learned to the test and make money from it. But that can lead to overtrading and can defeat the purpose of this wonderful education. I too, discovered, that if you have a few EAs "working" for you all the time, it take a large amount of pressure off of you as a trader since you feel something is going on all the time. This frees up your time and energy to trade, WHEN, and HOW you want to! It also means that you can have the patience to wait for the juiciest, highest probability setups instead of trading just to be in the market. On top of that, if we put together a portfolio of consistent winning EAs, our returns will be higher overall to boot!! I look forward to us all helping each other make the most $$$ in forex. Thanks again for the comment!

[Grant Carroll]

Hi Omar,
I am brand new to the forum and I have a quick question. Is it true that eventually an EA will stop producing the early results that a person may experience?
Thanks,
Grant

[pharoh777]

Hi Grant!!!

EXCELLENT Question!! This is one of those things that has been the subject of many debate. I will give you my viewpoint based on my experience and logic.

First off, we must realize that we are attempting to do business in an extremely dynamic environment that can literally shift dramatically in seconds. It was one of the attributes that made it so attractive to me in the first place BUT it does create challenges. The market has many different phases, and can act very differently throughout each of them. Sometimes price goes nowhere, other times it trends. Sometimes it bounces around. The majority of the time that someone has a problem with the EA after a while, it is usually just because the market has shifted gears, and the EA was designed for a specific type of market in which it no longer resides. So that person just tosses away the EA and goes around (with great vigor usually) to every single forum and complains that the EA "Was great for a while, but went belly up......guess that's what happens with all EAs". Never understanding why it failed. Don't get me wrong, some EAs FAIL..... you know what, ALMOST ALL EAs fail!!! But sometimes, they are just not suited for what's going on and need to be temporarily disabled to make sure that performance will continue and it works when it can make money. There are a whole host of reasons EAs can fail, BUT if you have an EA based on REAL market principles, it should never fail, just have periods where it doesn't work.

Look, support and resistance have been very important since people started looking at charts. It still works FANTASTIC. Does it work all the time??? NOPE. But it works enough to make a whole lot of money with it if you know HOW and WHEN to use it! AND it probably will for a very long time. EAs based on the same principles (and there is MUCH more than support and resistance but this is strong example) should work as long as the principles work. The better and more relevant the principles, the better the long-term performance of the EA should be.

EAs have been fantastically marketed as "Easy Money" (Make Money While on Vacation While You're Spending the Money You're Making on Vacation!!!) and sorry, but it's just not true. But here is what I have discovered about them:

1. They are just another style of trading that takes REAL EFFORT to be profitable with
2. Learning how to analyze the market, and taking the time to educate ones self about how to trade for yourself will lead to much greater profitability with EAs
3. EAs CAN be profitable for the longer term.

What we must do to be successful is choose EAs that trade a certain style based on REAL market principles. Then we must know WHEN we should use them. If you know the style and how an EA trades AND you understand the market you are trading; THEN, you can make a nice return from your EAs because you can use it as a TOOL in your trading arsenal rather than your "holy grail" to make money the lazy way. Forex is hard. That's why you can make a good living from it if you put the effort in.

I sincerely hope this answers your question! If not, I will try to expand on anything I have missed. Again, I really appreciate the question!! I know it's one a lot of people think about

Happy Trading,
Omar

[mosah]

Hi Omar,
I've been testing Fapturbo Ichimoku and i find that it's doing good. What's your opinion about it? Have you a special setting for it? momo

[pharoh777]

Hi Momo!

I actually use FapTurbo Ichimoku and have had success with it. It is part of my personal portfolio and as soon as I have time I will do a review and live updates of it. I don't like to do anything half-measure and as soon as I can I will be adding both FapTurbo (both regular and Ichimoku) and Forex Growth Bot as I know they are popular and I too use them both.

I don't have any special settings for Ichimoku BUT I only use it to trade Usd/Chf and Eur/Chf.

Thank you for your comments!! I will get that information out as soon as I can!!

[pharoh777]

EAs are Scams!! All Vendors Are Crooks!!!
(and other forex myths)

Hi there!! As my little corner has grown I have had a few private messages from people saying its hard to keep track of what I am doing/where I am up to. I thought the easiest way was to provide an update here with links to the various sections so it will be easier for folks to keep track of my forex robot adventure.

My name is Omar Eltoukhy and like many novice traders, when I discovered expert advisors (EAs) over four years ago I was attracted to the idea of making huge returns while I slept by letting an automated program make trades for me. I was drawn into the marketing that promised incredible riches while I went about my life enjoying instead of worrying about trading. Did I become an overnight millionaire relaxing on my yacht while my EAs raked in the cash??? HECK NO!!!!!! What I found instead was a world of programs pushed by a lot of marketing hype and shady vendors who promised easy success and sold misery and misfortune.
I spent countless dollars trying many different EAs, not to mention countless dollars from my trading account being bashed and beaten from the new “hottest” product. Incredibly though, throughout the minefield I found some products that genuinely worked and made some killer returns, although not without a little work on my part.

I thought, maybe other people out there have some better information. What I found were review sites and forex EA forums. The review sites all seemed to endorse products that clearly were suspect or even products I had watched attempt to drain my account. Forums just seemed to be a bunch of people screaming at each other, trying to prove who was the better trader, OR vendors disguised as members either hyping their own product or bashing competitors!! I was fed up!!

Armed with a top notch education I received from Forex Mentor Pro (the single greatest educational forex site in existence in my opinion); instead of giving up, I decided to do something about it. I would use a set of rules that would “filter” the great products from the stinkers, figure out the best settings, and share my results with the world. I wanted to be the beacon of truth in a world of lies because believe it or not, behind 100 hyped-up marketing campaigns, there was usually a hidden gem of an EA in there, just waiting to produce monster returns!!

I invite you to save yourself COUNTLESS dollars and hassle and just join me, your humble reviewer and tester as we try to find the EAs that will deliver big returns and send the rest on down the road!! Take a sneak peek at what I have going on at the moment!!


Omar’s “Power Portfolio”:
You guessed it, these are the expert advisors that made the cut. After much testing and tweaking, and subjecting these programs to a battery of market conditions to make sure they work, this is the approved, endorsed list of EAs that we trade with our OWN REAL MONEY. To me “put your money where your mouth is” couldn’t be truer in forex and I have staked my own capital on the success of this list. Take a look!!

Million Dollar Pips: This took the world by storm last year and produced some whopping 200% returns in 4 months of use by me!! It’s struggled a bit this year because of market conditions, but can produce a 15% return in minutes when we get the market moving again. Go see for yourself what it’s all about: Million Dollar Pips Settings and Real Time Trade Updates (thread includes a link for the review and performance stats from 2011)

Forex Growth Bot: This highly used and talked about EA has yet again proven itself to be one of the best in existence through solid returns and huge gains on big Euro moves. It’s not without minor drawbacks, which I’ve pretty much solved through custom settings. Check out the results for yourself: Forex Growth Bot Settings and Live Trade Updates

Thor II: Similar to MDP, this EA uses a different set of rules to go out and grab big profits from those volatile spikes that destroy other systems. Quiet lately, will the slumbering Thor II awaken with a fury of pips?? Or will the mellow markets keep it hibernating? Come follow along with us and see for yourself! Thor II Review, Settings and Live Trade Updates



Due Diligence aka “The Test Lab”:
When a new EA launches, even though many times surrounded by tremendous hype and customers who just can’t wait to grab a copy, we don’t just dive in and expose our capital. Here is the section where I “earn my keep” by diligently testing new products and saving people from spending $$$ unnecessarily on untested products. We put them through the ringer, and if they survive, they make it to the real money account. If they don’t they end up in the next section I will discuss.
This is a very exciting area because it lets us poke and prod new EAs without the risk of having to buy them or expose our precious trading accounts to them. Member suggestions are welcome and this is a “safe zone” of honest testing and review. Remember, my goal is for ALL of us to only spend our money on products worth buying. Take a look at a sample of what’s cooking in the test kitchen:

Volatility Factor EA: From the creators of another blockbuster EA, Volatility Factor promises high profitability mixed with flexible risk settings. An EXPERTLY prepared manual and very straightforward information makes this one intriguing. Will it make it?? Only time will tell!! Come check it out and make your own decision. Volatility Factor Review

Forex Replicator: This unique product uses historical patterns to predict future price movement and is the ultimate in versatility and flexibility for usage. It’s brand new and I’m putting it through its paces. Come take a peek and see what going on! Forex Replicator Review




EA Scams, Losers and Rejects:
Of course not every product tested makes it. In fact, some turn out to be downright scams!! This is where I discuss the products that just couldn’t hack it and those where we should never expose our capital too. Come check out the train wrecks we avoided here: Omar’s Rejects