Forex Hippo - Live Testing

[Ken Long]

Hello...

Any idea why "my" FHippo didn't trade the first two and tha last one in Coleen's list? Doesn't make sense...

Thanks

Because they were EURGBP and USDJPY trades and your settings may be different from hers. Compare the MA and BBand filter settings. Also the open and close of bars is often different on different brokers. Since all indicators and sgnals are based on closing price this may change your signals. I run this on both FXDD and FXCM and often see differences in trades.

I wouldnt run either of these pairs on my live account. They both have poor testing results and very poor cost basis, (the difference between range and spread, range/spread, or # pips profit per 1 pip cost). This is very important when going for small gains.

[Ken Long]

Donna Forex's weekend e-mail indicates that she will be droping the Hippo from her testing due to many large losses. This is the potential problem with any EA that uses such a large risk setting and an inverse risk reward ratio. If it doesnt work perfectly it will cost you dearly. I will be continuing my testing since I am doing well, but I am cautious here, this is not a good sign, and I do view this as a risky trading strategy. I think the key to survival with this is to use anything you can to eliminate risk and potential losses, even if it means missing good trades. That means only running the best pairs and using the trade filters.

[frankjibe]

I dropped as well. Seems to be very "random" in performaces and it will take ages to recover from losses.
I also dropped Multivers (same behaviour), while I'm getting very good results with BulletProof and High Voltage triggering the risk level to 0.25 Lots (instead of 0.09).

Still waiting to reach 50K on my balance to switch to 4x Cash Compounder, the only bot I trust

Best
Francesco

[Jake]

The filters work well. They do block both good and bad trades, but at a risk reward ratio of 3.3:1 they work quite well. The 15% risk setting is quite aggressive, just a few losses could do serious damage. I've opted for 5%, but I'm running my very tiny live account at 10% and watching it carefully and manually managing the trades. I wouldn't do this on a larger account.

G'day Ken,

I'm not sure what you mean by a 3.3:1 RRR. do you mean?

- That your running the hippo with only a 5% risk each trade it takes?
- Are you using the same s/l and t/p levels as recommended in the manual?
- Also have you adjusted your lot sizes to 0.05 to 0.10 per $1000 as recommended in the beginning of this thread?
- Are you following the recommended filters?
- What pairs are you using?

Sorry bout all the questions, im trying to give the hippo another shot after these last few losses...

Thanks for the help
Jake

[Ken Long]

G'day Ken,

I'm not sure what you mean by a 3.3:1 RRR. do you mean?

- That your running the hippo with only a 5% risk each trade it takes?
- Are you using the same s/l and t/p levels as recommended in the manual?
- Also have you adjusted your lot sizes to 0.05 to 0.10 per $1000 as recommended in the beginning of this thread?
- Are you following the recommended filters?
- What pairs are you using?

Sorry bout all the questions, im trying to give the hippo another shot after these last few losses...

Thanks for the help
Jake

3.3:1 is just a fancy way of saying it runs an inverse risk reward ratio of 3:1. With a stop of 100 and a profit target of 30 it is actually 3.3:1. Sorry about the confusion.

With this kind of ratio every loss will wipe out 3-4 winning trades. This requires a 70% win rate just to break even. A difficult ratio to accept on a long term basis unless you have something trully exceptional. Very few programs, or trading systems of any kind can achieve this just through timing, most do it through a proccess of trade managment, adjusting their stops and targets to compensate for changes.

5% risk is about your account, not the trade to trade ratios. How much of your account are you willing to risk on this EA's performance? I think 5% is reasonable on most smaller Forex testing accounts, 10-15% is good for demos and very aggressive micro accounts, and any larger real money account I would be very cautious testing robots on at all.


I think I've gone through my settings and the filters before, but I'll list them again in a minute.

The risk setting and lot sizes are basicaly the same thing. One is an automatic percentage and the other is a manual fixed size.

As far as good pairs, a lot depends on what your broker gives you good spreads on. With such a small profit target the spread means a lot.

The pairs I like are:
EURUSD
AUDUSD
EURJPY
GBPUSD
EURCHF
USDCHF
USDCAD
GBPJPY
GBPCHF

There are also some others I run on demo just to see what they do, but generally the EURGBP and USDJPY are low volitility pairs that are not worth the cost, and some other crosses are doing ok, but I think this is enough for now.

I use the MA Open Filter On , and the BBand filter On.

I set my take profit by a long term ATR 500 on a 1 hr chart and my SL at aprox 3x my TP.

[Ken Long]

I dropped as well. Seems to be very "random" in performaces and it will take ages to recover from losses.
I also dropped Multivers (same behaviour), while I'm getting very good results with BulletProof and High Voltage triggering the risk level to 0.25 Lots (instead of 0.09).

Still waiting to reach 50K on my balance to switch to 4x Cash Compounder, the only bot I trust

Best
Francesco

Frank, your right as far as recovery. I dont think it random, just very risky. I get good results by being cautious and manualy watching and managing my trades. The additional filters help a lot, and being available to manualy manage my trades is a big part of it.

I'll look for comments on Bulletproof, and Cresendo (I didnt buy either because of who and where they came from, and the hype involved), and I'll check out the Cash Compouder (thanks for that, I'm always interested).

As for this EA. Its a very difficult one to trust and I understand anyone who drops it. I'm staying in for now, its almost paid for itself on a $250 account before the refund deadline is up, and thats my first marker.


...Addition: When you think about the recovery time needed, you cant include all the trades that end at breakeven with a slight gain, those dont count at all. It needs 3-4 full wins to make up for every loss. Thats actually a lot higher than the above mentioned 70% win rate. This EA needs a 90% win rate to make any money.

[Pedraj]

what about the Forex Multivers and the Forex Overdrive those two are winning a lot on the Real Money Accounts Competition at Forex Robots - The Best Forex Robots in Live Trading Competition. I believe those two robots are very solid, I will give them a chance on my account.

[frankjibe]

Forex Multivers: I bought it and put it offline after 2 weeks. It is just a crappy piece of software, no clear strategy just a 1-10 ratio from TP to SL. This is the live statement from "real performance" tab on their website:

MT Intelligence - Statement for multivers_reloaded


If you go in FPA you will see this "random" moving chart, with large DD.

About Overdrive: It seems interesting but I'm scared about 2 things. The first one is the 325PIPs SL, the second is that there is a huge discrepancy between the "live statement" on their website and the result on ForexPeaceArmy.

Best
Francesco

[Ken Long]

what about the Forex Multivers and the Forex Overdrive those two are winning a lot on the Real Money Accounts Competition at Forex Robots - The Best Forex Robots in Live Trading Competition. I believe those two robots are very solid, I will give them a chance on my account.

If you actually buy these, (I have my doubts your actually buying anything), please start a seperate thread for them and post your results there. I would be interested in seeing if you can duplicate their results. Otherwise, this is a discussion thread for Forex Hippo, you should promote your product elsewhere.