SolomonFx.com Review

I notice that the most recent reviews are from 2011. Please note that SolomonFX has made many changes since that time, including personnel, and updates to our trade reporting.

We still do offer a Forex Trade Room that does have live session time, but with a new moderator. The program also provides various signals at different times throughout the week. During the live session, market conditions are discussed and trades are called in line with clear strategies, with pre-defined stop losses and profit targets. Trades that are called, are taken live on the platform during the session and are made visible to participants.

We do also still offer various strategies for trading Forex, and each has clear rules for entry and exits. The strategies use different approaches for different market conditions, and include shorter term as well as longer term trading. While we typically work to have a balanced approach to the profit and loss ratio, not all trades are designed with a 1:1 ratio, in order to adequately manage the volatility of the market. We are continually working to improve our communication of the strategies, and are always willing to answer questions regarding any of them prior to purchase.

For results reporting, we have updated many of our trade listings to communicate more accurately. We have also added more live trading account listings, and intend to continue progressing in that course.

We wish to thank all of you for your comments. It is always helpful in making us better able to serve you.

Have been erolled for 3 months and am totally satisfied. Have found support is excellent. Most e mails answered the same day. A basic understanding of trading and forex is necessary for success. Diversity calls are set up for large wins but also carry large stop losses. Normally for every wins you have a loss which is outstanding. Trading hours are 8am EST to noon and moderator has no problem staying with room as long as it takes. I guess my biggest point is in order to be successful in this room (not unique here) a good understanding of suppoort/resistance, pivots and fibs in necessary. All others need not subscribe.

Basically, these people are completely untrustworthy. Like most novice traders, they trade with their gut and do not adhere to their own trading strategies. With comments like, "I don't trust the market, so I am getting out now or not taking a trade." Even though discretion may be an excuse for taking trade off early or not entering a trade, their is absolutely NO EXCUSE for not knowing where your stop loss and take profit level(s) are BEFORE you enter the market. They also claim that most of their strategies are 1/1 regarding risk/reward profile. Again, a complete lie, though you wouldn't find this out until AFTER you purchased their strategies. Their typical scalp in the live trading room is 3-10 pips with a stop loss of 30+ pips. They do not trade live accounts, even though they claim they do as they will NOT show a real account, only demo account profits. This is the only red flag you need to base your decision. Even in the trade room, the person calling out the trade doesn't even enter the trade! He just looks st the current price on the chart and claims that was his entry price. Another red flag as they DO NOT SUBTRACT ANY SPREADS FROM THEIR TOTAL PIP COUNT!!!! They also claim on the fromt of their website "no losing month." However, if you read their listed pip profit from each strategy, you will find that this is yet another lie! The suppossed owners of the company and "money managers" DON'T EVEN CALL OUT TRADES! They suggest trades to the moderator, yet don't have the confidence to call trades themselves. Customer service, they don't respond, no surprizes there! Completeley unprofessional, as the owners and moderators like another person posted are more concerned about telling jokes than they are about trading. You would be better served by making decisions based on a coin toss than giving them ANY MONIES!

I took their CTS course in 2010 and it was very good. There was a lot of material but I had too much going on in my life to focus. I recently joined the trade room service in May of 2011 hoping to kick start my trading. I think they do a great job. I have tried other services and Solomon seems very consistent. Nice guys.

I have used SolomonFX in the past. Both live trading room and their systems they sell for thousands of dollars.

Please stay away from them. They are ALL liars and crooks.

SolomonFX trading is a joke. They have no clue....

I am begging you to stay away from them at ALL costs..

I took the one month trial offer and Ricky and Neil both sum it up very well. The way SolomonFx calculates the pip count is bogus and if you can't have confidence in that you can't have confidence in the company.

Thanks for Neil and all the other traders' review on Somonfx

Okay first of all I have to give Solomonfx a big applause for offering a completely
free 1 month trial, not even any CC required. That's definitely putting their money
where their mouth is. Very few services do that. Certainly offering the same
free month to lots of subscribers is an easy way to prevent abuse and and that works
great for them and me. Now on to the service...

Solomonfx offers several different trading strategies. One is a long term one they
call DiversityFX. This strategy has a 100 or 200 pip stop loss looking to collect
50 to 150 or so pips (TP1), usually with two take profit levels. Unfortunately I
was testing their systems out on a small account and even a single microlot was
overleveraging, so I really didn't concentrate much on this strategy. I only entered
3 of these trades and 2 lost and one hit TP1. Overall all a loss but not nearly
enough of a statistical sample to definitively say whether it's good or bad.

The second strategy is called Report Spotlight which is basically trading news
releases, but they are the slow market moving type releases, not NFP or any of
the 5-star releases. They naturally come out at odd hours and I only put trades
in on 6 or them, but 5 won and 1 lost. Good but again, not enough of a sample to
verify it works long term as they claim. This strategy works with an MT4 indicator
they created where you enter "pending orders" long above a certain mark and short
below.

One complaint I have about the RS reports: Normally the current price at order setup
time is between these levels and so you enter stop market entries. That's simple
enough but 2 or 3 times I went to do setups the price was already well below the shorting
price so setting up a sell stop order was not possible. Should it be a sell limit
instead?? Unfortunately their instructions on the page isn't clear on that point
and that's kinda silly. They only say "enter a pending order" at that level. For
that reason I did not do any trading on at least 2, maybe 3 Report Spotlight trades
at least one of which they claimed was a big winner and I think a second one was
as well.

For that ambiguity on those instructions, I gotta give them a "D". It's just plain
silly that they would overlook that important and basic detail.

There are also the Trade Room sessions where they will give out live trade calls
during the trade room time. I got 6 "Trade Room" trades during the month (probably
could have gotten more if I put in an effort to catch trade room sessions that
are at inconsistent days/times. All 6 were winners which was cool, of course,
and I think is certainly something worth pursuing for those using their service.
Pips gained ranged from 4.5 to about 30. Though again, 6 trades is too small
a statistical sample to certify it as a great system.

What I put most of my effort into was their Medium Term Trading Plan, or MTTP.
This is a very convenient system because it's worked at the same time every
weekday morning (1-2 AM ET). I made 57 trades on this system over the course of
4 weeks. This system involves entering pending stop orders, both long and short,
on about 5 different currency pairs. Usually there are about 8 entry setups per
evening, with SL's at about 40 pips and TP1's at about 20 pips and TP2's at
about 40 pips. Trade setups expire after 10 hours if not executed.

The first 3 weeks were wonderful, raising my account balance about 14%, and
that included a losing trade that they didn't actually call (my mistake).
Would have been over 15% other wise. That was through June 23, 2011. On Friday
the 24th, I noted that all the previous Fridays were actually losers as Fridays
tend to be slower ranging markets which are bad for breakout strategies so I opted
not to do MTTP trades that day. In hindsight that was a great decision as I would have
lost a lot so I felt really smart.

Then the "Texas Chainsaw" week of June 26-30 came and was it ever bloody. Every
day was a significant loser for me, each day taking out about 1 weeks profits
from the 1st 3 weeks of the month due to the SL's being 2x the TP1's AND the
practice of only exiting partial trades in hopes of reaching TP2, which did not
happen more often than not. (I think this would probably have worked better
without TP2's and just exiting completely at TP1, but.... SolomonFX devised the
strategy with TP2's so maybe that's not a stastistically winning thing to do??)

So, by June 30th, all of my profits from the first 3 weeks were gone and then
some. Now I can accept that there are losing weeks, but the thing is this MTTP
strategy has SL's that are about 2x the size of TP1's, so not counting the TP2's
means that this strategy should be winning 67% of the time just with random
guessing. So when the actual win rate was 6 out of 17 (35%) for the final week
of the trial, it hurt a LOT, as it would with any strategy where SL's are 2x
or more of TP1. And only 1 of those hit TP2. At least as I handled it.

I've heard of London Session breakout trading before and it was with similar
SL/TP ratios. It didn't work too well for me then but I think it can be a
viable strategy. If I was going to pursue it I'd probably have a quicker
trigger finger but the MTTP style of doing it has unfortunately not proven
robust enough for my tastes.

Finally, SFX likes to advertise the total pips they make over the course of
each month by totaling all the strategies pip gains, but I take exception
to that and think it is a false advertising type ploy which is only going to
fool those who are new to trading.

There are 2 problems, one of which was already described by an earlier review.
which is how they count TP1 pips as being the same value as SL pips when there
is a TP2 goal. If a trade has a 40 pip SL and a 20 pip TP1 and 40 pip TP2,
and a trade goes to SL, then it's a 40 pip loss which they count correctly.
But if a trade goes to TP1 and SL is advanced to break even and is subsequently
hit, then they incorrectly count that as having made 20 pips. It should only
be counted as 50% of 20 pips or whatever proportion of the trade was exited
at TP1 since the other portion of the trade exited at BE. Also, if a trade
hits a 20 pip TP1 for, say 50% of the trade, and a 40 pip TP2 for the other
50% then the correct pip total should be the average of 20 and 40 (30 pips)
to reflect the dollar gain of the trade. Without doing that, you cannot
even accurately compare negative pips that hit SL's with positive pips that hit TP's. It's apples and oranges.

But that's what SFX does. With their publicized accounting method, they could
have a positive pip month that actually is a losing dollar month.

That's problem #1. Problem #2 is they add up all pips across all strategies as
though they all have the same worth to a trading account, but anyone who
understand money management 101, which they certainly do, will tell you that
that's also adding apples and oranges. For example the DiversityFX trades have
SL's of perhaps 200 pips compared with the MTTP trades which have an SL of
about 40 pips. Applying rules of money management this means that MTTP
pips are worth 5 times more than DiversityFX pips. Yet they add them up as
though they are equal value and they clearly are not. Perhaps that's kindof
an industry standard for forex firms to advertise their value but it's
clearly and obviously wrong and everyone in the industry knows it, including
SolomonFX.

(As an aside, a good standard for measuring a trade strategies would be to do something like
take the number of net pips gained/lost divided by the number of trades
that generated them divided by the approximate stop loss used in those
trades. So it woud be:

Strategy value = Net Pips / # Trades / Avg Stop Loss.

So if you have a strat that made 300 pips over 20 trades with an SL of 30 pips
it would rate 0.5.

If however you did the same with only a 15 pip SL, it would score twice as good
even though it still only made 300 pips, because with half the SL the pips would be worth twice as much).

Overall, SFX can be a good service. I was so impressed through week 3 that
I was ready to sign up. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the last week was so devastating that I now can't justify it.

In sum I'm finishing their one month trial (a bit early) with a
dollar loss. I think this is a service that a trader could do well with
assuming a bit of effort and patience is invested with them to get the feel of how they work and, perhaps, knowing when to do the trades they call and when to stay out. I strongly suspect their MTTP system is largely mechanical and that may be what went wrong on week 4 when markets started ranging. How often does that happen? I don't know.

I do like that their systems are *pretty* clearly defined, though as mentioned,
it can and should be better which would take little effort on their part. Other
services I've tried have lacked that. At $100 a month or so, it's not the
cheapest service but also not the most expensive. Nothing fantastic from
them, but they could be profitable for a dedicated trader willing to put the effort in to working with them. 3 Stars.

I used to be a subscriber of its old trade room service for a few months. I find mixed result in using its service so I have stopped. A few nights ago, I have attended SolomonFX (SFX) new trade room sales webinar. The host, Gerald Sharpe, has shown us the trade room stats from Oct 24 to Dec 3 (6 weeks). It claims that it has generated 2516 pips from all signals but I doubt if any of its current subscriber is able to re-produce that kind of result.

The new trade room service is divided into 5 areas and the cumulative pip counts in those 6 weeks are:
a) Mid-Term Trading Plan: 990 pips
b) Signals To-Go: 169 pips
c) Live FX Trade Room: 31 pips
d) Report Spotlight: 1000 pips
e) Diversity FX: 326 pips
Total: 2516 pips

1) From its stat above, the live FX trade room is the weakest area. It averages about 5 pips per week.

2) The mid-term trading plan has generated total of 990 pips from 7 currency pairs. The plan is updated 3 to 5 times a week providing a buy stop and a sell stop for each currency pairs. So there are total of 14 pending orders to place. Let's say I don't mind risking 0.25% for each of the pending trade, the maximum risk is 3.5% if all of the trades are triggered and lost. The stop loss for each pending trade varies between 35 - 50 pips. Let's say it is 40 pips on average.

990/40 = 24.75
24.75 * 0.25% = 6.2% gain over 6 weeks.

That's about 1% gain a week on average.

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But, since I know that its pip counting method is tilted toward its favor, I don't fully trust its pip counts on face value. What I mean is that it has T1 and T2 for each trade. And, if T1 is hit, it will close out half of its position and moves stop to breakeven. If T2 closes out at breakeven, SFx takes the pip count from T1. If the trade is closed at T2, it takes the pip count from T2 for the whole trade. On the other hand, if the trade stops out and closes at a loss, it only counts the loss once for both positions. Essentially, it has distorted the pip counts by over-counting the pips gain on the winning trade.
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3) Diversity FX has 326 pips in 6 weeks. That's not a bad number at first glance. However, when I look at some of the pending trade examples, I realize that the stop loss on each trade is at least 200 pips from entry. That means 326 pips gain is about 1.5% gain for the acount.

Here are some of the pending orders from the plan presented in the webinar:

Trade 1203:
Buy Limit order on GBP/USD
Entry: 1.5575
TP1: 1.5888
SL: 1.5279
Order Expiration set on Jan 18, 2011 4:30 a.m. ET

Trade 1204:
Buy Limit order on GBP/USD
Entry: 1.5326
TP1: 1.5674
SL: 1.5047
Order Expiration set on Jan 14, 2011 4:30 a.m. ET

4) For Report Spotlight, it provides a currency pair to trade for news release (there are 8 opportunities for Dec 20 -22) and the straddle strategy is used with a pending buy stop and a pending sell stop placed above the recent swing high / swing low on the 15m chart about 15m before the news release.

This area of service produces 60 to 200 pips per week and it may worth takes a look at.

I would like to hear from current subscribers to evaluate the new trade room service if you find my assessment is not accurate.

I'm a newbie so I have nothing to compare them to. So I guess this about them standing on their own merits. I have to agree with other posters in that they lack a certain amount of professionalism during their morning live trading sessions. On the other hand, I have to disagree with some posters in that they have been very responsive to my emails. I have some pretty basic (stupid) questions, and they have been very helpful. I've signed up for their $9.99 intro package. They want $99.99 a month for their continued service. Their end game seems to be to sign you up for a $5000 training package at their location in Florida. The one thing that tickles my spider senses is that they use trading platforms in their morning sessions that are free demos. They don't use trading platforms used by the brokers they recommend. Some of the trades they recommend cannot be carried out with the brokers they recommend. Last thing, some of their trades are expired within 120 seconds of them hitting the SEND button on their email. My own personal jury is still out on these guys.