Rodders,
I still havent installed this on a live account, and I've had it since 11/25 when it first came out. Everytime I start to set up an account for it, it developes trading problems and losses, and I back off. Now it seems my current demo accounts are expiring and I cant check last weeks data, but I believe I had trades every day. However, I am probably running different settings than you. I run all four pair and set the spread to accomodate them, so they all trade. This is ok on a demo, but I'm not sure I would continue this policy on a live account.
I really doubt the problems are directly related to the vr 47. I saw the same accusations and concerns when vr 36 came out, and they've always claimed that the internal algorithim has never changed.
Almost every loss that I have checked is due to catching a trend in the wrong direction. Other than ocasionaly entering a trade in a position that I would not consider optimal, such as the wrong side of the range, the problem is more often about using a range trading strategy which only works well in a very narrow set of conditions. And it does work very well within its conditions.
I've tried eliminating the last hour of trading and although it did eliminate some bad trades, it didnt fix the problem, and it skiped otherwise good trades. I've also tried using the global moving average filter, and this did work as far as preventing some losses that were counter trend, but it didnt help if the trend reversed, even if its just a short term move, and this does cut out a lot of good trades. However, its a very interesting strategy if you want to run FAPT during a trending market, and are watching it for problems. When I first started testing this I ran it 24/5 for a couple months and the results were great, except for the consistant losses when the trend changed quickly. The end results were poor, but if this was done selectively and closely monitored it could work well.
Anyway, back to the problem at hand. I doubt if the current problems have anything to do with v47 specificaly. Unless its opening its trades incorrectly, or mismanaging its trades, which I havent seen any evidence of, the problem lies with the market movement and the basic night scalping strategy. If the market breaks out early, or if the system gets stuck holding a trade too long theres a great chance of it hiting the stops.
The reason FPA's account didnt trade from the 15th to the 26th was most likely due to the instalation and settings. The eurgbp doesnt trade on most brokers with the default spread setting, its hard to get any of these pairs to trade on a regular brokerage with the 5 pip spread limit. And as far as the risk settings, it depends on a lot of things, such as the size of the account, the win/loss ratio and long term expectancy of the pair, the final stop loss amount and the value of a pip. All the LLR does is set a percentage of the free margin to trade with, all the other calculations have to be done independantly, and they dont go over any of this in their manual. You mention the eurchf trading at .935/minipip, this is close enought to 1 that it wont cause a problem, but the eurgbp was trading at 1.65/minipip, and this threw my risk managment way off when I recalculated for the new 35 pip stop loss.
And one final note on risk. If the entire account is a dedicated risk account just for FAPT, and as such is just a risk percentage of your total trading account, then its easier to run a high risk allowance. It may seem like a lot for that individual account, but the entire account may be only 1 or 2% of the available equity. This is how I usually manage my accounts when I'm working with new, unknown, or potentialy high risk situations, which include every EA known, and most trading strategies. My theory is that if the strategy or system is good enough it will build its own account, MegaDroid has been doing this very well on a 20% risk setting. And if I like and can manage the system well enough on my own, I simply adopt it, or parts of it into my longer term trading plans. So far, these scalping strategies, and many of the short term trading strategies that they sell on the internet, have never proved to be long term profitable for me. I've found that the most basic trend following and swing trading strategies have so far proved to work best for me. Even on the shorter time frames they work well enough that I use them pretty much universaly. These scalping strategies I've been trying to incorporate in that they are simply range trading strategies, and are not restricted to only short time frames, we can scalp the 1H, 4H, and Daily bars too. Its just the perspective and the way the chart is running.
