Has anyone heard of The Forex Police- Striker EA OR FTSC100Club ?

[Pharaoh]

Let me see if I can answer some of this for you.

1. Per the glossary definition - Churning is the deliberate execution of more trades than necessary by an account manager to generate more income (for the account manager, not for the account holder) through extra commissions, cuts of spreads, and/or trading fees while providing little or no additional profits for the account holder.

The poster child for forex churning is Rizwan Awan. He was trading successfully, then suddenly kept opening and closing trades for large volume with no regard to profit or loss. All he was doing was generating IB commissions that were deposited directly into his account. He wiped out the accounts of a number of his clients this way. You can read about his criminal behavior here:

https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/fore...trike-trendsfx-com-managed-accounts-scam.html

2. You may want to ask BigT1 about the legalities. Of course, the issue is that there is no exact dividing line between churning and not churning. How can you be certain that a specific trade or set of trades was churning vs just a bad trade decision?

Of course it impacts negatively. Let's say there's a target of 100 pips profit on a trade. If a single trade is opened and closed, you'll probably pay 2-4 pips in spread and commissions (depends on broker, pair, etc.). Let's say 2 pips for arguments sake. That leaves you with 98 pips gain. If your manager does this in 2 trades for 50 pips, you pay for an extra trade (2 pips gone). If he does it in 10 steps of 10 pips, you shell out 20 pips instead of the 2 that a non-churned version of the trade would have cost you.

3. Those rules vary from country to country. In the USA, I'd suggest starting with the NFA. Of course, some people and companies (see Rizwan Awan as a prime example) just keep changing their names and doing the "lure clients in and churn them to death" routine over and over again.

4. Vantage is the broker. Forex Police is the IB (getting a cut of trades) and would "sort of" be the account manager since their EA is calling the trades on your account. I say "sort of" since they aren't logging directly into your account using your password and placing the trades directly. They still benefit on a per-trade basis like an account manager.


Let me anticipate two obvious questions and provide my answers:

Will Forex Police churn your account? I don't know. I hope not.

Does the opportunity exist for them to churn your account? Yes. If any company or individual gets paid per trade and can place trades into your account by any method, then the opportunity and the temptation for churning will always be there. That's why I consider such an arrangement to be very risky from a traders standpoint.

 

[Krachuk]

Let me see if I can answer some of this for you.

1. Per the glossary definition - Churning is the deliberate execution of more trades than necessary by an account manager to generate more income (for the account manager, not for the account holder) through extra commissions, cuts of spreads, and/or trading fees while providing little or no additional profits for the account holder.

The poster child for forex churning is Rizwan Awan. He was trading successfully, then suddenly kept opening and closing trades for large volume with no regard to profit or loss. All he was doing was generating IB commissions that were deposited directly into his account. He wiped out the accounts of a number of his clients this way. You can read about his criminal behavior here:

https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/fore...trike-trendsfx-com-managed-accounts-scam.html

2. You may want to ask BigT1 about the legalities. Of course, the issue is that there is no exact dividing line between churning and not churning. How can you be certain that a specific trade or set of trades was churning vs just a bad trade decision?

Of course it impacts negatively. Let's say there's a target of 100 pips profit on a trade. If a single trade is opened and closed, you'll probably pay 2-4 pips in spread and commissions (depends on broker, pair, etc.). Let's say 2 pips for arguments sake. That leaves you with 98 pips gain. If your manager does this in 2 trades for 50 pips, you pay for an extra trade (2 pips gone). If he does it in 10 steps of 10 pips, you shell out 20 pips instead of the 2 that a non-churned version of the trade would have cost you.

3. Those rules vary from country to country. In the USA, I'd suggest starting with the NFA. Of course, some people and companies (see Rizwan Awan as a prime example) just keep changing their names and doing the "lure clients in and churn them to death" routine over and over again.

4. Vantage is the broker. Forex Police is the IB (getting a cut of trades) and would "sort of" be the account manager since their EA is calling the trades on your account. I say "sort of" since they aren't logging directly into your account using your password and placing the trades directly. They still benefit on a per-trade basis like an account manager.


Let me anticipate two obvious questions and provide my answers:

Will Forex Police churn your account? I don't know. I hope not.

Does the opportunity exist for them to churn your account? Yes. If any company or individual gets paid per trade and can place trades into your account by any method, then the opportunity and the temptation for churning will always be there. That's why I consider such an arrangement to be very risky from a traders standpoint.

How does it work if the trades are limited to say 4 to 8 trades per week ? Will that still be amounting to any sort of churning ?

Thanks.

 

[Krachuk]

You are correct on all counts except that they are paid on positive PIPs (accounding to what they told me).
I did sign up for this and found my VantageFX account needed to be set up for 500:1 leverage and funded in GBP.
Still, I've done all this and am waiting for VantageFX to register my funding.

There are a great deal of other tools I will use in my VantageFX account to automate my "unattended" trading allocations. I'm going to ask the Forex Police if the Striker EA will keep my account logged in24/5. If this is the case, it should keep my web based tools runing 24/5. This alone will be worth the 20 GBP per month down the road.

I'll update this thread from time-to-time on my costs, the benefits, etc.

How is it going with the Striker EA ? Will appreciate to get your feedback about the Striker EA and Vantage FX........how is it actually working ?

 

[Krachuk]

You are correct on all counts except that they are paid on positive PIPs (accounding to what they told me).
I did sign up for this and found my VantageFX account needed to be set up for 500:1 leverage and funded in GBP.
Still, I've done all this and am waiting for VantageFX to register my funding.

There are a great deal of other tools I will use in my VantageFX account to automate my "unattended" trading allocations. I'm going to ask the Forex Police if the Striker EA will keep my account logged in24/5. If this is the case, it should keep my web based tools runing 24/5. This alone will be worth the 20 GBP per month down the road.

I'll update this thread from time-to-time on my costs, the benefits, etc.

Yes please update your experience with the above. Aren't they taking long to register your account ?

 

[Pharaoh]

If the really only do a limited number of traders per week, then they aren't churning. That doesn't mean that they couldn't start churning 10 minutes after someone signs up.

Looks like the FPA has their EA in Performance Testing now:

Striker EA Metatrader Expert Adviser Test by Forex Peace Army

 

[Krachuk]

If the really only do a limited number of traders per week, then they aren't churning. That doesn't mean that they couldn't start churning 10 minutes after someone signs up.

Looks like the FPA has their EA in Performance Testing now:

Striker EA Metatrader Expert Adviser Test by Forex Peace Army

Thanks Pharaoh for the input...as they r in the loop !

 

[ForexPolice]

From: The Forex Police

Hello everyone,

My name is Michael from the Forex Police. I am one of the founder members of the company and one of the developers of the Striker EA.

Having read some of the comments and assumptions about how we operate, I thought it best to offer our take on the Striker and The Forex Police in general. The Forex Police have been established since 2006 and since then have developed 2 Expert Advisors. The first was FPD Project 1 back in 2007 and the latest EA, the Striker in 2009. Our mission always is to produce systems that can cope with the high demands placed upon us from the Forex market.

The Striker EA took us 5 years to develop before we brought it to market. An EA we firmly believe in, having seen it perform extremely well since 2009. The Striker trades on average 30 times per month and all trades are executed by it - we DO NOT and legally CANNOT trade manually on any of our clients accounts. Let me explain the legality of our business model first - EA's are accepted by the FSA (UK - where we are based) and therefore do not require regulation. On the other hand, manually executing trades (churning as it were also referred to) does require regulation because it falls under the umbrella of Account Management. If we were to act illegally, we would jeopartise the relationship we have with Vantage FX but more importantly, we would violate regulations placed upon Vantage FX by the FSA... Vantage FX would lose their FSA status as a consequence - this is serious and for the sake of a few pounds it is not worth harming two reputable businesses. We firmly believe the Striker EA is best placed to place the trades by itself rather than by intervention from us.

For anyone who has read our Striker EA presentation on our website will understand that we wish to conduct our business as transparent as possible and have no issues revealing how we earn revenues and how much we earn. We earn 70% of the value of 1 single pip which is charged to Vantage FX, not the client, and is derived from the spread profit taken by Vantage FX; spread costs that exist with every single broker - it is how they (or most) generate revenues. There are no charges to the client and certainly no charges on profits. All cash in a clients account is the clients and can be withdrawn at any time they wish.

Our other source of income comes from the Virtual Hosting solution which is charged at £20 per month. This ensures the client doesn't need to worry about his/her computer being on whilst the Striker is seeking trades. The £20 per month is requested at the end of the clients three month trial period. There are no cancellation or hidden charges; the client can simply walk away if they decide.

Our business model and its success depends only on the performance of the Striker - this is exactly how we want it. This may sound false to some but we are more driven by successful products than money itself. The revenues will happen as a result of a successful product and it will give our business sustainability; in this industry we appreciate this is tough but the only way to survive (many companies or sole traders operating business in this industry come and go within the first three months and most do not adhere to any form of compliance). It is easy to bring EA's to market but not so easy to bring sustainable EA's - 5 years blood and sweat to produce the Striker before we would even dare allow clients to invest their hard earned cash regardless of account size into the product. It's not what we're about. There is never satisfaction in anyone losing money regardless of the amount.

The Forex Police began as a result of trialling hundreds of money making Forex products and in almost all of them we received the same outcome. They never worked, No customer service, no voice behind the emails (if a response was even seen) and 1 chap we did manage to speak to told us, "What do you expect for £50!" - this guy couldn't care less about how much money we lost from his system, he just cared about his £50. We worked, and continue to work, to change the stigma attached to Forex caused by guys and girls like him - we wanted to provide a service that cared and worked hard to help traders and struggling traders.

We trade the Striker on 4 live trading accounts with real money and all of our results are published. We win together and we lose together. We publish our results to members and to visitors to the site - we all take the same trades at exactly the same time; the reason why we all use the same broker - if we were churning, it would be extremely difficult (almost impossible) to do this on all accounts an maintain our transparency policy - members would notice the differences in trades placed on our accounts than to those placed on their own account... Immediately our trust is vulnerable - without trust our model is useless no matter how good the Striker is.

We specifically chose to partner (not affiliate) with Vantage FX, UK and we have complied fully and worked closely with their compliance team to ensure we were doing all of the correct things both morally and legally. We chose Vantage FX, UK because their customer service was excellent, their execution times were excellent & very accurate and also their spreads were the most competitive of all the companies in the UK. We specifically chose not to invest with the more established brokers because customer service was far from ideal - I will note that most offered higher commissions than Vantage FX. Our clients have a direct email/phone contact at Vantage FX whenever they need it - this is unique and there has been no complaints whatsoever from any of our clients with the excellent service provided by Vantage FX.

Some weeks ago we were approached by Forex Peace Army to feature the Striker on their website. We immediately loved the idea behind FPA, the website and their philosophies & beliefs. We accepted and allowed access to one of our live accounts. We only associate with one other company online (FTSE 100 Club) and are very wary of doing this simply because most are affiliate based and will sell our product by producing fake results so that they can increase sales. This is of no interest to us - people need to know exactly how the robot operates, wins, losses everything - FPA can do that for us because they are producing results from our live account which are in no way manipulated. The Striker EA is a long term investment and as such will suffer short term draw downs - potential clients must be aware of this factor. We have included many sophisticated measures designed to contained this factor; the Striker EA will only risk 5% of balance on each trade placed. The Striker is not a money making short term scalping robot which trades hundreds of trades per month. There are periods (3-4 days) where the Striker doesn't even trade - this is just to highlight that the Striker is not developed to make money from commissions but rather to make money from success - the only way this can be truly achieved is if the account balance grows - as it grows the lot size increases (5% risk) and so does the commission.

I hope my post has helped answer a few of the issues mentioned in this post. I am happy to answer any questions openly that anyone has on this forum.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Kind regards

Michael

 

[Pharaoh]

Getting .7 pips for round lot does have the potential to encourage churning, but the trading records shown at the FPA show no sign of such activity.

Any word on getting the performance turned around? The account listed in the FPA's Performance Test seems to be losing at the moment.

 

[ForexPolice]

Hello Pharaoh,

Thank you for your comments. I am glad you have pointed out that churning is not present on our account and nor will it be at any point in the future. We have no intention of involving ourselves in this type of 'morally incorrect' activity. If we were it would be rather foolish to open up a live account publicly for all users of FPA to dissect. We are confident in the Striker; it is best to let it handle trades (All trades) rather than jeopardise our reputation in any way. It really isn't worth it. I am pleased this has been recognised.

The performance of the Striker has disappointed us recently but during extensive testing we seen this type of draw down - we believe that draw downs are unavoidable for any trading system to progress higher in terms of profit/loss (account balance). The natural cycle for successful systems is never to go straight up since this is impossible but rather to produce peaks and troughs that move steadily & sustainably higher - the Striker profit/loss over all is doing that. Everyone knows what happens to markets that boom straight up – they generally bust back down much quicker.

When we began live trading on this account we began with a balance of $1800 - in a few weeks the account was at around $2400. The Striker, as you may well know, risks only 5% per trade... During this winning period our lot size was increasing nicely; we topped up the account to $5000 and took the dip in form at the highest possible lot size. We are not concerned about this loss as we always maintain a long term stance and remain confident that the Striker will push on again. We invested money into this account as an investment - the way we believe trading should be... Not topping up trading accounts every few months and trying something different. Good systems, like the Striker, need time to come to fruition.

It was also pointed out by someone that we may re-write the Striker EA code and end up ruining it - we don't do this because very often, by the time the new market cycle is discovered, it has changed. Systems that change along with cycles will always be behind the game. True systems are written with the long term in mind - a very clear strategy, a business-like approach - not frequently changing whenever the trader feels like it. In my experience this leads to a tangled and very confused trader and often, a somewhat lost trader. The Striker we deem as artificially intelligent because it attempts to foreknow the cycles based on similar cycles matched in its database from history, over 25 years worth of key events in history for EUR/USD – the Striker only trades EUR/USD. The Striker assesses how the cycle was derived, how it responded, the market feeling during the response and the eventual outcome. Database matches become the blue print for projecting the future movement of price as the market moves into the unknown. The Striker mimics previous cycles to the exact degree and quits when they fall out of sync. This is also why the Striker goes through periods where it doesn’t trade – no matches were found.

The Striker thinks like a human; it is coded to interpret human-feelings based on market fluctuations. E.g. the heart thumping when the market is rallying or depreciating at speeds and noticing the curves that occur at reversals of any degree, feelings of greed, fear, recklessness after defeated positions and much more. On the other hand, the Striker executes trades and calculates risk to reward, current win ratio, recent form and loads more like a robot – robot precision and its lack of fear & greed is what’s needed at this stage of trade execution – the decision is made now see it through so-to-speak.

We analysed the important factors of human traders and the good qualities all of them posses in the markets. However, the issue with most on manual trading is there are few extremely detrimental qualities that ruin overall performance – in fact, most traders are more than capable traders but very few can apply the necessary discipline to achieve success. The one that springs most to mind is 'gut instinct' and the feeling you get from the markets of its eventual direction; it's almost like a sixth sense - every trader has experienced these moments but few would act on it - successful ones do and robots most certainly do. A combination of both, we felt was critical, fundamental and would become the basic blocks of the Striker – a solid foundation to build on from the ground up.

I have probably written way too much again – please accept my apologies for this. There was a lot of time applied to the Striker in the 5 years we analysed just about everything we could think of and stayed away from all traditional forms of technical analysis – sometimes when I dive into the mechanics of the software it’s difficult not to say so much.

Thanks for reading

Michael

 

[Pharaoh]

I'm glad that it sounds like you may tweak it instead of doing a full scale overhaul. I've seen too many successful systems hit a glitch and then the "fixed" version ads fatal flaws.