A few days ago, Intelli4x contact FPA's administrative HQ and asked if they could do a detailed study of their forex signals service. The FPA itself isn't set up to directly test products, but decided that this one was worthy of further investigation. They decided to look for an FPA member who was helpful, fair minded, and talented. Since everyone who fit those parameters was too busy, they decided to settle for someone who was very active and I got picked.
Intelli4x will be providing me with free access to their signals and in exchange, I will be providing them with merciless feedback, innumerable nit-picking questions, and non-stop headaches. I'll report everything in this thread, and when I have more data will also submit a summary in their reviews page on FPA's site. I'll keep this thread and the review updated frequently.
I must admit that they are very brave to do this. So far, they have a perfect 5 star record of reviews. I won't say that I will definitely ruin their streak, but I will say that they'd better be
very impressive if they want to get (and keep) 5 stars from me.
Just to keep this truly interesting, I'm not going to follow my own advice about demo trading first. I will however, retain just enough common sense to trade with very small amounts of money to start with.
The signals come via email as well as phone message. I am now set up for both, so should be able to trade the majority of the signals that don't come in the middle of the night. I will report every trade I take after it either hits the profit target or crashes and burns into its stoploss. Since I plan to vary the amount of money risked depending on my (hopefully increasing) confidence in the system, profits and losses will be reported as pips rather than dollars in order to minimize any confusion over the results. If I decide to try something different from the official directions (like letting a trade run indefinitely with a trailing stop), I'll do that with a separate order so that I don't alter the results of following the signals exactly.
They offer 2 types of signals, Intraday and Swing. When a trade closes, I'll specify which type it was and will try to keep a running pip scorecard by trade type and currency pair. Please realize that my scorecard will probably slightly differ from the one on their website since I may miss out on some trades, and my broker may have a different spread as well as slippage.
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And now, my initial impressions:
When I was told of this possible assignment, I asked that the reviews for Intelli4x be double-checked. One of the review moderators assures me that all of the reviews appear to be completely legit and there is no hint of review spamming.
The first signal I got from them was an update on a prior trade. It's currently
losing, but hasn't hit stoploss. It would have been very simple for them to arrange for me to not get that particular signal. Considering that I didn't sign up for this anonymously and they knew I'd be writing about all of the details here, I have to give them points for honesty.
Currently, all signals are set to London time (slightly inconvenient for the rest of the world). They are working on a system upgrade to allow users to get signals set to their own time zones.
I decided to go ahead and ask the one burning (and usually never answered) question that comes up about all forex signals providers, forex software, and forex trading systems:
If it's so good, why not just trade it and don't tell anyone about it?
There answer was quite detailed, so I'll summarize it. They (more or less - Intelli4x can post here if I've botched anything) said that due to the high liquidity of forex, letting others in on their signals was unlikely to have any negative impact on effectiveness. Also, selling the signals (and having a managed forex account program in the fairly near future) allows them to diversify their business models (i.e. make more money - sounds reasonable to me). Additionally, they say that unlike some services, they have the in-house expertise to trade, manage accounts, and send signals without over-extending their IT capabilities. They know of competitors who have shifted between trading, managing, and signals, but Intelli4x plans to successfully pursue all three lines of work.
Overall, I found this explanation to be much more plausible than the usual "I'm a great market guru who's suddenly decided to spread my good fortune by selling you the ultra-secret methods/software/signals that will make you rich in 60 days and that took me 30 years to learn for the very low, limited time price of ..." hype that a lot of companies use.
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If anyone has any questions for me about this endeavor, please post them here. If anyone has questions they want me to pose to Intelli4x, please post them here.
I don't plan to join any trades that were opened before today, so now I'm awaiting the next new signal. I'll post an update after I get a through a trade as well as after I sent some more questions off to torment their support department.
