Automated Trading – Week 3
This article is the third week of my ongoing evaluation of FXCM’s Forex System Selector, a web based automated trading tool that allows the user to select one or more trading systems, and have them automatically traded against an account.
This is running against a one month demo account, which is funded with $100,000. Last week, some unsuccessful trades had depleted the initial starting balance of $100,000. This week some more trades have been made by the automated tool, and this article details progress that has been made.
At present there are no open positions. However some trades have been closed successfully during the week, including one trade with a profit of $2,000. These trades have not put the account into a profit, but it is now down $1,327 in total, or 210 pips, which is an improvement on last week’s position.
The amount down is only about one successful trade at present.
The following table shows the completed trades and performance.
You will note that the FXGrup system has made 2 lots of trades where two positions were opened at the same time (with consecutive ticket numbers). For both groups of trades, the trades were made at the same second. At this point, I have not determined whether this is a part of the strategy, or a trading error. I suspect that this was an execution error with that particular system. In both sets of trades, the system lost quite heavily. If the trade had been executed just once, the system would be ahead by around $850.
In summary, this tool is only as good as the trading models you choose. It is certainly not a easy path to instant riches. Even if the above trades that are presumed to be incorrect were excluded, the annualised return would be around 8.5%, which is moderate considering the volatility of the returns.
I will continue to evaluate it next week, which is the last week of the demo account.
