I started trading in the summer of 2002. I started trading mini
commodity contracts and commodity options. I was not very good
or experienced at this and ended up loosing.
I switched to Forex trading in the spring of 2004. I started with
the broker CMS FX. I tried dozens of trading system and none
of them were consistently profitable. I had this account almost
two years and only left CMS FX when their trading platform
VTTrader continued to have connection resiliency issues
(the software would make only one attempt to re-connect after
the connection was broken).
I switched to Interbank FX in the fall of 2006. This was my first
exposure to MetaTrader. Not knowing MQL, I had a company in Europe
code an EA based on the Donchian Channel indicator. This trading
method was profitable but requires very long-term trading on a four
hour or longer chart and often involves thousands of pips.
I started looking at signal services but they were either too
expensive or not that consistent. I next looked at managed funds
but realized that I would be loosing 25% (at least) of the profit
off the top due to the fees. On top of this, I would have to pay
taxes. Most of the management funds I investigated either had a
poor average return rate and/or required a massive amount of
money (100,000 or more) deposited.
In October of 2008, I started looking at EA's as a method of trading
Forex. Since then, I must have bought almost a dozen EA's. Not one
of them was worthy of a live account until FAP Turbo came along
and (almost, at the same time), I stumbled onto Pipcop.com.
I starting trading using FAP Turbo on a live account in early Decmeber
2008. It was a wild ride and FAP Turbo was very profitable before the
Christmas holidays. After the new year, everything changed. FAP Turbo
was unprofitable due to the brokers widening the currency spread
and the EA itself starting mostly loosing. After investigation, I
determined that I was with one of the worst brokers when trying to
run FAP Turbo.
In January 2009, I started using the FAPTS EA live. It made very good
profit for almost two weeks and then the dreaded floating drawdown.
The FAPTS EA only opens one trade at a time. It took a full two
weeks to close that one trade. I ended up manually closing the
trade and 8 hours later the price moved to my take profit point.
With a recommended 500 pip stop loss, this can be one scary EA.
After that experience, I drastically lowered my lot size but,
at the same time, FAPTS does not make that much profit. The
risk-reward is out of wack. See my
FAPTS trading journal for more
information.
After some investigation (mostly here), I realized that FAP Turbo
was, once again, profitable but I needed to change brokers. I opened
an Account with Alpari UK and on on March
3, 2009 I started live trading again with FAP Turbo and FAPTS.