What does PipCop.com do? How are forward tests better than backtesting?

[PipCop]

What does PipCop do?

PipCop's goal is to find the best Forex Expert Advisor automatic trading robot.

Which robot is best/which robot does PipCop recommend/which robot should you use?

YOU have to make the decision which robot fits YOUR trading profile. PipCop does NOT recommend any robot for use at any time for any person, and all reviews on here should be considered for entertainment purposes only.

All decisions to trade Forex should be made with the help of a qualified Forex investment adviser or qualified financial adviser. The comments, reviews, and statements made on PipCop should NOT be considered financial advice!

How?

PipCop finds a Forex Expert Advisor and reviews it, in real-time, on a demo or live brokerage account. We post a detailed statement of the account showing every trade made, every profit, and every loss, as it occurs on a real account. We start each review on a demo account, and if the EA performs well, we put it on a live, real cash, brokerage account!

Yes, we risk our money so you don't have to.

Why we NEVER backtest any EA:

An EA author can tweak the settings in their EA to provide excellent results when backtested, but when you put it on a live account the results are disastrous. Even with 90% modeling quality, backtest results are still unreliable.

A huge issue with back testing is that the data is not tick -by-tick . History data is bar open and bar close. That means the best data you will get is 1 minute.

As we all know, in one minute the market can move quite enough to ruin your account. Therefore, backtested results really are useless because the data can vary widely from broker to broker , and depending on where the are getting their data feed. (There are some exceptions to the rule, such as with a quality tester such as Forex Tester which can do tick -by-tick modelling.)

Backtesting usually provides the "best case" scenario, and often publishers simply pick the settings for their robot that have the best results, not the safest, most reliable, or most realistic. There are many robots I test that have crazy TP settings of 100+ pips, when in forward testing 10-40 pips would be more realistic and profitable. As a result, when I test those robots, the tend to fail very quickly because the authors simply are fooling themselves into thinking their robot will make them rich, without thinking about the reality of the market.

Backtesting has caused many traders to lose tens of thousands of dollars using EAs that suck! Don't be fooled by backtesting!

What we DON'T do:

We do NOT give bullshit reviews on an EA by saying things like "I give this a 4 out of 5 stars." We back up our reviews with real data on real accounts. We let YOU make the decision.

We also do not require you to pick from a handful of EAs which are obviously part of affiliate marketing programs designed to make money on selling EAs to unsuspecting customers instead of making money by having a good product.

We don't claim you will get rich overnight. In fact, we'll point out that you WILL lose money, sooner or later, as every investor does.

How can you audit us?

You may audit us very easily. All you have to do is run a demo of any robot we are running, using the same brokerage and same settings. If your trades don't match ours, let us know!

If you want to get really clever, you can audit our statements. Just link directly to the statement and be sure it's updated at least every 45 minutes. You can do this by linking right to it and checking the last update time.

All of our statements are located in the following folder: www.PipCop.com/mt/robot_name/statement.htm

Example:

www.PipCop.com/mt/y-oww/statement.htm

Please note: We restart our servers every weekend, after the brokers are closed, so don't expect them to be perfectly updated on Saturdays or Sundays.

How do we make money?

Advertisements.
We hope they are relevant to your needs. We also try to make them as minimally intrusive as possible. Like most people, we also hate websites that are decorated with ads instead of good content.

Donations, subscriptions, and advertisers.
If you would like to advertise or donate to PipCop, click here to be taken to our donation and subscription overview. We have several programs, such as user upgrades, brokerage review account purchasing and affiliation, advertising, and plain donations.

Affiliate / reseller programs.
We subscribe to affiliate marketing programs - if offered - but they are not our sole goal of income, like many other review sites which usually depend on affiliate programs to make money - or are in fact the robot author peddling their wares - or worse, are random affiliate programs "disguised" as a review website!

Expert Advisors:
Of course, some of the EAs that we run on live accounts make profits. We take those profits out each month and re-invest them into the business. However, so far most seem to take our money.

What do we do with donated money?

All donations to the site are used to fund live brokerage accounts to run robots on, to purchase robots which we cannot obtain for free, and to pay for site features, site upgrades, site hardware or software, site licenses, and other site maintenance requirements.

Our goal is to use the funds to provide relevant information to the end users so you can invest more wisely.

How are we different from other review sites?

We continually test upwards of 10-20 EAs at once, allowing you to follow EAs in real time to see how their profits stack up compared to each other.

Some sites only test one or two, or perhaps only backtest, don't test on a daily basis, or perhaps test for a few weeks, or have cluttered and hard to use sites.

Worse, some sites don't even DO reviews, they just post glowing "reviews" about robots without any cold, hard data. If they are not forward testing ... that's not really a review, is it?

With live accounts and live statements, we try to make it easy for you to see what is going on.

When do we stop reviewing an EA?

We run an EA until it runs out of money or if it's only minimally profitable after 60-90 days. A robot needs to average at least $10/day to remain under review.

How often do you update the test results?

Our tests run 24x6, every single hour our brokerage is open, and we publish statements every 15 minutes via MetaTrader.

Our Quick Stats are updated every 15 minutes.

All account statements are backed up every 15 minutes AND we archive the statement for each month to show a complete history of all trades every made by an EA.

How do I know if there was a problem?

We keep a log of downtime, so you can see if an EA was offline due to a software, hardware or setup issue. Sometimes our servers go down due to power outages. We're fine with this because it shows the reality of how a robot handles being offline for a while. If it crashes after being offline for 60+ minutes, we think you should know. Your computer or VPS may have similar problems so this is a glimpse into how the robot recovers.

Yes, things go wrong in the real world!

Which EAs do you test?

We attempt to test the most widely recognized commercial EAs, as well as smaller less known free ones, and give everyone an opportunity to put their EA to the test.

Bottom line? We are here to provide honesty, integrity, and trust in the world of Forex Expert Advisor reviews.

PipCop - busting the bad guys!

[argyb]

First of all, as I'm new in this forum, I don't know whether I should post my questions in this thread or somewhere else. I am not also a native speaker, so I apologise for any errors. So, I have two questions, mainly addressed to the administrator(s) of the forum:
1) Where may one find all the comments-reviews of the robots? I have already visited the "Previous robot reviews" and the "Current Live robot Reviews " sections but I don't feel these are all the reviews available.
2) You have these "ACCOUNT PERFORMANCE ICONS". Are these to be posted by each individual using-assessing (maybe in an arbitrary way) a robot, or performance rating awarded to a robot as a final verdict? Because I have only seen bad ones in the "previous" section and up to average in the "current". I haven't noticed any " The PipCop Award of Excellence" or " Running for 9-12 months and has $3,000+ closed P/L ".
Sorry for too many questions.
Argy

[PipCop]

Originally Posted by argyb

First of all, as I'm new in this forum, I don't know whether I should post my questions in this thread or somewhere else. I am not also a native speaker, so I apologise for any errors.

Welcome, and your English is impeccable.

Originally Posted by argyb

So, I have two questions, mainly addressed to the administrator(s) of the forum:
1) Where may one find all the comments-reviews of the robots? I have already visited the "Previous robot reviews" and the "Current Live robot Reviews " sections but I don't feel these are all the reviews available.

That is all of the reviews. The site is new, started on 9/21/08, so that is all the reviews that have been done so far.

Originally Posted by argyb

2) You have these "ACCOUNT PERFORMANCE ICONS". Are these to be posted by each individual using-assessing (maybe in an arbitrary way) a robot, or performance rating awarded to a robot as a final verdict? Because I have only seen bad ones in the "previous" section and up to average in the "current". I haven't noticed any " The PipCop Award of Excellence" or " Running for 9-12 months and has $3,000+ closed P/L ".

Those icons are accessible ONLY to me, and I manually update them (at this time) based on the performance of the robot. In time I will have an automated system that changes the icons automatically to help remove any "human errors" that may occur.

The previous reviews tend to be failures, so yes, most of those are going to be poorly rated.

And again, since the site is really only about 3 months old, none of my reviews have made it to 9-12 months, so we won't see any with excellent ratings for a while.

Originally Posted by argyb

Sorry for too many questions.
Argy

The more questions the better. I am sure others will be helped by any and all questions you have. If you have suggestions on how processes could be improved, please also feel free to post them here.

Thanks,

James Fullerton

[argyb]

Thank you for your prompt answer. Keep up the good work and I do hope that eventually you will detect an EA or two to help us ignorants a bit.

[PipCop]

You're welcome and thanks.

You really hit it on the head - that's why I started this site. I tried many robots and after a year of not being able to find anything conclusive out there, I figured others would benefit from someone - me - putting together a web site that we could all use to cut through the BS and find the true performers.

[argyb]

OK. More questions coming. BTW I test the RoboMiner too, but it seems that it plays on safe ground, that is the AUDNZD which is quite stable over the years. Anyway.
What I would like to ask now is that as far as I know, those robots base their strategy on technical analysis , which in turn can be performed simply on data fed by any platform. Are there any robots that work based on fundamental analysis ? I noticed that some firms provide such data in a quantified way, such as weight and direction of the impact of events. Is there a platform providing these data so that a robot can use these to act on fundamental analysis ?
Sorry if this question is too naive, but I was just wondering.
Argy from Greece

[PipCop]

I don't know the answer to your question, sorry!

[safemarketer]

Chief, I want a review on Quantum Trader . Is this the right place to ask for it ?

[PipCop]

Actually, this is the place:

http://www.pipcop.com/forums/current...ese-rules.html