Forex Blog

ForexGen, which began to operate on-line in 2006, is a Forex broker that offers quite interesting trading conditions, including MT4 platform, spreads as low as 0 pips and no overnight swaps. The spreads on the major currency pairs go do down to 1 pip for $5,000 and bigger accounts and decline to 0 for accounts starting from $50,000. Leverage also varies depending on the trading account size — from 1:200 to 1:500 for mini and micro accounts, 1:100 for standard accounts and 1:50 for big accounts.

Unfortunately, there are four major problems with this broker. First, their site claims to be on-line since 2001, while it’s not. Second, ForexGen offers 1 pip commission per trade to their partners, which means that the broker doesn’t receive profit from the spread on big accounts and that’s a bad sign for traders. Third, ForexGen tries to look like it’s registered with some authorities or regulatory institutions, but in fact it isn’t. Fourth, they have a lot of bad reviews in the Forex community; I don’t know of they are justified, but that’s something I would be worried about.

I’ve decided to add a new Forex broker to the list on my site today. It’s FXD24 — I’ve seen this broker before, but I’ve been in doubts about it because it looked too suspicious to me. But eventually I’ve thought that adding it to the list isn’t the same as recommending it, so now it’s there. FXD24 is quite new — it went on-line somewhere around December 2007, but its site claims that it’s on-line since 2003, which is the unnecessary lies, in my opinion. FXD24 isn’t regulated by any authority, but they claim to be from London, which is doubtful, since the British brokers are required to be registered with FSA, as far as I know. There is little or no information about this Forex broker in the net, so I will welcome any review or commentary about it.

As to he good side of FXD24, they offer MetaTrader 4 platform, several deposit/withdrawal methods (including my favorite — WebMoney) and $250 minimum to start trading with 1:400 leverage. The leverage is flexible but the minimum traded amount is 0.1 standard lots.

Update: The original title of this post was FXD24 — New Forex Broker I Wouldn’t Trade With, but I’ve changed it now. I’ve been contacted by a representative of FXD24 because this blogpost went quite high on Google for «FXD24» keyword and he said that it could hurt their business. Not like I’ve changed my opinion about them, but I don’t want to make someone’s life worse, I just want to inform traders.

The final part of my introduction into statistical Forex system development is dedicated to the complexity of the resulting expert advisor (or automated program if you want to create such strategy for anything else than MetaTrader platform).

When traders think about Forex system, they come to a conclusion that a simple trading system can’t be profitable, because it doesn’t capture all the market parameters that influence the dynamics of the currency pairs. Partially I agree with this point of view but, in my opinion, the complexity of a Forex system should be limited. With the statistical Forex systems the complexity of different parts may vary.

1. The amount of different information and the number of data types that is gathered for the statistical system are the important parameters, which if increased produce a more complex system. One may decide to gather not a single timeframe information, but rather statistics from several timeframes and record not only the price quotes (or OHLC data for bars/candles) but also many indicators, calculations and other parameters. This will lead to rather large database of the statistics that would be hard to interpret in a right way, but if interpreted correctly it will surely yield better results than a more simple strategy.
2. Gathering statistics before the actual strategy running is extremely important and is a necessary step, in my opinion. But making a system that can continue gathering statistics when it runs in a real-time is also important. It shouldn’t add much complexity to your expert advisor, but it will help to react faster on the market changes. Of course, such on-the-fly data gathering can’t substitute the pre-running gathering.
3. Changing the way of the interpretation and statistics comparing is a really advanced method to add the complexity to your statistical system. Having several functions to compare the past and the current data can be helpful if you have some method to choose from these functions. Personally I couldn’t develop a system that would use such an interesting functionality.
4. The complexity of the actual order carrying and position handling is a rather obvious field for the system improvement and upgrading, but it hardly can be connected to the statistics that can be gathered. The only way that would work, in my opinion, is if your system uses real chart-to-chart comparison - that’s a really difficult method, but it opens a whole new set of opportunities for position and order adjustment. In other cases, simple buy/sell/hold decisions are the best market actions available for the statistical Forex systems.

Those are the most obvious ways to make your trading system more complex. Some minor changes can also improve it to make it react more flexibly on the market volatility and evolution. If you have experience with really complex Forex systems that are based on the trading statistics, feel free to comment on this post.

OrderSend Error 131 is a very popular problem that is usually encountered when testing MT4 expert advisors. What causes this error? It’s called ERR_INVALID_TRADE_VOLUME in the MT4 code. That means that your expert advisor is trying to send an order with invalid trade volume. On the absolute majority of the MT4 brokers setting some EA to open an order 0.123 lots will generate this error. But sometimes it’s generated when the EA, created for mini or micro accounts, is used on the standard account. If you stumble on OrderSend Error 131 during your testing, you can quickly find out the wrong settings of your EA — find the standard init() function inside your EA’s code and insert these lines of code there:

Print(MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_LOTSIZE));
Print(MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_MINLOT));
Print(MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_LOTSTEP));
Print(MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_MAXLOT));


The first line will give you the information regarding how many units one lot holds when you trade in this account (100000 would mean a standard-sized lot). Remember, that in your expert advisor’s log this line will be first starting from down to up, not vice versa. The second line will tell you the minimum amount of lots you can trade (this is the most usual error; you’ll probably just need to fix the amount of lots your EA trades from 0.1 to 1). The third one will give the minimum step for the trade volume in lots. The fourth line will tell you the maximum amount of lots that your EA can trade.

For example, demo account at FXOpen generates this info when I insert those lines into the code:

2008.07.10 15:13:37 MACD Sample EURUSD,H1: 10000
2008.07.10 15:13:37 MACD Sample EURUSD,H1: 0.01
2008.07.10 15:13:37 MACD Sample EURUSD,H1: 0.01
2008.07.10 15:13:37 MACD Sample EURUSD,H1: 100000


That means that 1 lot is 100,000 units (a standard size), minimum trade volume is 0.01 lot (so, one can trade starting from $10 on 1 position in a dollar-based currency pair), minimum trade volume step is also 0.01 lot (one can trade 0.33, 0.4 or 1.25 lot volumes, but can’t send orders with 0.333 lot size) and the maximum volume one can use to open a position is 10,000 lots.

You can incorporate the MarketInfo() function at a more complex level into your EA, so it could automatically check the allowed values and correct its settings. But if you don’t want to code much, you can just use the code above to find out the right values and correct the settings manually.

MetaQuotes Software is organizing its third yearly automated trading championship (basically a contest of the expert advisors). There are three sponsoring Forex brokers this time — FXCM, Interbank FX and FXDD. The total prize funds are $80,000 with $40,000 going for the first place, $25,000 — for the second one and $15,000 — for the third. The registration for the championship opened today, July 1, and will last until September 19th. The automated contest itself will start on October 1st and will run for almost 3 months until December 26th.

As always, this is a pure virtual money contest (but with the eal money prizes of course), which is free for anyone to participate. The expert advisors should be written for MetaTrader 4 platform and can be both in form of the source files (*.mq4) and in compiled form (*.ex4). The last year contest showed some very brilliant Forex expert advisor ideas with more than 1,300% gain on the winning one. This time the quality of the participants’ submission may get even better.

My expert advisor for the 2007 championship was quite lossy and I hope to get a rematch this time. I’ve already registered for this competition and I am looking forward to optimize some interesting EA before the contest starts.

Register for Automated Trading Championship 2008.

Another broker supporting the MetaTrader 4 Forex trading platform took its rightful place in my list of brokers. This broker is called FastBrokers. It’s not a very new on-line broker — according to the Wayback Machine FastBrokers is on-line since 2006. Its head company is Fast Trading Services LLC, which is registered with NFA and CFTC. As a payment method they support PayPal, credit cards and, of course, bank wire. These factors combined make FastBrokers one of the most reputable MetaTrader Forex brokers available. The registration process is quite easy, which is also nice. Spreads are standard for these days — from 2 spreads on EUR/USD. If you don’t prefer depositing or withdrawing with e-currencies, this broker should be an interesting choice for you.

Today I’ve added a new Forex broker to the list on the site — TradeView Forex — another broker that is operated by the financial company Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC (first broker from this company, which hit my list, was RCG fxtrader). TradeView Forex offers MetaTrader 4 platform without CFD trading, limited demo accounts (30-day limit) and rather tight spreads (from 2 pips). For me, it doesn’t look like a great broker, because it requires a lot of paper work to open an account, doesn’t support convenient ways of account funding and offers quite a limited amount of trading instruments. But for some traders it might seem to be an interesting Forex broker, because it’s registered with NFA and offers good scalping opportunities.

MasterForex existed on-line since 2006, but being very similar to other MT4 Forex brokers it has never received such traders’ community attention as their competitors (e.g. LiteForex or FXOpen). As its rivals MasterForex accepts WebMoney, e-gold and wire transfer for deposit/withdraw operations, trading from $1, MT4 platform, CFD trading and a flexible leverage. Unfortunately, like many other MetaTrader brokers it’s not registered with NFA, CFTC or FSA and resides offshore on the Seychelles. But for starting your way in Forex this is still a good broker, because of its trading conditions that are very easy for the newbie traders.

I’ve added a very new Forex broker to the site today — Forex-Metal. Its website is still very raw and there is not very much information about this broker on the internet. But I thought that it should be listed because it has one rare feature — it supports both MetaTrader 4 platform for trading and PayPal payment system for deposits and withdrawals. It also supports WebMoney and wire transfers for billing and also offers CFD trading (as almost every MT4 broker). Of course, this broker is still very new, it’s not regulated and it has no reputation, but it may be an interesting opportunity to start trading Forex. Anyway I don’t recommend depositing too much funds in Forex-Metal before it becomes more reputable.

Today’s update to the MetaTrader expert advisors on my site isn’t very original. For many people MACD Sample expert advisor was the first EA that they tried on the MT4 strategy tester. It’s a well known sample advisor from MetaQuotes, designed to show the basic Forex strategy implementation for the MQL. The one that is now freely available on my site differs slightly from the original version. I’ve decided to make some enhancements and optimized it for GBP/USD pair and H4 (4 hour) timeframe.

In a one year backward test it made about 44% of the initial deposit with 0.3 standard lot position size. The drawdown also wasn’t small, but 10% is quite good, in my opinion. Download this expert advisor and try it for yourself. If you get some interesting results with it on forward tests, don’t hesitate to contact me.