NOTE: We no longer trade FAPTurbo on our real cash accounts and we do not recommend it. Forex Crescendo is now our top robot that we are using on our large account. We terminated using FAPTurbo before we experienced any severe drawdown, but the trading became so volatile that most people did not trust it anymore. This post has been left as reference material only.
Sunday evening when the Forex trading resumed, it was May—a new trading month. A EUR/USD long trade my system had made Friday afternoon (the last trading day of April) was immediately closed out on the first tick of the chart because I had neglected to reset my FapTurbo_CloseAfterXMonths setting input to 0 to disable it. The default comes with 1 meaning the very first tick of the 1st month following the month the trade was opened (even if that is the next day) will close the position immediately. Had it been set at 2 and my trade was still open on May 31, then the first tick in June would close it out instead.
Looking on the web for ideas to write about, I saw that a lot of new FapTurbo users are not aware of that field and probably not aware of the field that precedes it, FapTurbo_DurationInHours which is the maximum number of hours allowed to keep the opened position before closing it. Zero is the default and means ignore.
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Don’t forget—unless you cut it off sooner, the Long Term Advanced FAP Strategy only ends if either the Take Profit is reached or the trade stops out.
Both of those input fields follow FapTurbo_TrailingStop which was briefly talked about in my first post when I promised to explain why the Fap Turbo Expert Guide’s tweaked stoploss settings can never work.
The 1 minute trade defaults that come with FapTurbo Expert Advisor (chart pulldown window) in its Long Term Strategy for EUR/USD are FapTurbo_TakeProfit at 140 pips, FapTurbo_StopLoss at 500 and FapTurbo_ TrailingStop at 0.
The Expert Guide , however, suggested switching to the 5 minute timeframe and lowering the profit to 20 pips, using a Trailing Stop of 30 pips and leaving the hard StopLoss alone at 500 pips.
Sunday evening I tried to test those 5 minute settings (and the other 5 minute Expert Guide inputs from my first post) and at 6:10 pm EST, my 5 min went long at 1.3320 with the TakeProfit (TP) of 20 pips, a Trail setting of 30 pips and leaving the hard StopLoss at its original 500 pip setting which I assumed was left unchanged because they expected it would be superceded by the TrailingStop anyhow.
Either someone over there did not test the settings or they are a misprint, but with MetaTrader and my broker at least, a trailing stop cannot kick in until the trade has gone profitable by the number of pips used as the Trailing input number plus 1 extra pip. Until then the hard stop is in control.
What that meant was that because that trade never actually got higher than I think 15 pips, the 31 pips needed to start the Trail running never occurred but more important is that the 20 pip TP meant that the TrailingStop would NEVER start and the 500 pip StopLoss was the only exit for a trade gone bad (without trader intervention).
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I was using a demo so it didnt hurt, but instead of exiting at about -15 pips (ignoring slippage), computed by the +15 pips it ran before reversing hard and subtracting the 30 trailing pips from that, it is still actually open and looking to either hit its 20 pip profit target or stop out at a whopping 500 pip loss.
In other words, those settings created a 25:1 risk:reward ratio AGAINST us—just to protect 20 little pips.
I also ran my 1 min chart with all the original default settings and at 6:18 pm EST as my 5 minute was reversing, FapTurbo took a short trade at 1.3325 with a TP of 140 pips and the StopLoss again at 500.
The 2 trades were only 5 pips apart, so for every pip the 5 min Long lost, the 1 min Short profited—this is an unintended example of hedging. The 1 min trade actually ran and filled the full 140 pip target which was totally absorbed by the loss up to that point except for 5 pips.
Moral of the story? Never risk your money on anybody’s tips until you have thoroughly studied them too.
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So are you suggesting moving the stoploss to where the trailing stoploss is.