The vendor has asked me to point out that demo results are NOT the same as live results, especially in light of this robot being a scalper – and this is a sentiment i very much agree with. Following the normal minimum one month of demo testing i will consider trying Forex Big Cat on a live account should performance continue along the same lines. Forex Big Cat does use variable lot sizes for its trades. I am told that this is an inbuilt feature which raises the trading size when the trade has a higher probability of success (note, this is probability, not certaintly – remember that just becasue something is probable doesn’t mean it will happen – anyone who lives in the UK will know what a 10% chance of rain today really means )

Forex Big Cat have multiple live accounts running which are on display on their website. This EA is not cheap compared to many other products flooding the market, at $997. I have been able to get a 5% discount on this price, exclusively available to readers here on my site. To get the discount you need to visit this page (http://forexbigcat.com/dsclaper.html) of their website.

We are hoping to go live with Big Cat in the next two weeks.

Update 6 April 2010

Forex Big cat have temporary closed their sales they will be up and running within the next two weeks.

Demo results:-

Update 16th April 2010

Currently investigating scam reports about this robot.

Update 3rd May 2010

BigCat is a confirmed scam. The code is very close to 100% the same as Euronis. Some of the Russian coding was even left in! It is a sad shame, really.

The Manual

The manual for Black Swan is certainly less comprehensive than most; to begin, you will need to be well-acquainted with MT4. There are not scads of pretty pictures as there are in most manuals, and the manual is a bit messy, but it is certainly adequate to understand the installation process (fairly standard) and the workings of the EA. Much of the manual is actually dedicated to explaining the way in which the EA itself works.

The manual goes on to explain, in detail, the three core processes with which the EA chooses its trades. says the EA works using 3 processes: The Swan Web Bot trawls the internet gathering information based on keywords to figure out what the global financial community thinks will happen next.  The custom indicators are not described in as much detail, but the creators say that these indicators are used to qualify the data coming in through the Web Bot. Finally, the “Black Swan Theory” comes into play. This Theory, according to the manual, is the robot’s “fail safe,” and prepares for the unexpected but trading surprise and rare events. The three processes work in conjunction to predict trades.

Support

Support was quick, polite, and efficient; a request sent was answered within 24 hours.

Analysis

Black Swan trades 8 currency pairs: GBP/USD, EUR/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CAD, USD/CHF, EUR/JPY, EU/GBP, and AUD/USD, all on 15M charts. Our testing of Black Swan on these pairs was started on 5 January 2010. The robot trades for a profit of 10-15 pips. It trades 2-5 trades per day on average, although there have been days where it has made as many as 12 trades. From this testing, it doesn’t seem that it has a particular time of day that it tends to trade in; though, from the description of the inner-workings of the robot, it didn’t seem that it would have a specific timeframe.

Stoplosses are not as predictable, it seems; EUR/USD had the largest stop, which was 320 pips. With a T/P of 10-15 pips, that is quite a few profitable trades to make up for the S/L. This was the largest stop, though, and there were some on other pairs that were as low as 2 pips. There really is no consistency to speak of, except for the fact that EUR/JPY and EUR/USD, in testing, have had stops of 250+ pips. The remaining pairs do, indeed, have smaller stoplosses.

From the beginning of testing, the robot was doing very well! It is set to a low risk setting, using lot sizes of  0.01 and 0.02 lots on a $2000.00 account. For the first 2 weeks, the account was building nicely. . .and  2 stoplosses on EUR/USD wiped out the profits and then some (these 2 stoplosses equaled a total of -11%)! The account is currently in a 5.7% drawdown, and has closed trades for a profit of 2.35% over 2 months. Several trades in drawdown have been held for 6+ weeks, so this is not an EA for scalper mentality.

Overall

Black Swan requires more testing, but is really approaching a drawdown level that could make one nervous! A drawdown of approximately 5 times one month’s profit is a bit nerve-wracking.

View Stats Here

The Manual

The manual claims that Forex Transporter is the perfect EA for a “newbie,” as there are few variables within the EA. This is apparently the target, as the manual show every step, from installing MT4 to choosing  setting options on the robot, with pictures of every step to boot.  We put Transporter straight on demo (”Out of the box,” so to speak) to see if someone who is new to Forex or robot trading could easily install it and make a profit. It has been on demo since 25 January 2010.

Support

Support was quick, polite, and efficient; a request sent was answered within 12 hours.

Analysis

Transporter trades seldom; it has closed only 4 trades since we began testing. It is, however, holding 5 trades open, and some have been open for 4 weeks! Not all are in drawdown; the drawdown is quite high compared to its gains, though, at close to 7% currently.  In addition, those 5 trades could, in the long run, take up a lot of margin room, so this is something one will need to weigh when using this robot. It does not seem to trade at consistent times of the day or night, nor does it seem that it has any typical number of trades to place per week.

Overall

The robot is overall profitable, even if it is not the stellar results one might be used to. A 1.5% gain has been made in the first month of trading, and with low-risk settings. This robot looks promising thus far, but cautiousness will be necessary with a building drawdown.

Note About Our Stats Page

Our Forex Transporter stats became unavailable as the broker deleted our demo account, hence we are unable to share previous results. We have restarted a new demo unfortunately you cannot view the results as it has not traded on the new account.

Update 22 March 2010

There have been a number of scam allogations regarding Transporter we felt it would be best to withdraw it from test as we cannot prove them, however we tend to belive that they are true.

The Manual

The manual is very straightforward and comprehensive, walking you through downloading the MT4 platform with pictures and details at every step.  It does not, however, go into much (or any!) detail regarding the inner-workings of the EA, trade timing, strategies, suggestions, etc. Installation of the EA is very simple, and uses a EURGBP 1 H chart.

According to the mauual, Juggernaut is ECN compatible, works with both standard and mini accounts, and uses a sophisticated money management system.  As mentioned earlier, there few settings, but 4 things are necessary to set up:

• Lot size
• Lot percentage
• Trading time 1
• Trading time 2

Furthermore, Forex Juggernaut will run on a $500 accounts; however, $1000 – $5000 is recommended.

Support

Support was quick, polite, and efficient; a request sent was answered within 24 hours.

Analysis

Forex Juggernaut trades EURGBP on the H1 timeframe, and places trades in the late afternoon and evening (GMT time).

There is a warning whenyou want to alter the chart time frame;, you must take the robot off the chart and re-attach it on the correct timeframe.

It uses a take profit of around 7-10 pips (though it is variable) and a stoploss of around 78 pips (also variable, as internal logic is used to exit trades at other points). It trades 1 – 5 trades per day on average. In testing, though, the largest stop hit was 62 pips; often, it was much smaller.

From the beginning of testing, the robot was doing very well! We were using an unusually risky lot size of 1.0 full lot on a $1,000 account, however. Once this was noticed, the lot size was changed to 0.5 lots.

Overall

Certainly all EAs require more than a month on demo, but Forex Juggernaut certainly looks promising. The drawdown is not significant and the profit is more than intriguing. Let’s see how next month goes!

Update from DonnaForex 8 March 2010:

I have had a number of people report inconsistent results with Juggernaut. You can tell if this is happening to you as you will get multiple losing trades on your account in a short period of time. I’m not sure what is causing this at this time but it could be an issue with the coding. When it works, it works really well – which is a real shame!

View Stats Here

Update 24 March 2010

It has been decided to remove Juggernaut from test due to it’s inconsistent results things have not improved over the lasgt few weeks.

Forex Knightrider does not trade very frequently, we had 18 trades in total for our test. It also uses a large stoploss and a small take profit, which will result in a high win rate followed by the occasional large loss – an effect which can be seen on our test account. Towards the end of the test we did have two trades which did not have a stoploss or take profit placed – this appears to be a glitch in Metatrader at the time rather than being a problem with the robot, however it did result in two large stoplosses getting hit at once. Following this, and on reflection looking at our results so far we decided it just wasn’t worth continuing to test this over the long term, with such large stoplosses and infrequent trades it can take months to recover a single stoploss, a risk we just do not feel worth taking, although this robot is definitely far from being a bad one.

You can view our full statement - View Stats

After contacting the people at Forex Robot World Cup, I am pleased to say that they were indeed fully transparent about their competition and were able to provide me with access to their Metatrader platforms where the live tests were conducted so that i was able to verify the statements as true and correct. This is something which is significant since many of us know how well many systems perform on demo and how those same systems when put live never quite match up to expectations. Being able to verify the honesty / integrity of the whole competition is also important and a big step forwards in terms of transparency which i would love to see happen more frequently with normal robot vendors.

The following system tests have been verified as true and correct by myself and are genuine live accounts (other platforms i did not check, i only checked the top 11):-

1. LMD-Multicurrency – Gained 145.6%

2. HiRider – Gained 88.11%

3. SuperVolcano – Gained 36.25%

4. VREM2 – Gained 19.39%

5. Nutcracker – Gained 14.93%

6. Simple – Gained 8%

7. Neg-Correlation – Gained 6.07%

8. Zoop – Gained 4.34%

9. CobaltFX – Gained 3.58%

10. AkuKaya – Gained 0.2%

11. USFX – Lost 0.45%

Here is a screenshot i took of the results for HiRider in the platform directly (blanked out account number for security). You can see the account is a live one by the presence of a golden coloured icon next to the account number, you can also see it is on an FXCM platform:-

Where Does This Leave Us?

Well, what i like about this whole competition now having been able to verify the accounts as real is that it gives me a HUGE headstart, as a trader, in determining if a system is any good or not! To get to this point ourselves would normally take perhaps 2 to 3 months of demo testing then a further few months of live testing on top. My only slight niggle with what they have done here in the competition is that i wish they had continued for another month – three months would have been perfect for analysing further.

“Great Let’s Buy It !”

Not so fast!! Whilst the accounts are fully verified, i would caution that we need to find out if these are “real world” tradeable, for how long, and also determine what impact liquidity may have. It is no secret that this competition has been massively advertised by a huge number of affiliates, some of them huge players in the industry. I have no idea how many copies they would sell but it is my opinion that at least one or two of these robots could create a problem when traded massively all with one (or a handful of ) brokers – anyone who has tracked FAPTurbo for a very long time knows full well the effects of too many copies of a robot getting out into the market.

What i do think is in favour of these robots, is the fact that there are a number of them. They also seem to display a pretty decent cross-section of various strategies, from scalpers to ‘basket’ traders to correlation trading. They all have their own unique points which will attract different traders. Some have very low drawdowns (and lower returns), some have higher drawdowns but fantastic returns (like the number 1 position).  Most people picking up these robots for the first time will no doubt choose to go with the first place winner. Whilst this wouldn’t be a bad place to start and i will be investigating it myself too when the time comes, actually it is some of the robots further down the list which catch my eye.

“HiRider” for instance, has very consistent gains. I also feel this one will be prone to jumps in equity though/large stoplosses, etc. now and again. But if you like scalpers with high win rates this looks to be one which is working brilliantly right now for current conditions and the drawdown is a measly 3.26% for a return greater than 88% – statistically that looks miles better to me than the first place robot which suffered a 34% drawdown – a figure which most people will say they don’t mind but in reality when it happens to you on your account it may well just scare you out of your positions.

The “negative correlation” robot has an amazing drawdown of only 0.03%. How many people will be trading this one, i’m not sure – but at 6% gain for 0.03% drawdown i know this one will also be near the top of my list for testing! Again, i think a lot of traders will overlook this one based on its “low” (low compared to what most robots tell us we can get anyway, but this is actually a great figure!) return of only 6% over two months.

CobaltFX looks to be high risk with a large drawdown and minimal profit. Nutcracker also appaers to be a bit risky for my tastes. There are a few others that are inbetween which look suitable for testing later on.

Practical Details

Forex Robot World Cup EA’s are scheduled for release on 16th February. They are not cheap at a price of $999, however if i can find and trade long term with one or two of the EAs then it is worth the cost for me and i won’t be complaining about that. Before jumping into buying this system you do need to check if it is a viable expense for you based on your account size, there is no real sense in buying a $999 set of robots if all you have to trade with is $200, i see way too many people falling into this trap. Remember, trading is a business like any other and you must carefully weigh up any expenditure against your income and levels of capital for trading and make the figures work in your favour.

Immediately, i was dismayed to discover the upsell tactics on proud display yet again. Once you have payed out $149 for the system, you are sent to another sales page promising you something even bigger and even better, ONLY another $77. I went for it in the interests of research. That wasn’t the end of it, there was yet another upsell after this, saying something about how special i was – one of the “chosen ones”, i now had access to the manual system behind USDBot, for ONLY another $49!!! Well, i wasn’t going to fall for that one and just clicked the “no” option then got presented with yet another sales page offering me that same manual system for $27 (sorry, anyone who purchased it at $49!).

Anyway, annoying sales tactics aside, here are our stats for the account starting today (note, if this is blank it is because the account was only started today! click the graph to view detailed stats):-

We are running USDBot (original) plus the upsell USDBOT Adaptive, both on the daily charts of the recommended two currency pairs, EURUSD and USDJPY.

On first glance i really do not feel this robot is ‘newbie’ friendly. The instructions are very brief, and some essential elements of the install/setup process are not described. The original USDbot is not adaptive to 5 digit brokers – although the vendor does provide a settings file for those who are unsure of how to alter the settings. I would recommend using this even if you are sure of the settings, because there is a lot that needs changing for 5 digit brokers.

Confusingly, the ‘adaptive usdbot’ is compatible with 5 digit brokers although there is no obvious mention of that until you open up the settings and discover that yourself in the settings list. This had me hunting around their site for a time looking to see if they had a .set file for this strategy as they do for the original, before i realised. It doesn’t help that they actually use the same trading manual for both systems, even though they are very obviously pretty different from one another. I don’t know if i’m missing something, but i also cannot find a comprehensive list of what all the settings are and mean, and there are a fair few settings in the list. Most of them are self-explanatory for the more advanced robot trader, but for a newbie they will be very bewildering.

USDBot uses a take profit and stoploss of 100 pips, and implements a trailing stop of 30 pips. The adaptive version appears to have stochastic indicators built in to it of which there are settings in the parameter list. The EA is ECN compatible and there is a setting to adjust for ECN/nonECN (an issue i didn’t find explained in the manual and so could be a problem for newbies again if you do not know what ECN means – if in doubt, always put ECN mode on, it won’t actually hurt if your broker is not ECN). Original USDBot has a money management setting, but the ‘adaptive usdbot’ does not – something i’m not understanding at the moment but that’s how it is.

Sorry to say that this long review has been more about their sales and processes rather than the robot, but it’s all i can comment on right now… and wanted to get something up as a lot of people are emailing us asking about this one. Do keep an eye on our results, they will tell the truth behind this EA and whether it really performs as well as they claim it will, etc. something which in my mind is in serious question since the vendors own live account is still very new.

Finally, the EA is sold via Clickbank, complete with their usual money back guarantees.

Broker Buster trades on EURUSD. It uses a stoploss of 106 pips and a take profit of 37 pips, although we have had instances where trades have closed at different take profits as the EA ‘locks in’ some profit on profitable trades – an option that is customisable via the settings (see our stats).

The stoploss and take profits are ‘unbalanced’ in that the stoploss is larger than the take profit, however it is a lot less exaggerated than in a lot of other popular EA’s, for instance, FAPTurbo & Megadroid. At 37 pips, we need just under three winning trades for every loss (if we get three wins to each loss it leaves us with a net profit of 5 pips). It is very early days but so far we are recording 9 wins, 1 stoploss, and 5 ‘other’ trades closing at a different take profit.

The robot itself is ECN compatible. It offers options for money management, including an ability to control the maximum and minimum lot sizes which are traded, and full control over the point at which the EA locks in profit. It also has a magic number facility so it is compatible with other robots trading on the same account/currency pair.  View Stats

We did hear a lot of positive feedback and reports about this EA via email from traders, however it has come to light recently that a couple of people are experiencing issues with their robot not trading correctly and making losses. Also on the negative side, you should note that the vendor states on his website that no refunds are available and he appears very strict about implementing this.

Furthermore, we have also had reports that their support services are not particularly helpful / supportive and therefore if you are very new to trading and may need help with basic setup, etc, this robot may not be your best first purchase.

Ultimately, if this robot continues to return results as good as it has been so far these issues would warrant overlooking due to its performance and profit potential.

Update (important)

I have reason to believe that this robot may be a scam copy of another robot, as determined by 4xproject.com
I cannot confirm the validity of this either way but felt it was right to inform people in this post.

Update 21 April 2010

We have removed this robot from test.

1. No Loss = No Stoploss

NoLoss wins 100% of its trades because it never closes any trade out for a loss. Ever. Theoretically speaking, this is a holy grail solution then. In real life however we are limited by the bounds of leverage, account size and lot size. Even trading on a $50,000 account at 0.01 lots i am concerned that this robot will almost certainly bring about account destruction given time.

2. Don Steinitz (maker of NoLoss) – Needs to go back to customer service school?

Since beginning to test NoLoss, we have had a surprising amount of mail from people who absolutely cannot stand this guy. Some of the mail we have seen to back up their reasoning really makes me inclined to agree with them. We don’t normally come out in criticism of robot customer service as it seems an industry-wide problem (i.e. we’d have to highlight it in EVERY review) but in this case we really do think it needs noting.

I would say that generally speaking we should not be supporting robot sellers by buying their robots if their customer service is not only bad but abusive in one form or another. The only exception would be perhaps if a robot really was a near holy grail, in which case i would say “put up with it, the robot is worth it!”.  I have created a new article dealing with Don’s customer service attitude and provide a truely appalling and shocking transcript i have received from one of his customers – it is too long to put here in our short review. I hope that the article will serve to highlight the importance of customer service in an industry which is so much lacking. I’m *almost* sorry to have picked on Don as an example here, but his emails really were bad (swearing, abusive, the lot). See the article here: http://www.donnaforex.com/trading-articles/don-steinitz-and-bad-customer-support/

Back to the robot then – NoLoss really is not a holy grail. Not even close. Yes, it has banked lots of trades and make no losses. Yet. As i write, our sum total of profits is $2,344.47 and the sum of our floating (unclosed) losses is $5,812.90. It’s only a matter of time i think before the account is turned to dust.  If you are trading with NoLoss your best strategy would be to do one of the following:-

1. Run it on very high risk and withdraw your profits EVERY WEEK, starting from scratch each week. Keep your account size small and expect your account to be blown up in some weeks.

2. Run the robot on fairly low risk but close out all your floating losses regularly (this could be either once a week or once a month).

3. Close out all trades when the net profit after doing so will be positive by the amount you want to achieve. e.g. if you want to gain 3% on your account, leave the robot running until such a time as when if you were to close all your open trades you would have gained 3%. Then repeat the process again.

Update 3 February 2010

NoLoss has made 32% profit as of the 1 Feb  2010 with no recorded losses on closed trades however there was -£7581.27 in open trades at the same time.

Update 23 March 2010

We have decided to remove NoLoss from our demo testing because it has not lived up to it’s name by making some losses and it has had some rather large drawdowns.  View Stats Here

Here are the trading options as presented by the vendor:-

Standard risk

Osaka7 EURUSD and Tokyo night EURUSD 1 chart each 5min time frame.

Advanced / High risk

Osaka7 EURUSD, AUDUSD and GBPUSD I chart each 5min time frame.

Tokyo night EURUSD and GBPUSD (highest risk) 1 chart each 5min time frame.

Poison Robot Hacked trades during the Asian Session, which we initially were a little concerned about since we test many robots which trade at this time. As with many Asian session trading robots this one also uses a high stoploss and much lower take profit, although by no means is this robot as unbalanced as many out there. Initially we had flawless results and great gains but as i write this we did suffer our first stoplosses, two in a row, which were not large enough to take out all of our profit but nevertheless did have a pretty high impact on our results. The problem moving forwards then will be whether we can win consistently and often enough to overcome these larger losses when they happen.

Update 9 February 2010

Since starting it’s demo test Poison Robot hacked has made a 26% profit however it has not made any trades since 14 January 2010.  We have decided to remove it from test.