Forex Shocker

Donna’s Review:

Ease of Use:

Control of Risk:

Customer Support:

Overall Rating:

Forex Shocker is another Asian session scalping robot. In the manual it suggests a number of trading pairs to use but we were recommended to try GBPUSD and EURUSD by the vendors, and so stuck to these pairs for our testing. It uses a pretty high stoploss compared to take profit, as is common with other robots in this category.

This review is based on version 1.0 of Forex Shocker – we understand there is now a version 2.0 available which hasn’t been tested by us.

We demo tested Forex Shocker for around three months with success before putting it on a live account on 10 September 2009. Unfortunately, it hasn’t performed so well on our live account and we have lost money in the two and a half months we have run it. The image below shows our live account progress on FXDD from 10 September to 27 November 2009 when trading was stopped:-

I think what we are seeing here with Forex Shocker is typical of a number of scalping robots which have been optimised and work well on demo accounts but fall down when put to live test.

This is a good example of why anyone considering developing a scalping robot, particularly one which scalps during the Asian session, should not get excited by demo or backtest results and should instead focus on live, real results and work on optimising the robot for “real” conditions and all that involves, e.g. slippage, requotes, spread spikes, price spikes, possible broker interference.

Generally speaking, the narrower the timeframe that a robot has to work in and the more specific and exact the settings have to be, the more in danger you are of falling into trouble when trading for ‘real’. This is certainly the case here with Shocker, which even on demo only ever functioned within its very strict narrow window of trading times.

Overall then, based purely on our live test results, i wouldn’t consider this a good robot to run on a live account unless you have access to superior trading conditions (e.g. an institutional platform or extremely good ECN). Even then, it appears to be fairly heavily optimised (perhaps over-optimised) so caution is advised.