Metatrader expert advisors dissected.
FAP Turbo live forward test
Trading style: Asian session scalping; also includes a long term advanced strategy that trades around the clock on EURUSD with high SL & TP targets.
Currency pairs: EURUSD, EURGBP, EURCHF, GBPCHF, USDCHF, GBPUSD, USDCAD
Timeframe: M15 for the scalper; ironically, M1 for the long term advanced strategy
EA price: $149 ($129 with the eareview discount)
License: 1 live account
NFA compliance: yes (with the long term advanced strategy disabled)
Refund policy: 60 days
Read more at the FAP Turbo website
First of all, you MUST visit the product website then you can proceed to buy FAP Turbo with $20 discount
Birt’s forward test
Settings: default; Scalper_LotsRiskReductor 5.0, Scalper_StealthMode false
Started: 13.02.2012
Broker: PrivateFx
Account type: live, micro
Starting balance: $300
Current version: 5.6
Note: I believe the long term advanced strategy to be overoptimized so this forward test is only running the scalping EA on all possible pairs. This expert advisor was added based on popular request rather than profitability potential.
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#2 written by Donlao February 16, 2012 (1 year ago)
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#3 written by birt March 1, 2012 (1 year ago)
That’s because I have no such issues on PrivateFX and you most likely won’t have problems of that kind with any serious ECN broker nowadays. On top of that, running without a SL or with a fake, larger SL can be a risk that is completely unnecessary. Think about it, if you have an open position, you get disconnected and in the meantime some dramatic news are announced, your account might suffer greatly if the market goes against you.
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#4 written by Geoff February 16, 2012 (1 year ago)
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#5 written by birt February 16, 2012 (1 year ago)
To tell you the truth, I don’t think anyone is going to buy them. Like I said in my no review list, anyone who might have wanted them has them already. Even if there’s still someone who intends to buy them, do you honestly think that they’re going to land here of all places, while there’s hundreds of affiliates with flashy pages piled up on google?
Anyway, it’s undeniable that both FAP Turbo and Megadroid were very popular and I’ve received mails from quite a few people who either wanted to see how they compare against the other EAs in the EA Top or simply mentioned that Megadroid is still making money for them.As for FAP Turbo, like I mentioned in my review that’s now over two years old, I don’t think it is still profitable. It’s probably just going to hover around the initial balance.
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#6 written by greg February 17, 2012 (1 year ago)
well I have owned FT ever since it was launched 4 years ago and it has always made money every year, BUT you cannot trade ALL the pairs ! If you eliminate the losing pairs, you will make a steady 8%/month profit. I only trade EU, GU, and UCad, the others will just bring down your profits to zero. It seems obvious to me ?
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#7 written by Beat March 10, 2012 (1 year ago)
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#8 written by birt April 7, 2012 (1 year ago)
To the best of my knowledge, it’s not very broker dependent but the results will vary to a certain degree as they do with about all the EAs. Since it’s a scalper, it will do much better when running on an ECN account, so from the three brokers you mentioned I would venture a guess that an FXOpen ECN account would be best suited for it.
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#10 written by Daffi April 6, 2012 (1 year ago)
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#12 written by Malcolm May 3, 2012 (1 year ago)
I don’t quite understand – the FAP Turbo website real live money account forward tested and independently verified statement shows outstanding results for this EA. Yet your results, and the ones on Forex Peace Army show mediocre performance at best for FAP Turbo. FPA actually shows a catastrophic performance wiping out all prfits made in the last 51 weeks of their test. What’s going on ??
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#13 written by birt May 3, 2012 (1 year ago)
In my opinion, the EA has a mediocre performance and just zig-zags the balance up and down. The key question that you have to ask in regards to their results is: verified by whom? If it would’ve been an account verified by myfxbook, sure, that would be rather trustworthy as they are a completely independent 3rd party.
As you can probably imagine, I’m not really doing anything to make the EA look bad – my account is live so I wouldn’t have absolutely anything to gain from that. That’s just how it performs.
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#14 written by KC May 12, 2012 (1 year ago)
FAP Turbo is junk.
Bought two when it first came out, got money back withing two months.As far as hiding an EA from a broker, not going to happen.
That is just a ‘feel good’ setting.You don’t find out about the problems until you buy it and then can get on the forums.
Seems like the answer was always ‘you didn’t set it right’. That’s bull.
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#15 written by birt May 12, 2012 (1 year ago)
Hiding an EA from a broker is something can be done but to the best of my knowledge nobody managed it successfully so far. Anyway, the “hide” option in the parameters of many EAs nowadays are at best good to conceal what exact EA you’re using, not the fact that you’re using an EA.
As for the FAP Turbo performance, as I stated in my review a few years ago, I believe its days are somewhat over and the best that can be expected of it now is a zig-zag performance, just like the one my forward test account shows right now.
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#16 written by S.E August 1, 2012 (9 months ago)
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#18 written by Ronald September 15, 2012 (8 months ago)
Nice! When somebody (S.E.) writes that he/she has been using Fap Turbo for five years, with great success, you just try to make him/her look like an idiot because English isn’t his/her first language (it isn’t mine either, by the way)?
I’ve just bought Fap Turbo (yep, another fool) and am testing it on a few demo accounts. Can’t say much yet, but so far, after using it for three days, it has made 21 trades, of which 20 winners in a row. Need to adjust some settings here and there (mainly lot size, trading hours, Take Profit and Stop Loss), but it looks pretty good to me!
Did I pass the English test?
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#19 written by birt September 15, 2012 (8 months ago)
Well, first of all, FAP Turbo hasn’t even been available for 5 years. It’s been launched in late November 2008. Second, I was suspecting that S.E. was being sarcastic because FAP Turbo has only actually worked profitably for several months after its launch, but it’s really hard to determine whether the comment was sarcastic or not given the fact that it has no punctuation.
If you take a look at other areas of my blog, I am typically very considerate in regards to the language topic and I rarely point out people’s mistakes; I just try to figure out what people are trying to ask/say and do my best to answer it. I occasionally ask people to rephrase when I simply can’t make any sense of what they are saying, which was also the case here – I suspected sarcasm in his post due to his mentioning “5 years” while the robot is less than 4 years old. Once again, I didn’t point out this detail until now because I suspected (and still suspect) that the comment is meant to be sarcastic.
As for your assessment of the EA, if you decide to run it live, I suggest doing so on a minimal lot size. I can’t find any single recent profitable live account so I would advice proceeding carefully.
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#20 written by Ronald September 16, 2012 (8 months ago)
I’ve bought Fap Turbo 56 recently, installed it and used it on two demo accounts. Used it with the default settings and in total had 17 + 21 trades, of which only two were losers (I said 21 trades, one loser in my above comment, because the first 17 trades in one demo account were the same as in the other…).
After looking at the “Birt’s forward test. Settings: default” at MyFxbook, I must say that there’s a few things I don’t quite get:
1. the default stop loss for GBP/USD is set at 45, but in this test the stop loss got hit many times at 25 (same goes for EUR/GBP: default 50, many hits at 25-30). USD/CAD, which has a default SL of 50 got stopped out many times at 60 and EUR/USD (default SL: 70) got hits at 50…
2. EUR/CHF, the queen of the ‘scalping pairs’ (a known fact and also mentioned in the official ‘FapTurboGuide’) made a meager 24 trades of the total 741 (!), of which ‘only’ 50% where winners, but amongst the 12 losers, some resulted in 0.00 pips (break even) with -0.05 ‘profit’ – one can prove anything with ‘statistics’, right?Anyway, it doesn’t look like this Fap Turbo test was carried out with ‘default settings’, if you ask me (of the 21 trades in my demo account, for instance, 5 were made by EUR/CHF…).
Be careful, people, it’s a jungle out there
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#21 written by birt September 16, 2012 (8 months ago)
First of all, you do realize that I am an affiliate and I have absolutely nothing to gain by bashing a product, right?
Regarding your observations:
- FAP Turbo 5.6 was released in late May 2012. I updated the forward test to v5.6 on the 1st of June. I’m guessing the GBPUSD SL was 25 pips in v5.5 and all the other SLs you mentioned had different values; if you take a look at the dates I’m sure this will be confirmed.
- EURCHF simply did not trade for a long time. This is likely due to the Swiss National Bank decision to keep the EURCHF rate above 1.2. If you take a look at the EURCHF chart you will see it was mostly flat until 05.09.2012, at which point it went up, coincidentally about the time you started your demo testing. My account also had some EURCHF trades since that date, all of them profitable. Just as an aside, EURCHF hasn’t been the queen of scalping pairs at all after the Swiss Bank rate thing.
As for the -0.05 profit on the break even trades, that’s because of the commission. If you think those trades should be counted as positive, you have to contact myfxbook support, not me.
I will stress this once more: I am an affiliate and I do not try to hide it; this means that I get a commission every time a product is sold via my affiliate links. I have absolutely no reason to present a product in an unfavorable light; on the contrary, I would have all the reason to make everything sound really great. However, I am doing my best to be as unbiased as I can, which is why I actually state the truth when an EA sucks.
Bottom line is that I am not trying to stop you – feel free to run it on a live account, it’s your call. I just recommend threading carefully if you decide to go that route. No matter what you choose to do, I wish you the best of luck – I sincerely hope that the EA will perform nicely on your accounts and that you will be able to come here in 3-4 months and post your myfxbook live account statement showing a very nice profit in your FAP Turbo account
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#22 written by Ronald September 16, 2012 (8 months ago)
After reading your reply, I’m convinced that you are a sincere person and that you mean well. So in a way, I owe you an apology: my last comment was a bit out of line… I’ve been reading up on Fap Turbo (mainly on forums) and it’s clear that there’s a lot of contradicting information out there. For instance, a lot of folks swear that it’s USD/CAD that blew up their account, while a few minutes later you come across an account on MyFxbook of someone who made $ 21.000 profit in about 8 months, mainly thanks to the performance of… you’ve guessed it: USD/CAD. Others make profit by trading all pairs, with default settings, while the next statement shows somebody who cashed in on trading only a few of the available pairs. Etc.
You’re right about the stop loss of GBP/USD: it looks like it was 25 with FT 54, so I guess this remained the same for v.55 and only got changed to 45 with the release of FT 56 (also found another MyFxbook account that showed NO trades for ERU/CHF for a longer periode, as you explained in your reaction to my comment.
I’m not convinced that Fat Turbo is a worthless EA, but it’s not a robot that you can take out of the box and ‘set and forget’ it. Also, I’ve noticed that it takes ages to make some noticeable profit when you start out with only a few hundred dollars in your account, hence the urge to increase the lot size, forget about money management and before you know it, you’ve blown up another account… Like in your MyFxbook account, lot size is for the most part 0.10, which means that a stop loss hit eats away like 4% of your account sometimes.
My plan: keep on testing FT 56 on my demo accounts, tweak the settings (I’m already a member of the FT expert guide site), try to find the most sensible balance between SL/TP (risk/reward) – I’ve noticed that Fat Turbo Ichimuko has his SL/TP default set to 35/3 and the few trades I’ve made with it so far, were all winners. Also, I’ve my trades so far, and the ‘ranging hours’ that FT uses for scalping makes the use of tighter stops less risky (the expert guide also recommends tighter stops than the defaults). In fact, none of the 21 trades so far, were in need of stops larger than 25-30…
So, with the use of conservative money management, better risk/reward ratio, and last but not least a not too small account to begin with – as to allow some noticeable compounding effects – I’m hoping to do some profitable ea-trading. I’m sure you’ve noticed too that even in your losing account FT showed some good winning percentages: EUR/GBP 76%, EUR/CHF 50% (only 24 trades, of which the most of the ‘losers’ broke even), GBP/CHF 77%, USD/CAD 91% (!), USD/CHF 76%, GBP/USD 82% and EUR/USD 78%; not exactly the results of a worthless EA, in my humble opinion. In fact, these figures make it clear that the losers put too much weight in the overall equation (told you, English is not my first language either
Anyway, thanks for wishing me the best of luck, I hereby return the same to you (and to all our fellow traders, wherever they may be) and will indeed return here in 3-4 months to inform you of the results of my ‘adventure’. At the least I will have gained a lot of experience by then
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#23 written by birt September 16, 2012 (8 months ago)
I’m sure it will be a good experience and I’m looking forward to your findings as you move forward with it
Just a word of warning: trading a demo account will have pretty different results from trading a live account, even if they are with the same broker. Also, expect a very, very different outcome from demo to live when you have a take profit as low as 3 pips. Spread and slippage eat into it quite a lot. If you also pay a commission, it gets even worse.
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#25 written by Pete October 9, 2012 (7 months ago)
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#27 written by Kenju April 8, 2013 (1 month ago)
Hello Birt,
Has Ronald come back from his adventure seeking how Fab Turbo is performing for him? To be honest, I would like to be for Ronald in terms of Fap Turbo’s performance. At the moment, I have been using Fap Turbo 57 since the late of November 2012. It has been almost five months. The results of Fap Turbo 57 performance, it is not bad. I have been very satisfied with the perfomance so far. (I may be disappointed soon since you mentioned the good perfomance lasts on a couple of months.)
As you and Ronald disccussed on SLs values, I have checked the SLs, and I found that SLs are defined as same as Fap Turbo 55, not 56. So, for example SL for GBPUSD now become to 25 pips. As for your foward test, the values of SLs defined by 56 affects a lot the results. And, Fap Turbo might be a broker and spread sensitve EA. For running the Fap Turbo 57, I selected currency pairs out of 7 pairs which will gain the profits. And all Fap Turbo 57 are trading on ECN accounts. One of them is FXOpen you also use. Since I have some experience of using EAKAIN as well as Primeval-EA, I got better impression of the perfomance by Fap Turbo 57 than ones by EAKAIN and Primeva-EA as compaired to.
For now, that is it. If necessary, I will show the key results such as PF, win-lose ration, etc in the near future. Thanks! -
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Thanks for testing it, even if just to confirm if it’s rubbish like you had thought.