…and we must change with them or risk being trampled under the great hoofs of the ages. Now that sounds dramatic. Speaking of time, when I started this blog almost one year ago, little did I know of the time investment required to post and operate it. I was attempting to be some kind of knight in shining armor of the Forex world, pointing the finger at those who wanted to cheat the average customer with various scams. And I thought to attempt this at no personal gain whatsoever – the Google ads on the site barely cover the site costs, nobody actually clicks them. Actually, the only reason I added them was to avoid feeling that I’m also paying for the whole thing.
It turns out that writing a thorough review is no easy task. The review itself takes up to 8 hours. If I add the backtesting, it can sometimes go as high as 20 hours, depending on the EA. Also, after writing a review, there are things to take care of: the forward test must receive thorough babysitting, the forward test demo accounts get closed by the broker and have to be reopened, the comments have to be replied to, the flow of emails also has to get replies and many other things have to be taken care of… All in all, even not considering the reviews, the blog turned out to be more than a part time job in itself. The future was looking quite grim: more and more EA scams coming out every day and I couldn’t even begin to hope to cover them, while the amount of work associated with the site was increasing with each review.
On top of this, toward the end of the last year I closed all my Forex accounts and completely stopped trading. Among the reasons for this, the chief one would be that I was unable to sleep at night. During the years of trading, I would wake up several times per night to check on any trades I had at the time, no matter if I was trading by EA or manually. The stress was too high and I ended up concluding that trading (anything, not only Forex) is not the thing for me, I’d rather be calm and penniless.
I stopped writing reviews when I stopped trading. I maintained the forward tests for quite a few months after that, but at some point I stopped that as well. I had some programming projects that were eating most of my time, so my only involvement ever since was replying to comments and emails. I used to work with an hourly fee, so naturally, when I had to decide whether to work on the site for free or to work on a project for money, I always chose the latter.
Life went on in a monotone fashion until a couple of weeks ago when I found some of the content of my site on a different site, with a couple of IB links in it. I asked nicely and it was promptly removed, but a friend pointed out that I could do the same in regards to the IB links (thanks hyperdimension!). Since I started this site as a totally independent site, I was naturally reluctant to do it, but as he pointed out, I’m allowed to change my mind. And he is perfectly right.
So, given the fact that the global crisis is affecting me as much as anyone else, I am now changing my mind. In fact, I have already changed my mind; I’m just letting you know by writing this. I will be changing Birt’s EA Review to a site that might actually make a few bucks. It’s only fair that I receive something in return for the amount of time invested. This is not to say I will review crap EAs and try to make you buy them. No – I will never do that. From now on, although I will be affiliated with the EAs I review, I will attempt to review only those EAs that I would consider running on a live account. Each EA reviewed will have its own real (not demo) forward testing account and being an affiliate should allow me to dedicate the attention each EA deserves and to receive new versions from the authors, updates that will be immediately pushed to the forward test. I will also add a donate button for those inclined to do so; I thought to only add it on the tick data page, but I will add it globally. Sometime later this year, I will remove the Google ads since they’re mostly useless anyway; for now, I’ll remove those displayed in the middle of the posts.
During the following days, I will edit some of the old pages to accommodate the blog changes and to perform some cleanup, but overall nothing much will change. The old reviews are there to stay, unchanged, but don’t expect to read a lot of bashing EAs and developers or marketers in future reviews, although I will try to maintain a good humor. If an EA is crap, I will simply not waste my time writing about it. If you want me to write about a particular EA that you think is awesome, feel free to mail me about it, I will consider it and let you know. Chances are it’s a nullity, so, like I said, I won’t write about it but at least I will reply to your mail to tell you what I think.
I’m not sure if I will manage to be as unbiased as I was before, but I will certainly attempt to. What you can be sure of is that I will not tamper with the backtests and I will give you the straight facts. Although from now on the fact that an EA is reviewed here might be sufficient indication that I recommend it, it’s up to you to read the whole review and decide whether you like it or not and whether you’re going to buy it or not.
As an end to this rather long rambling that must have bored you by now, I wish to thank all the people who mailed me to thank me for the reviews and to ask me to write more. I know I answered a plain “no” when it came to writing more, but here I am doing it anyway. I hope you’ll keep an eye on this blog in the future.