Forex Autopilot System (FAPS) Updated - 26 Mar 2008

The latest version of Forex Autopilot System is now available in the member's area. Appears to be a minor update to the FAPS EA which now requires your copy of the EA to be activated. Also, manuals have been updated to inform users how to handle forex brokers with 5 digit price quotes as well as slighly more info on the EA settings itself.

Q & A - How Forex Autopilot System (FAPS) Handles Losing Trades

According to Marcus Leary, the Forex Autopilot System creator, FAPS has a win rate of about 96%. Live testing by many FAPS users have borne out this statistic. However, to achieve that win rate, the EA can sometimes goes through a 20-30% drawdown while waiting for market conditions to reverse.

The FAPS EA has no fixed stop loss as a default (you can actually set a fixed stop loss if you want) but rather relies on internal indicators to decide when to close trades. The EA will continue to carry a loss until it eventually hits the Take Profit target or finds a signal to close a losing trade. I've yet to see the EA close a losing trade but that's another matter.

More importantly, the FAPS EA will automatically close all open trades at the beginning of a new month. You can already see this in backtesting. If you test from Feb 08 to Mar 08, you will see the EA closing the open trade on 1 Mar 2008.

What does this mean to you as a Forex Autopilot user? Well, first you need to monitor your open trades at the end of the month, especially if it occurs in the middle of the trading week. You may want to manually close your open trades a few hours before end of the month midnight (based on your broker's MetaTrader server timing).

Also, you need to have sufficient funds to cover the EA drawdown while running. The recommended trading lot size are shown below:

• 0.1 lot for US$1,000-2,000


• 0.5 lot for US$5,000


• 1 lot for US$10,000

Happy trading!

Q & A - How To Correctly Backtest Forex Autopilot

As you know, MetaTrader has a Strategy Tester where you can backtest Forex Autopilot expert advisor using historical price data. However, there are a couple of steps involved for a successful backtest.

First of all, you need the relevant price data loaded into MetaTrader. Whenever you trade or run an EA using MetaTrader, price data is collected and stored automatically. You can view your past currency price data by going into the History Center (F2 key). If you look at my example of the left, you will see that some price data between 13 Mar and 20 Mar is missing. This was because I did not trade during those days. As a result, the EUR/USD 1m price data was not collected during that period.
What this means is that you can only backtest for dates where you have already collected the price data. Example, if I started trading on 10 Mar and stopped on 13 Mar, I can backtest the EA between 10-13 Mar but not before or after that period. MetaTrader does not automatically download the missing price data.

Fortunately, there is a website where you can download historical price data. Visit http://www.alpari-idc.com/en/dc/databank.php to download the EUR/USD 1m historical price data for free. It's a zip file that's about 10.2MB and contains about 3-4 years worth of price data. Also, although there is a Download button in the History Center, not all brokers provide historical price data. The Download button in Alpari UK's version of MetaTrader does work and you can use that instead of uploading the data manually.

Then, go to MetaTrader Options (Ctrl-O) > Charts. You need to modify Max bars in history to 2147483647. This will allow you to upload the maximum amount of historical price data.

Then, go back into your MetaTrader History Center, double click on EURUSD and 1 Minute and click Import to upload the historical price data (.hst file). Of course, you need to uncompress the downloaded zip file first.

Now you can go to the Strategy Tester (F6 key) to backtest Forex Autopilot properly.

Modelling Quality
A lot of people doing backtesting are concerned about Modelling Quality (MQ) when doing backtesting. The higher the MQ, the more reliable the backtest. An MQ of 90% is about the maximum you can get with the Strategy Tester. The number increases with the quantity of data that you have. If you are missing some price data, MetaTrader interpolates the missing data resulting in reduced MQ.
For backtesting the EUR/USD 1m timeframe, the maximum MQ you can achieve is 25%. No, this is not an error. It's just the way the MQ is calculated in MetaTrader. You can read this article that explains why this is so => One-Minute Data Modelling Quality Rating

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Q & A - How To Let Forex Autopilot Manage Lot Sizes Automatically

I'm writing this post in response to a question from a Forex Autopilot user who wants to know how to set FAP so that it will select the lot size automatically. Here are the steps below:

1. Go to the Forex Autopilot EA properties.
2. Set Lots to 0.0
3. Set LotsRiskReductor between 1 - 10.
   1 = 10% risk of your deposit
   2 = 20% risk, etc...
   
4. Click ok
   

Please note that good money management practice is to risk not more than 3-5% of your deposit on any one trade. So, even the minimum 10% risk is considered high.

Forex Autopilot System Review - Forward Testing Results

Here are some of my forward testing results using the default settings for the EUR/USD pair. I initially started with just 0.1 lot trades to see how the EA would work. Turns out that Forex Autopilot System works very well indeed!

For the last 2 trades, I enabled the autolot feature where the EA will automatically decide how much to trade based on your risk profile. Note that for a deposit of US$10,000, the recommended lot size is only 1 lot! So, trade higher at your own risk.

Forex Autopilot System - Expert Advisor Settings

I've been playing around with the Forex Autopilot System (FAPS) for a few days now and have learnt a few interesting things about it. This Metatrader Expert Advisor robot or EA is designed specially for the EUR/USD 1M currency pair.
There are about 13 individual settings for the EA including take profit, stop loss, Lot size and so on but very little information in the documentation on configuring the rest of the indicators. The default setting uses a take profit of 20 pips, trailing stop of 50 pips and no fixed stop loss.
According to Marcus, the FAPS creator, the EA is designed to for 100% win rate and uses internal indicators to close losing trades rather than having a fixed stop loss. During backtesting, I noted that drawdown can be close to 30%. I suppose that's why the recommended trading lot sizes are as follows:

0.1 lot for US$1,000-2,000
0.5 lot for US$5,000
1 lot for US$10,000

Forex Autopilot Review - Backtesting Results

The results of back testing the Forex Autopilot System has been nothing short of spectacular. Using the Strategy Tester in MetaTrader4, I ran the Forex Autopilot Expert Advisor for the last week of Feb 2008 (25th to 29th) starting with an initial deposit of US$1000 and using a maximum lot size of 0.5lot. The results show that after just 5 days, I made US$1,893 profits using the Forex Autopilot System. Click here to see the actual backtest results (pdf file, 37.7kb).

With results like this, I can't wait to put the Forex Autopilot System into Live testing. Stay tuned for more updates!

If you want to test the system for yourself, grab your copy now by clicking here!

Forex Autopilot Review - The Forex Autopilot Package

Once you've purchased the Forex Autopilot System (FAPS), you will be directed to the software download page. This page will also serve as your member's page where you will download updates to the FAPS. So, be sure to bookmark this page.
You can choose to download the entire FAPS package in one zip file or download each file separately.











Once you downloaded the zip file and uncompressed it, you will see the following files below. The actual Forex Autopilot robot trader is the file ForexAutoPilot.ex4. The Forex Autopilot System does not work on its own. Rather, it uses a forex trading software called MetaTrader4. The file ForexAutoPilot.ex4 is an Expert Advisor that works in MetaTrader4 to automatically trade the forex market for you. Instructions on how to install and configure the advisor in provided the AutopilotFAQ.pdf file. MetaTrader4 is provided free of charge by many online forex brokers. You can download this software here => Download MetaTrader4














Also included in the package is the eurusd_m1.set file. This settings file is used to optimize the Forex Autopilot Expert Advisor to the Euro/USD currency pair for the 1min timeframe. The FAPS is designed to be very profitable for the EUR/USD 1min timeframe using this settings file. In my next post, I'll show you some impressive backtesting results using this setting file.