The contest is going on without me. And yet...

Each passing day I am amazed at the fact that my EA stopped trading on October 10th, the 10th day of the contest, and yet I keep ending up in the top 10. If you don't know my story, my EA was set at such an aggressive setting, and the market was so wild the first week of the contest that the EA managed to turn $10000 into $81000 in the first week of trading. Since I could not interfere with the EA I had to put in a failsafe to keep it from draining my account. So here's a little background pertaining to this "panic mode".

I (mistakenly) figured that my EA would generate something like $90000 to $100000 by the end of december when the contest ended. I also knew that the EA would completely drain my account if I didn't change the way it trades. So what I essentially did was put in a $20000 "trailing stop" and called it "panic mode" because if this trailing stop was hit the EA would NEVER trade again. It was also configurable and I arbitrarily set it to 20000, thinking that in order for me to lose that much in a single trade I would have to have a bunch of equity and my trade sizes would be very large. I also assumed that if that were the case, it would be near the end of the contest and I needed to protect my gains at all cost. My assumptions were (mostly) wrong.

Here is what actually happened. The market went CRAZY on the first week of trading and my balance (not equity) was up to $81000 when my "trailing stop" hit and drained me of $20000. This was on day 10. The EA assumed it was near the end of the contest and quit trading altogether. Now the EA is sitting doing nothing with a balance of $61000, which at the time of this writing has me in 9th position. An amazing feat when you realize that it has been over a month since that last trade. Here is a chart of the trades that took place...

I was trading 0.1 lots for each $500 in the account. As my balance grew, my trade sizes grew. Here is the progression of trade sizes...

• 2.0 lots: +71 pips
  
• 2.2 lots: +116 pips
  
• 2.7 lots: +68 pips
  
• 3.0 lots: +110 pips
• 3.6 lots: +97 pips
• 4.2 lots: +211 pips
• 6.0 lots: +155 pips
• 5.0 lots: +213 pips (not sure what happened there. should have been about 7.9 lots)
• 4.0 lots: +238 pips (another anomaly. should have been even more like 9.0 lots)
• 5.0 lots: +281 pips (at least it's increasing lots again but should have been maybe 11 lots)
  
• 6.0 lots: +63 pips (guessing it should have been maybe 13 lots by now)
  
• 5.0 lots: +363 pips (noticing a pattern? smells like a bug to me)
• 4.0 lots: -505 pips (WHAMMO! panic mode stops all trading)

Incidentally, if the EA had done the trade sizes like it was supposed to, I estimate it would have had nearly double the balance it had, and have been trading at least (I guess) 15 full lots by the time panic mode hit. That would have put me in first place even until now.

Now I'm not saying all this to brag. I know it was a fluke in the market that caused such unbelievable gains, even with a bug in my trade size calculation. I just want to point out what's possible in forex. Do you really need an EA that can run for the long term unattended? No. You can get by quite nicely by finding an EA that has explosive growth for a short time, then spend all of your energy learning how to spot the market conditions that your EA thrives in. Use the EA like a tool and know when you need to run it and when you need to keep it turned off.

There's another key element to trading successfully with an "explosive short term growth" EA, but you'll need to read the book to learn about that one. :-)