Forex Invader expert advisor is designed for trading on time interval, but performed best on the EUR/USD currency pair. The authors don’t describe the rules of deal making, stressing only that the rules of trading on large time intervals (starting h1) were adapted for the small timeframes.
According to the authors, back in 2009, the EA made up to 90% of successful transactions, and the maximum drawdown didn’t exceed 30%. These results were obtained on the EUR/USD pair. The results on other currency pairs were not very stable.
The expert advisor doesn’t use Martingale, and in the case of a negative situation development, the position is closed by SL. A trader can choose between profit-taking by TP or using a trailing stop, the value of which is specified in the settings of the advisor. By default, the trailing stop is disabled.
Forex Invader EA doesn’t allow to adjust the level of risk. In each deal, it is limited to 1% of the deposit. The recommended minimum deposit to start trading is $200. For deposits of less than $5,000, the transaction volume will be 0.01 of the lot.
Forex Invader EA: installation and configuration
Installation of the EA is no different from other trading robots: you just need to copy a file with the .ex4 extension from the archive to the Experts folder. To run the expert advisor in the terminal, simply drag it to the chart of the chosen currency pair.
Basic settings of the advisor include:
- Lots – the parameter determines the amount of the deal. For deposits ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, the recommended value is 0.1, for those exceeding $10,000 it is 1.0.
- TP and SL – levels of fixing profit and loss, their default values are 25 and 100 pips respectively.
- UseTrailingStop – the parameter is responsible for using a trailing stop. To turn it on, put the True value in the relevant field.
- TrailingStop – trailing stop value (default is 0).
- Slippage – slippage, the default is 3 pips, plays the role of insurance – for example, in the case of trading during important news release.
- MagicNumber – the developers recommend using the default setting or to pick up any other. No explanation on how this parameter affects the EA is available.
At first glance, it seems that the Forex Invader EA violates the basic rule of successful trading: the ratio of the expected profit and loss (SL value is 4 times TP). In fact, the disadvantage ratio of SL and TP is compensated by an extremely small number of losing trades.
Forex Invader EA: testing and optimization
Despite the fact that the expert advisor was created about 5 years ago, for the purity of the experiment, the testing was carried out on default settings. The volume of the deposit was $10,000, and the testing was carried out on the EUR/USD currency pair (m5) for the first half of 2014.
As expected, the standard settings were no longer profitable, and over the past six months the EA lost $1,421.28 of the deposit. The maximum drawdown was 34.54%. Nevertheless, the ratio of profitable and unprofitable deals was 4:1. Another surprising fact is the small number of transactions: only 56 in six months. It is a very low figure for a scalping advisor.
The size of SL was changed to optimize the EA (starting value was 25, the final was 100 pips in steps of 25 pips) and TP (from starting 25 pips to 75). Trailing stop was also on during the optimization (starting value was 10, the final – 20 pips).
The optimization resulted in no significant change. On this basis, it can be argued that it is necessary to make adjustments to the very methodology of the market situation valuation by the EA. It is impossible for the reason that the authors say nothing about the trading strategy which it is based on.
