REVIEW:
Mixed feelings here. I'll just honestly report my experience, and you can decide for yourself.
The first day I ran the robot on my live account, my balance went from $18,000 to over $19,100; that was in 24 hours. I thought, oh my goodness, this thing is amazing, I'm so glad I found it, etc. But only a few days later, the news about Fannie Mae, Lehman's bankruptcy, etc. came along, the trends reversed, and I quickly found myself down $3,000 (balance was now about $15,000).
To make a long story short, at one point I was down over 2,700 pips, and no, that's not a misprint-2,700 pips of drawdown. That's total for the 10 pairs Don Steinitz suggests to trade. So, I decided to manually get out, and in the end took a loss of about $5,000.
But I must state in all fairness to Don and this robot, I did a post audit at the end of the month (Sep 2008), and found that if I had stayed in, I would have actually ended up with a $1,000 profit rather than a $5,000 loss.
Although this robot may produce profits when all is said and done, I just have to ask myself if I want to go through that kind of torture every month, experiencing almost incomprehensible drawdowns, then just hoping it comes back my way. When the markets "behave", this robot works great; it really is a beautiful thing to watch. The only problem is, the markets don't always "behave", especially now, and this robot has no way of dealing with a trend reversal other than just sitting there in drawdown waiting for the market to come back.
In conclusion, I'd say if you can stomach the drawdowns, it's worth a shot. But I highly recommend using extremely low leverage, I'm talking like micro lots, regardless of your account size. If I do end up trying it again, that's what I'll do...
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