EuroX2

Hello Fellow Traders,

This is a tale of a disaster that happened to me that you should know about. It is about a commercial EA called EuroX2.

There are several attachments with this letter.

1. A detailed account statement and GIF of a demo I allowed to run from September 4, 2006 – January 9, 2007. This is NOT a backtest.

2. Screenshots (screen1, screen2, screen3, screen4) of the chart attached to the account from October to January. It was running on another computer prior to this.

3. A log off my friends (and my) LIVE ACCOUNT that was COMPLETELY wiped out by this EA.

About the demo. It made good money for a while, and the balance went up to about $17,000. However, it then lost 10K and went mostly downhill after that. I closed it at about $1,250. It had been down further than that.

This was the first EA I ever dealt with. I bought it, paid $100.00 for it. Before I did, I was told I could “backtest” it for free. Well I did. The backtest was FANTASTIC. I thought that if it was even a QUARTER as good as the backtest that it was all trader could ever want!

However, not being a total idiot, I put it on a demo and tested it for a few days. Boy, did I learn a lot about it in those few days.

I learned that it could be good and bad. The good I learned was that it needed to be WATCHED and if running during QUIET market hours, it would rack up small amounts of change. Even so, it still lost a lot, and sometimes closed trades unreasonably. The bad that I learned was that it had NO defense against a serious change in market direction. Once you got left behind, the trades kept running right where they were until your account was seriously depleted. Later with the demo, I watched it drop 10K before it closed its bad trades.

In the meantime, I had discovered lightpatch and the MT group, and had found a mellow hedge trader that did not have to be watched all the time. A few times I day I would check it and if the equity was past a certain point, I would close the entire thing manually. It didn't seem to close itself, but that was fine with me.

I had put the EuroX2 on the live account and ran it for a few evenings while I watched it closely. Then I turned OFF a few days before at the end of a short trading session. I know it was OFF, because the computer was ON and it was NOT trading.

I had decided to put the hedge trader on that night, and take a break and eat a leisurely dinner.

Before I did, I made CERTAIN that the EuroX2 was off.

I then turned on the hedge trader. I sat for about an hour watching to make certain again that all was well. It was. Nothing but the hedge trader was running. (See the “log” for more details on this).

I went about 10 feet away and started cooking dinner.

About the time I was halfway through eating, my broker called and said the account was dropping rapidly. They had been having trouble with their servers, and he was on night duty checking periodically to see if they were working. Normally there was no one there. He said that its normally a very quiet time of night, but the machine kept binging indicating that someone was trading, so he went over to see if there was a problem with the server, saw it was my account and called me. I jumped up, ran for the computer, and closed ALL trades as fast as I could. However, by that time the account was wiped out.

As you can imagine, I was totally unnerved to say the least, and to say I was not thinking clearly would be a RADICAL understatement. The money in the account belonged to a friend.

There is no way I can express the personal pain this has caused me. That's why I am warning YOU about what can happen.