Hi there!

My name is Alan Bentler and this page describes my experience with the Forex Autopilot settings and what I found to be the best settings for maximum profits with minimum risk. It will also let you know what tools I used to facilitate my trading so that eventually it became truly “autopilot” trading.

This page consists of two parts:

The first one is my rant about Forex robots and robot developers – why some robots work and some (most!) don't and why would one sell their robot for $100 instead of trading with if it were so profitable - things that most people ask when they first begin investigating this industry and these are all logical questions so I try and answer them as best I can.

The second part contains the Report, and the Robot, complete with calculations, charts and figures, dissecting my trading experience with Forex Autopilot over the course of 3 months (140 trades altogether): what I did, why I did it, what happened as a result, what I should have done instead. If you want to get right on it you can skip the first part and jump right into the report - it will help you see what the best settings for Forex Autopilot are. Also there you will find the link to download my

Let's get some things straight

Before we get started I'd like to clarify a few things which might be on your mind. I'd like to make them clear now, so you can focus on the valuable information in this case study, instead of wondering where the next  catch or pitch  is going to be. (I don't do that. When we get to the "pitch" part I'll tell you straight.)

1. I'm not a super trader and I am not a “former financial adviser with Goldman Sachs” or whatever some other "gurus" out there claim to be in order to project an image of authority. I am a regular guy just like you. I have worked as a computer programmer most of my life and now I am a Forex trader by choice and by vocation. What you'll read here is simply my a account of 100 days of trading with the Forex Autopilot and what I learned from it and how I can now use this system to make money with it worry-free, and truly on AUTOPILOT! ….something that many other users of this system will not be able to say of their experience...

Why? You see -  the Forex Autopilot is a good system but it has a serious flaw , something which most users will discover the hard way and when confronted with it - will not know how to deal with it. In this report I will point out this flaw and show you how to work around it.

2. The  tools that I developed  (as I told you - having been a software engineer for almost 15 years I am fortunate enough to know a thing or two about programming) helped me  make the system safer and easier to work with. You could read the report and apply some of these methods without using my software (which, by the way is free - if you are a new Forex Autopilot user!). However if you want to have a fully automated system I would strongly encourage you to do yourself a favour and make use of this software.

3. Ok, so if I didn't write this report to pitch you something then why did I write it? Good question! Firstly, I didn't say that I didn't want you to buy the products mentioned here. Of course I do - I will make some money this way. But it is not the reason I wrote the report.

As you will see in my Report I'm going to tell you about my personal experience with Forex Autopilot and what I liked and didn't like about it. I am going to show you my trade record - which you can examine for yourself - trade by trade. I will not bend over backwards to push a hard sell - I tell it as it is. Whether you will agree with my conclusions, and whether you will decide to use the methods and tools I used is entirely up to you.

Fair enough? Good. Let's begin!...

A few words about them Forex Robots...

I love automated trading robots. They are my passion. I download them, install them, play with them, test them on different pairs and time frame and generally – have fun with them! Some of them I eventually use on my live accounts and they make me good money. Of course they also lose money from time to time – that is the nature of trading. The important thing is that the net result is positive, I am making money.

But let me tell you a secret…

75% of all robots are not worth your time and money!

That's right. Why? Because three out of four EAs can't beat the market.

This means that:

• all the extra money you put into buying one…

• all the extra time you put into downloading and installing

• all the hours you spent reading the manual and setting it up...

• all the extravagant promises of quick riches...

• all of the robot's advertised features such as supposedly emotionless and constant 24/7 trading…

…it's all in vain.

Yes, unfortunately most times you'd do better trading on your own – even without much Forex trading experience. After all why do we buy a robot? Because we want to sit back and to relax while the software is making us money. We don't want to baby-sit the damn thing and bite our nails all night long, praying for that trade that went south to come back.

That's the idea. The reality, however is that there are way too many junky, crappy, worthless robots on the market ranging in price from $60 to over $3000! The only thing they all have in common is - they don't work.

 But here's the good news... 

A select few robots can make you A LOT of money!

In fact, there are a several robots which I have tried that pull profits out of the markets like clockwork. Get yourself one of these babies and you'll win big over the long term.

This immediately brings up two questions:

“How do I know which ones are profitable”

   and

“Can I afford one?”

While some of these systems sell for thousands of dollars there are some which cost way less than that.

The first question is – how do we find those profitable systems which don't cost an arm an a leg?

As a professional software engineer and a day trader it is my passion to test them robots and try and help individual investors secure their financial dreams through the power of these select few systems. As such I have come across many trading robots and the above ratio of 25% good robots versus 75% junk is derived exactly from these tests.

The first thing I look at is feedback from customers on popular forex forums and message boards and then I find out how many copies the system has sold.

Let me tell you - there are GREAT Forex robots out there if you know how to work them! But most investors don't.

Interestingly enough – most robot vendors are also not keen on telling their clients how exactly to set their robots up properly! Why? Because we humans are greedy and we want the world on a gold platter and we want it now! People want to become rich over night and, hey - whenever there is demand the market will follow suit and fill the void quickly! Hence, most system vendors try to out-do each other, proving that their system can double or triple your account in a month!

What is a reasonable Return for a Forex Robot?

This of course is a game of risk versus profit and in order to present their systems as super profitable they run the tests with very risky settings! They then optimize the robot such that it would display profitable results for some particular period of time, and – voila, here's the new super robot that pulls in a 300% profit in a month!

While this may look harmless when run as a test on the developer's demo account it can cause serious problems to beginner traders who were promissed quick riches in the sales copy and who are now eager to run the system on their live account without any knowledge of the concept of risk management.

What's a poor trader to do? Buy an expensive $3000 system? Give up on automated trading altogether?

Not at all! Here's the deal – unless the robot is a total junk (and some of them are!) there will be a set of settings which may not produce a 300% profit in a month but will work well in most market conditions.

Let's say these Forex Autopilot settings generate you a “humble” 25%-15% return a month. Not enough? Most mutual funds and indexes ANNUALIZED return is under 15%! Think about that! You are making money at 12 times the rate of your retirement savings. I know you want out of that dead-end situation as soon as possible but let's be realistic here.

A return of 25%, even 15% per month is pretty darn good.

What, you don't think so? Alright, look at it this way: if you invest $10,000 and your ROI is only 15% a month then after 1 year you'll be sitting on $50K! How's that sound? Next year you'll have over 280K in your account. How many people do you know who made $200,000 from $10,000 in 2 years?

As a comparison – opening a franchise (e.g. Starbucks) will cost you in the order of $200,000 and most owners won't be in profit until the 3^rd or 4^th year of operating their business. I am not even talking about making a $200,000 profit – simply being able to make ends meet and to start actually seeing some profits coming in from their business.

So 20% a month is actually awesome. If you expect to make much more... well... you might as well stop reading right now and go look for a magic wand instead because what you're looking for, my friend, is more of the realm of magic than financial investments...

But before we try to determine what are the best settings for Forex Autopilot let's see why was it chosen in the first place.

Why Forex Autopilot?

1. The Forex Autopilot has sold the most copies with a low return ratio, which makes it the “people's choice” by popular vote. Most people, even not knowing what are the Forex Autopilot best settings, will see some very nice profits pouring into their accounts and be quite happy with it (well... until it hits rock bottom, that is. Read on...).

2. Forex Autopilot is PROFITABLE. Yes, this little baby knows how to pluck those pips out of the market! This “stellar” performance may sometimes cost the traders dearly but that is exactly what this report will focus on – how to use the Forex Autopilot to trade profitably, yet safely.

3. The Forex Autopilot costs a little less than $100! This makes it an easy investment even for a very constrained budget!

The bad news?

The problem with Forex Autopilot...

I'll give it to you straight. Forex Autopilot – is risky. It can trade for weeks and weeks without any accidents, quietly building up your account equity and then one beautiful sunny day it would open a bad trade and “forget” to close it. Since “no stop loss” - is what the user manual specifies as the preferred setup this could spell disaster for many a inexperienced fellow trader. Yours truly was also not spared from this little “imperfection” of the system. Forex Autopilot opened a position which went bad and at one point I had a 600 pip losing trade sitting in my account! Now, as you can see from my report the end result was 1489 pips in profit, but there were a few days when I was literally going crazy because this ONE bad trade threatened to wipe out my account!

This was the turning point for me and that's when I decided that I will gladly sacrifice a few hundred pips in exchange for the safety of my account and my own sanity.

The real funny part is - Forex Autopilo does not need to be a risky system! It is actually quite profitable! All you need a stop loss at the correct level! Unfortunately, as I pointed out the forex robot marketing wars are at their height and if you wanna sell your robot you gotta show some exorbitant monthly profits, or else it will simply wither in the whole forex robot crowd.

Sadly, common sense falls the first victim of this war. Here we have a great robot and instead of equipping it with adequate Stop-Loss settings the marketing guys are jumping up and down, yelling "ship it, ship it, ship it - we don't need no stinkin' stop loss! Last month it worked much better without it!"

As a result we end up with a system which can be a profit maker 90% of the time, but when it incurrs a loss - God help you. And this is something which I really don't like about the Forex Autopilot! I buy a robot because I want peace of mind. I don't want a ticking time bomb in my account. And I don't care if my profit margin is low. Heck - the thing as automated, even if my profits are as low as 10% a month it's still pretty good for a system which I don't need to tinker with! As long as it is a safe system.

Unfortunately... Configured with it's default settings Forex Autpilot is not a safe system.

When I emailed support regarding this problem their explanation was that:

However both these reasons seem dubious to me, firstly, because of that 600 pip drawdown position and secondly, because I'd rather have a 100 pip stop loss hunted down by the broker than lose my account to a margin call.

To be fair – after contacting their support department the 600 pip loss was investigated and attributed to an internal system error which was promptly fixed by them and a free update was issued to patch up this problem. I have never seen anything like that since then. However, the system remained unchanged in that it still uses only internal stop loss values and quite big ones at that. It can easily allow a 200 pip loss trade to hover for days before it recovers of before it is stopped out. Some may be ok with this style of trading... me - I prefer a more secure setup.

So here I was faced with the same dilemma as most other Forex Autopilot users:

1. Overall the robot is very profitable.

2. Once in a while the damn thing would enter into a bad trade and would stubbornly refuse to close it for a small loss, preferring instead to “wait it out” rather than bite the bullet, accept this one little loss and keep on trading happily ever after.

With a system as profitable as Forex Autopilot, risking your account to squeeze in one more 25-pip winner trade by waiting on a 200 pip loss to turn into profit is simply stupid.

So I decided to analyze the trades and see where is the optimum profit/loss ratio which will allow me to sacrifice a small percentage of my trades as losers, in exchange for peace of mind and confidence in the system (I don't ever want to be in a situation where I am looking at a 600-pip loss in my account and I am sure you will not want that either! Yah, yah that bug is fixed now but, ya know... better safe than sorry! ).

For those who decided to keep reading - let's look at our report involving a 3-month trading record, which occurred between March and July 2008 and see what we can make of the robot's performance.

Best Forex Autopilot Settings based on Drawdown Values

As was mentioned in the beginning – we buy a Forex robot (or any automated system for that matter) because we are lazy. We don't want to do the job ourselves. Instead we would rather sleep, watch TV, play beach volleyball or do whatever else we might find amusing and entertaining.

It's obvious then, that one of the most important characteristics of our chosen system should be reliability. If, instead of being able to relax and do some of the above fun activities, we have to baby-sit the robot all night long, almost getting a heart attack as we watch our account equity plummet … well the only thing I can say to such a system is “thanks, but no thanks”. I can do the allnighters on my own, without the need to buy no goddam robot...

Conclusion: Reliability is one of the most important characteristics of an Automated Trading System!

Trading Overview

(...and why "wise guys" lose money)

Before we continue with the charts and figures, I have to confess a sin:

I have tried playing wise guy. Instead of following the developer's advice and only using the robot on the EUR/USD pair I decided I will also let the robot trade the EUR/GBP.

That turned out to be a bad idea (read below), but then - hey... that's how we learn right? Or should I say "that's how I learn". Luckily for you, since you are reading this report you will be able to learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

After reading this report you should be able to choose the perfect settings for your FAPS trading account, settings which will let the robot reap maximum profits while at the same time cutting losses dead in their tracks.

Not only that, but if you decide to buy it and email me your receipt I will send you absolutely FREE, a special robot which should help you automate this whole process. This handy little robot acts as a "supervisor" for FAPS and sets certain standards which FAPS, being the arrogant rogue trader that it is

The Analysis

Here's a summary of all my trades (you can see details here):

The first thing that probably draws your attention is that EUR/USD had 92% winning trades ratio versus 73% for the EUR/GBP. The Total Pips value also speaks for itself.

Morale?

Don't screw around with the system. I did and it obviously cost me money. So don't do it. I understand the temptation to "diversify" your portfolio but the idea behind diversification is to minimize the risk and it works well in systems which allow for diversification. This system was carefully designed to work its magic with the EUR/USD pair. Every currency pair has it's own “personality” and Forex Autopilot obviously gets along much better with EUR/USD than it does with the other pairs. So do yourself a favor, don't reinvent the wheel and stick to EUR/USD.

The following tables shows the distribution of winning trades and their drawdowns. First we will look at the EUR/USD trades. I will not analyze the EUR/GBP. Although it may be an interesting exercise I am not trading it anymore so I feel there is no point wasting my time on the analysis. I might give a brief overview of the EURGBP trades and why I don't consider them suitable for this system.

Analyzing the EUR/USD

The table below shows all the EUR/USD winning trades.

Explanation Of Columns:

Max. Drawdown or Potential SL (pips) – what maximum draw down did the trades in this row reach? I split the drawdowns into groups of 10, e.g. <10 mean these are all the winning trades which reached at most a 9 pip drawdown before turning around and becoming winners; <20 means all the winning trades which reached a max. draw down between 10 and 19 pips before turning around and becoming winners. Potential SL means that if we set a Stop Loss at the level all the trades in this row (and all the preceding rows) would still remain winners, whereas all the trades in the row below this one would become losers (loss would be equal to the Stop Loss of course. So for example if we entered our Stop Loss at 120 pips then all the trades below – and that's 3 trades altogether – would become losers and would produce a loss of 3x120 = 360 pips altogether).

Trades (#) - How many trades reached this drawdown level before turning around and becoming winners. There were 27 trades which had less than 10 pip drawdown and then quickly turned into winners and 13 trades which had between 10 and 19 pips drawdown.

Trades (% of total trades) – same as above but expressed as percentage. For example 11.94% of the trades reached a drawdown of 20 to 29 percent before turning around and becoming winners.

Cumulative % - how many winner trades would we have in the end if using this level as a Stop Loss (expressed as percentage). For example – the sum of all the trades which would turn winners if using 30 pips as a stop loss is 27+11+8 = 46 which is exactly 75.41% of 61 wining trades.

Profits At this Stop Loss Level – this is the most interesting column of all. What it means is: “If we assigned this level as a Stop Loss level to all of our trades, what would the end result be?” (as pips profit). As you can see, at 10 pips stop loss (which of course is ridiculous but we'll look at it for the sake of example) all of our trades except for the 27 trades in the first row would have been losers, because all the other trades except these ones had a drawdown greater than 10 pips and so they would have hit our Stop Loss level at 10 pips.

EUR/USD Winning Trades Distribution by Max Drawdown

A quick glance at the data and charts immediately reveals certain patterns:

1. Looking at the pie chart we can see that 75% of all winning trades became winners without incurring a drawdown greater than 30 pips! You can also see that from the “Cumulative %” column. Wow. If we setup a stop loss (SL) at 30 pips we would still catch 75% of all winning trades. AND we wouldn't have to worry about how the system is doing! While that is definitely good news we can see (by looking at the second chart and at the last column of the table) that using such a low SL value would cut our profits in half (422 pips instead of 800+!)

A quick glance at the bar chart shows us that there are 2 peaks in the profit values – the first one around the 60-80 pip Stop Loss where our profits would have been 560 pips and the second one around the 140-150 pip Stop Loss where our profits would have been around 700 pips.

So... 880 pips versus 560... (or versus 700 if you feel cheeky and greedy ;)). Indeed the question now is – How Greedy Are You? And when I say "greedy" I mean that in a good way. But don't forget that at the end of the day the idea is to make money on autopilot, not drinking countless pots of coffee, pulling all-nighters, and staring at the charts . As a matter of fact my “unprotected” trading experiment could have had much more dire consequences if I didn't close that horrible 600 pip loser trade at “only” 370 pips loss after 2 weeks of baby-sitting it, biting my nails and losing my sleep over it. I don't know about you but I would gladly sacrifice 50 or 70 pips a month only to know that my account and profits are safe! So...

Personally, I settled for the 80 pips Stop Loss and I don't complain.

Eventually I wrote a nifty litle helper robot which would apply a stop loss value to all of Forex Autopilot's trades! Since I started using my proprietary "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot, I can say that this is now truly an automated system! I set it and forget it! I know that the SL values entered by my "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot will protect my account when Forex Autopilot decides to act up!

But hey … don't let me tell you what to do! I just give you some food for thought – how you want to use the results of my findings is of course entirely up to you. If you feel bold and want to go for the 140 pip stop loss – by all means, go ahead. Nothing wrong with that. Even at this SL level it's still a better setup than trading with no stop loss at all!

(By the way, I lied that I settled for the 80 pip stop loss... well not exactly... I told the truth, but not the entire truth. I do use the 80 pip SL most of the time but I also use the 145 pip one but in a special, clever way ;). How exactly? That's a little secret and I will keep it a secret for now. You won't need it if you don't decide to buy the Forex Autopilot system anyway and if you do – I will send the details to you you along with my helper software ;)

How To Use The Information In This Report

First of all you will need to decide which Stop Loss level you want to use. As pointed out above, I myself use mostly the 80 pip stop loss. You may want to experiment a little and see which value gives best results with your broker.

The way you can use this system “manually” is by simply looking at your trades every now and then and adding a Stop Loss to your orders. Manually. That will work... sorta...

Of course this is not exactly what I would call “Autopilot Trading”, but hey – it's better than nothing! Of course if the robot opens a trade while you are away and you come back 3 hours later and the trade is 200 pips down then this won't help you much. Plus you will have to deal with the nuisance of calculating the exact Stop Loss value manually and run the risk of calculating it wrong.

How about a better way of doing this! Why not automate this process? Then you will have a truly automated system which you don't need to baby sit all the time!

The Pitch....

Ok, here's my “pitch”:

1. You click on the "download" link below and buy the Forex Autopilot.

2. I get a nice commission from the sale (Don't worry it does not cost you more to buy through me. The commission is paid by the developer and not by you so your price is always the same. As a matter of fact I will show you a clever little trick which will save you $10 on the sale!).

3. You drop me a quick email with your full name and Receipt # for the Forex Autopilot purchase and I send you (absolutely FREE!) my nifty little "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot which will perform all of the above tasks 100% automatically! (Of course I will also send you detaled instructions on how to set it up.)
Using the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" you will never have to worry about Forex Autopilot opening a bad trade, anymore, because the robot will monitor all trades and assign a stop loss of your choice to each new trade as soon as one is open!

Sounds like a good deal? Ok – here's the download button...

How does the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" Robot work?

1. You copy the robot into your “experts” folder inside your Meta Trader 4 installation folder in Program Files.

2. After starting MT4 you start the Forex Autopilot as usual – by dropping it into a EURUSD M1 chart.

3. You then open a NEW chart 9same currency pair) and drop the StopLossWatchDog EA icon onto that chart. That's important. Do not drop it into the same chart as the Forex Autopilot as you can only have one robot per chart and if you drop the SLWD EA onto the same chart it will terminate the Forex Autopilot!

4. Once dropped onto a chart the robot will ask you what is your desired stop loss level (the TrailingStop parameter) – enter it. The other two parameters will be covered later, leave them as they are for now.

5. That's it! From this moment on the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" will watch all the trades in your account and will attach to them the specified Stop Loss level! Being a smart little piece of software the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" will use a server-based Stop Loss but treat it as a Trailing Stop which will maximize your profits in case of a favourable price move. If the trade goes bad then the Tr. Stop Loss behaves as a regular Stop Loss.

6. Note that I said “server-based” Stop Loss. You see, in MT4 all trailing stop losses are client-based, i.e. they are maintained in your MT4 terminal, not on the broker's servers. What this means is that if your connection with the sever is interrupted (internet connectivity problems, power failure, computer failure) your trailing stop is no longer active. The "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" , Using a server-based SL, which is constantly monitored by the robot eliminates this problem!

I strongly encourage you to spend 1/2 hour and test the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot on a demo before you use it on your live account! Open a couple of trades, play with different Stop Loss values, notice how the robot adjusts the Stop Loss level as sson as your account gains pips, etc.

Things To Watch For

If you want to use your account with some other robots or trade manually then we have a slight problem. You see, the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot will assign the specified Stop Loss level to all of your trades as soon as they are entered. This may not be what you want.

What can you do in this case?

A. Don't mess around with the account that you're using for your Forex Autopilot trading. Open another one for manual trading. That's the best solution. Honestly. You see, if you have 2 orders opened by the robot and 3 more opened by some other robot or by yourself it will very soon turn into one big mess. It will quickly become very hard to calculate your available margin and your allowed level of risk when opening new trades. It will be hard to keep track of your trades visually. You may accidentally close one of the robot's trades thinking it is one of your own. In short – you can easily lose control of the situation and that's why my best advice is – don't do it. Better open another account for manual trading.

B. If you absolutely insist that you want to trade manually (or with another robot) in the same account. Then what you can do is use the the IgnoreComment parameter of the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot. Enter something there, e.g. 111 or zzz. From now on, whenever you enter your manual orders enter the same string as a comment. So if you entered 111 into the IgnoreComment parameter of the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" then enter 111 in the Comment field of the New Order Window. This will tell the Watch Dog not to attach as stop loss to this order.

C. The above will allow you to trade manually in the same account but it does not solve your problem if you decide to use other robots in the same account. Again, I can't stress enough that this is a VERY bad idea as the two robots will each think that they have the entire account to themselves and base their margin and equity calculations on this assumption which will of course be wrong. But if you absolutely must do it then I will show you a workaround for this problem should you decide to buy the Forex Autopilot (will be in my email).

Quick Overview of the EUR/GBP Trades

Ok let's take a quick look at EUR/GBP and see why I decided that I will not be using Forex Autopilot on this pair anymore.

I won't even bother with the pie chart as it's not really helpful in this particular case.

Looking at the bar chart which shows projected profits for a given Stop Loss level we can immediately see that:

a) Low Stop Loss values actually produce negative results!

b) There is no clearly defined areas of maximum values – the profits grow as we increase the Stop Loss and eventually reach a peak value at 160 pip stop loss. After that they flatline. This essentialy tells us that this is a risky setup – obviously every losing trade will come back at some point if you are prepared to wait forever and to incur infinite drawdown! This of course is not something that any reasonable trader is prepared to accept so my advice is to not trade this pair with the Forex Autopilot robot.

Also just observing the robot trading I could see that it was trading erratically, with no clear pattern. Some losing trades would be closed early while others would be waited out forever. I suppose the developers really mean it when they say that the Forex Autopilot is designed to trade the EUR/USD pair...

Conclusion

...and Download Instructions

Ok folks, that was all from me, I hope you found the information on this page useful and helpful in your future trading with the Forex Autopilot EA. Should you decide to give it a try, please use the download button ...

and remember:

1. It comes with a  2 month guarantee  so you will have plenty of time to try it and see if it works for you. If you don't think you like this system - simply return it – no questions asked! And the best part is - the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" is yours to keep, even if you decide to return the Forex Autopilot!

2. Don't forget to send me an email after you complete the purchase so I can send you the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot and the additional info, as promised. Please include your full name and your Receipt #. DO NOT send me your credit card info.

Cheers, and happy trading!

Here's that button one more time for your convenience...

Your Truly,

Alan Bentler

Q: "...Alan, wait - I am not interested in the Forex Autopilot, can I get your "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" robot separately?"
A: Sure, why not... If you prefer to get the "Stop-Loss Watch Dog™" separately you can purchase it through this button (CC or PayPal secure payments through PayPal) for the one-time Low Price of $20. You'll get free updates for life...