RoboMiner

Using the RoboMiner EA

Q: Where do I find support for the use of this EA?

A: The EA is very simple and will likely require very little support. You just set the settings as instructed in the PDF instructions and in the video, and let it trade (both found under the Support tab above). It will not take a trade every hour. Over time, it may average 1 trade per day or close to that. But there will be times when it goes a couple of days with no trades. It will make a nice little return for you if you just let it do its work without interference. If you need any further support please contact us at forex-goldmine(@)tradingmetro.com.

A: Yes. You can close your trading platform over the weekend, but all trades that are open are left open. When you re-open your trading platform on Sunday afternoon or evening, the EA will pick up where it left off as soon as trading resumes.

A: Up until recently, the answer has been No. RoboMiner is part of a complete trading system that was originally designed around the AUDNZD and nothing else. There is money management involved and we took into account the lowest and highest trading range of that pair. You could put it on a 1 hour or 4 hour chart, it didn’t matter, as long as it was on an AUDNZD chart. Recently, we added the ability to trade the EURCHF to the RoboMiner. This does require a higher minimum balance than the AUDNZD to keep this element of safety. Trading both pairs actually increase the safety of the whole system by creating a mini-basket. If you do decide to trade the EURCHF, you must use a different magic number setting, although it is recommended that the magic number (found in the EA settings when you attach it to a chart) still end with 1. Also, if you are a beginner, you may wish to begin with just one currency just to familiarize yourself with using the RoboMiner.

Still, if you really feel that you need to try other currencies with this trading system, there is another more advanced EA called the GT-Shadow, that requires a lot more settings, but it can be used on other pairs. However, it’s not recommended for live accounts at this time and you really should have at least several months experience becoming comfortable with this system before you even think about trying to use this more complicated EA on other unknown pairs. If you have any questions about GT-Shadow, please contact us at forex-goldmine(@)tradingmetro.com.

A: Yes. You must keep the platform on all the time for the EA to cause the trades to take place when they need to. Don’t turn the platform off (except on the weekend when trading is finished). And of course, you must be always connected to the Internet while the Metatrader 4 platform is open.

Virtual platforms with institutional level hardware and Internet access are available for those serious investors who don’t want to rely on their own home computer equipment and access. There is a nominal monthly charge for this, please contact us at forex-goldmine(@)tradingmetro.com for more information.

A: There are 3 ways to stop trading, you can remove the EA from the chart. You do that by right-clicking on the smiley face, and then selecting the choice to remove the EA. Or to just temporarily stop trading, you can click on the expert advisors button at the top of the screen and turn off all of the EAs (expert advisor) that way. You can also hit F7 to open the settings box and change “DoTrades” to false which will allow the program to remain active without taking any trades.

A: No. It is likely that nothing is wrong.

It may be several hours or even a day or so before it triggers its first trade. As long as you have a smiley face, showing that live trades are enabled, and have the comments showing up to the left of your screen, and the do trades is set to true in the settings box, then the EA is working. The next trade will be triggered when the bid price reaches 1 of 2 predetermined price points. Look in the comment on the left side of your chart for the “Long/Short open for range X = x.xxxx” for the prices where you range will open a trade.

Don’t forget to take the spread into consideration. This system averages between 6 – 10% return a month. It does not make huge amounts all at once, but if you let it be, it will make steady amounts as the days and weeks go by.

A:Click on the “tools” menu at the top of your trading platform. Then click on “Options”. Then, click on the tab labeled “Expert Advisors”. Make sure that “Enable Expert Advisors” and “Allow Live Trading” are both checked. Make sure that both check marks that begin with “Disable experts when” are both NOT checked. Then click on the OK button to save that and close that form.

The main “Expert Advisors” button at the top of your trading platform should be on, and it should be green and not red. If that still doesn’t give you a smiley face, then press F7, and click on the “Common” tab, and make sure that “Allow Live Trading” is checked. But what you did earlier should have done this already.

A: There are several brokers that don’t offer the AUDNZD. However, the AUDNZD pair is offered by most, and especially those that are suggested by Trading Metro. You must right-click on the “Symbol” heading in the market watch window. Then left-click on “show all”. This will have the platform show all the currencies that are available.

A: Either one will work fine. Many use 100001, but there is no reason that you can’t use 510001. It is only intended to keep that EA different from any other one you may be using. When the EA is working, the magic number you set is actually only the first one out of 64 that the EA will generate. 510001, 510002, 510003, etc. But the EA handles all of that internally.

A: It is a grid trading system. It is waiting for the price to reach a predetermined point before it closes a trade.

If you study the back test data that is shown on the website, you will see that it is sometimes several days before a trade is closed. It is not meant to be nursed along waiting for trades. They happen when appropriate. Over the long term, you will see the profits build up as the trades close and accumulate their profits.

We have studied the movement of this pair over a long term and it will eventually get there. But it is rare for a trade to close within a few minutes. What you are describing is very normal for this system.

A: Yes and No.

The EA can run on any time frame. You can run it on an H1, H4, D1 and even W1 chart if you wish. You can even change the time frame of the chart it is on while it is on the chart, and it will not hurt anything. It just doesn’t care about the time frame at all.

If you are using the same terminal program, and wish to operate the EA on a different chart of the AUDNZD or EURCHF, you could do so as long as the two following conditions are met:

1. The magic numbers must be completely different. Once set could start with 100001 and the other set could start with 510001, for example. Each instance of the EA uses that magic number as a starting point, and then adds 1 internally until it has 64 magic numbers total. So the EA that is using 100001 is actually using all the magic numbers between 100001 and 100064. You cannot leave any conflict between the magic numbers of the 2 robots.
2. You must have a large enough balance to support trading the system twice. The system must have a minimum of $2000 balance to support trading .01 lots. More is better. By setting the BalanceFactor to 2000, you are allowing for that. But if you are adding another currency you cannot do that. In that case, you must have a minimum balance of $3500 and your BalanceFactor on each EA must be set to a minimum of 3500. This will cause each robot to trade .01 lots until you get to $7000 in balance, and then each will trade .02 lots, etc.

We actually recommend using both Currencies if you have enough in the balance to protect your open trades. This is known as a mini basket and adds a certain amount of protection from margin calls. It is far more unlikely that both currency pairs would reach extreme areas simultaneously than it would be for just one pair to go into the extreme highs or lows. Which means that you should have a little extra balance to help protect the extra open trades that add to the draw-down from the pair that is not trading in the extreme area.

A: This determines the maximum number of ranges in the whole grid that you will trade. Note that you will only trade a maximum of half the ranges at one time, either as buys or as sells, depending on where the price is.

For example, setting 1 sets up a total of 39 ranges in the whole grid. Add 1 to that, and then divide by 2. At that setting, you will have only a maximum of 20 trades left open at one time. Under setting 3, with 23 ranges in the grid, you add 1 and divide by 2, and find that you will only have 12 trades maximum open at one time.

So, setting 2 is more conservative than setting 1, and setting 3 is more conservative than setting 2. These range settings allow you to adjust your risk level vs. your profit. When you use setting 2 or 3 you make your account safer but in doing so you are also likely reducing your return.

Whichever setting you choose will still be centered at the same point, and so it will keep the range # consistent, so that you can switch from one to the other and still keep the same magic number for the open trades that the EA is monitoring.

A: The BalanceFactor is an important setting that is part of the money management portion of the EA. The EA will trade .01 lots for every multiple of the amount you have in the BalanceFactor.

For example: You have 2000 for your BalanceFactor setting. The EA will trade .01 lots until you reach an actual acccount balance of $4000 and then it will trade .02 lots until you reach an actual account balance of $6000. And so on.

You have 2500 for your BalanceFactor setting. The EA will trade .01 lots until you reach an account balance of $5000 and will then trade .02 lots until you reach an account balance of $7500. And so on.

Obviously, the higher you have that setting, the safer you will be. It is important to not set it below 2000. The math has been worked out so that the AUDNZD can cover its entire historical range without you receiving a margin call as long as you don’t trade more than .01 lots for every $2000 of account balance. This is assuming a standard account with 200:1 account leverage, which is no problem with most brokers. If you have 400:1 leverage, you have even more of an advantage in this respect.

As a matter of interest, if you were to trade an IBFX mini account, with a 10000 lot size, then you would still want to leave your BalanceFactor setting to 2000 or higher. The EA will adjust itself internally, automatically, and will trade an additional .01 lots for every $200 of account balance. Thus, with an IBFX mini account, you could theoretically trade this system with as little as $200. On a standard account, however, it is important to have a minimum of $2000 to trade this system. And that is starting with .01 lots. If your broker only allows you to trade a minimum of .1 lots, then you would need a minimum of $20,000 to be safe, and you would have to adjust your balance factor so that it would not change over to .2 lots until you reached a $40,000 balance.

We recommend that as your account balance grows over time, you set this setting to be more and more conservative (higher). We cannot guarantee that the AUDNZD will never move beyond its historical high and low prices, as unlikely as that might seem at this time.

A: If you want to read information in the comments about your current trade with the RoboMiner, such as where the order opened and where it will close, here is what to do:

First of all, it will help you to show the comments for your current open order at the bottom of the screen. A big reason for this is that each order’s magic number is shown in the comments for that order. If you don’t have the comments showing in your orders at the bottom, here’s what to do. Your open trades are in a box at the bottom of the MeteTrader4. On the bar just above that is the headings of order, time type and size etc. Right click on any of these headings and click next to comments placing a check mark there.

Now, as you look at the comments on the left of your chart, depending on where the price is, you may be looking at the information for the next grid higher than the grid of your current order. It is also possible you are looking at the same grid. You can tell by comparing the magic number in your comments at the bottom of the screen (if you have the comments showing) to the magic number in the chart comments.

You can find the magic number on the chart comments in the lower area of the comments to the left of your chart. If it is the same as the magic number in the comments for your order, then the “Reverse Close” that is showing in the chart comments is the point where that sell trade will close.

If your comments on the screen show that you are in grid 26, but your trade is grid 25, (very possible), then press F7 to open your settings, and replace the 0 with a 25 in the DisplayLevel setting. This will show you all the open and close points for grid 25. If your DisplaySetting is 0, it shows the grid settings for the current price level, but sometimes it is helpful to be able to see other levels, as in this case.

For buy orders, the Forward Open and Forward Close items show the order open and close points. For sell orders, the Reverse Open and Reverse Close items show that. Orders are always triggered by the bid price reaching the predetermined level. Incidentally, the number after the words “Forward Open” and “Forward Close” is the number of the current grid that you are viewing. This matches the number in the magic number. For example, magic number 510025 is the magic number assigned to a trade for grid # 25, if you have your first magic number set to 510001.

If you put a 25 in the DisplayLevel, so that you are looking at the data for grid # 25, you should see that if your sell order opened at 1.1650, it will close when the bid reaches 1.1610.

Down lower in the comments, you should see that the buy orders end when the price reaches grid 21 and that the sell orders start at that point.

If it is difficult to read the comments on the chart, try changing the time to the 1 minute tab.

A: Most of the time, the size of the spread and slippage is not an issue, but during an unusual news event, it may become an issue. Whenever a trade is triggered, the EA looks at the distance from the bid price to the actual trade price that is about to take place. If a sell is being closed, then that would be the Ask price. If the spread is extraordinarily wide, due to the broker widening the spread during a news event, then the trade won’t be allowed to happen, and the EA will wait until the spread comes back into tolerance before it tries again.

The reason this was done was due to one event that happened during testing, when some news was released. The spread was widened from 8 Pips to over 36 Pips and the price moved really fast, just as a trade was about to be closed. Instead of being closed at 1.1608, while the bid was 1.1600, the spread widened and the price shot up so that the Ask price was 1.1663, and that was the price we got on a close that should have been 1.1608. In a determination to never let that happen again, we put in the special slippage test routine. The scenario where we needed it only happened once during months of testing, but that was enough to make me want to do something about it. The slippage function is there now in case it ever happens again.

The normal spread is 8 Pips for FXDD and 11 Pips for IBFX. I set the slippage to 16, which means that it will still take the trade if the Ask is separated from the Bid by as much as 15 Pips, but cuts the trade off at 16 Pips difference. That allows some room for movement from the time the EA decides it needs to trade to the time it does the trade, while still protecting us.

Account Balance and Money Management Questions

Q: What is the Minimum Balance recommended to trade this system?

A: For a standard account that allows you to trade .01 lots, $2,000 is the recommended minimum balance, $2,250 or $2500 would be even better if trading only one currency. For that standard .01 lot starting point using both currencies, use $3500 as a minimum and higher is still safer.

For a mini account (10000 lot size) with the ability to trade .01 lots, then you could start with as little as $200, although $250 would be better.

In either of the 2 above scenarios, you would put 2000 or 2250 or 2500 as the figure in your “BalanceFactor” setting. If needed, the EA will detect that you are trading a mini account, and will adjust the 2000 to 200 internally.

If your broker only allows you to trade with 1 decimal place, ie, .1 lots is the minimum you can trade, then you would need 10x as much money in your account balance. You would still put 2000 or 2500 in your “BalanceFactor” setting, but you would need to start with $20000 in a one currency account.

The rule of thumb is, that for a standard account, ie, an account with a 100,000 lot size, you need a minimum of $2,000 for every .01 lots traded. For a mini account, ie, an account with a 10,000 lot size, you can trade .01 lots for every $200 of account balance. Setting your “BalanceFactor” to 2000 will accomplish this. If you do that, then the EA will trade .01 lots until your balance reaches $4000, and then it will start trading .02 lots. etc.

For additional safety, you could set your BalanceFactor to 2250. That means that the EA will trade .01 lots until you reach $4500, and then it will move up to .02 lots.

That may seem like a small number of lots to trade, but the system we are using dictates that we be very conservative in our lot sizes, and if you just follow these rules, you will still be rewarded nicely over time.

A: Other money management tips to make your account even safer:

1. Begin on a lower BalanceFactor setting when you have little to lose and increase the settings as the account gets larger.

   Example: I may start with 100% trade coverage with a BalanceFactor setting of 2000 and a RangesSetting of 1 (66) until I get to $10,000 then change my BalanceFactor to 2250. After I hit $20,000 I might kick the BalanceFactor up to 2500 and set my RangesSetting at 2 (50) to trade only 75% of the range, then at $40,000, set the BalanceFactor to 2800. At $100,000 I might want to increase my safety by decreasing the number of trades taken in the outer reaches by setting my RangesSetting to 3, I would drop to 40 range levels (60%) leaving the BalanceFactor on 2800.

2. Take your starting amount out early. After your account doubles, watch for it to increase by how much you put in to get it started and take that amount out. After this, you are operating on zero risk. You still don’t want to lose anything but if you do it this way, you can only profit.
3. The program will continue to increase your trading amount until you reach the broker’s maximum. Until you reach that amount, you can open a second account with the same broker that you don’t trade. When ever you take money from your trading account, take out a little extra and move it to to your second account. If you need money fast and don’t want to see if taking it out would mess up your open trades, this is the way to do it. If you feel that something has happened in the world and you want to protect your account even further, you can move those second account funds back it to the primary trading account. This will not be necessary after reaching the brokers max.

Trading with this type of grid system is more of a money management trading strategy than a typical trading system. If you use the other money management tips as well, you will have about the safest account that can be had. Even the currency pairs used are for safety. Australia and New Zealand’s economies are vary much the same. If there is something happening in the world, it would most likely effect them both equally. It would take a world class event happening to just one country but not effecting the other, to make any significant change in the currency prices.

A: We wanted the RoboMiner to be very simple, easy enough for a rank beginner. So the money management for that is only the BalanceFactor. If you have a $10,000 balance, and a BalanceFactor set to 2000, then you will trade .05 lots. All it does is trade .01 lots per BalanceFactor worth of balance. Of course, it detects an IBFX mini account, so it would also trade .05 lots for a $1000 balance on an IBFX mini account.

The other EAs allow you to use that same BalanceFactor if you have UseMarginPercent and UseEquity set to false. That is for the convenience of those who started with the RoboMiner, and are used to using the BalanceFactor.

If you set UseMarginPercent to true, then you can have the EA trade a lot size based on a required margin amount that is a given percent of your total balance. If you go one step further, then you can set UseEquity to true, and it will calculate that margin percent as a percentage of your account equity instead of your account balance.

Let’s say that you have a balance of $10,000 and your equity is $9,000 and you used 5.0 as the margin, and UseMarginPercent was true and UseEquity was false. It would try to calculate how many lots to trade that would cause your broker to charge you with $500 worth of equity for that single trade, because that is 5% of $10,000. If UseEquity was true, it would trade the number of lots that would use $450 of margin, because that is 5% of $9,000. Of course, that setting is way too high for grid trading. I usually recommend something like 0.125 for the margin setting. Also, we should mention that the EA does take your account leverage into account in those calculations.

The reason we have the BalanceFactor for the AUD/NZD and the EUR/CHF presets set to 3500 is because with the RoboMiner, that is the recommended minimum standard account balance and BalanceFactor setting to trade both pairs on the same account. If you were just trading the AUD/NZD alone, you could have a balance and BalanceFactor setting of 2000 (minimum). If the GridWeaver is traded by itself on an account, I likewise recommend a minimum balance of $2000 on a standard account and a BalanceFactor setting of 2000. And, if using the margin calculation instead, at 400:1, this usually works out the same if you use 0.125 for the margin setting.

General Questions

Q: Do important news events have an effect on this system>

A: Important news events usually don’t have a huge effect, but sometimes they actually help a little bit. We generally don’t worry about them at all.

A: As long as the prices are moving, we don’t really care. And they are always moving. We suppose that a ranging market over a range of 100-200 pips would be ideal, but it works even in trending markets. Depending on where in the trading range the trend is taking place, we might earn profits right away, or else we will earn them when the prices retrace or the trend reverses.

A: It is a grid trading system. It is waiting for the price to reach a predetermined point before it closes a trade. It is sometimes several days, weeks and maybe months before a trade is closed. It is not meant to be nursed along waiting for trades. They happen when appropriate. Over the long term, you will see the profits build up as the trades close and accumulate their profits.

We have studied the movement of the pairs over a long term and it will eventually get there. But it is rare for a trade to close within a few minutes. What you are describing is very normal for this system.

A: No. Neither EA or Robot uses a martingale strategy, because the size of the trade does not change after each trade. A martingale strategy plans on some trades closing at a loss, and then it increases and even doubles the size of the next trade. The RoboMiner is programmed to never closes trades at a loss and doesn’t vary the size of the trade until it would be dictated by the normal money management rules of the system, (IE: your account balance grows to a point where it can trade an amount safely and still allow for the full range of the movement of the currency pair).

The RoboMiner uses a grid trading strategy. The size of each trade is an important part of the strategy, because we worked out the math to allow the currency pair to go higher price than it has ever historically reached, and lower than it has ever historically fallen to, still without getting a margin call.

The whole idea is to be able to just let it alone and trade over a long term, and it will make a nice average monthly return for you. That is why we tell people to not think like “traders”, but to think like long term “investors” when using this EA.

A: We have had as many as 25 or 30 open positions in the past. There is no real limit as such, except for what your equity can handle. As long as you are trading conservatively as has been suggested, you should be OK, even with a number of open positions. The system is designed to have positions open almost all the time, and so I do not worry about that. For each currency pair, if you look at the lower left of the chart, at the bottom of the comments, you will see two comments: Open Forward Orders and Open Reverse Orders.

Each one will be market true or false, with a number in parenthesis after it. That number in parenthesis is the grid number you need to get to in order for it to switch from one to the other. If you are buying, and the number in parenthesis says (33), then you need to get to grid instance number 33 to switch to selling. Actually, it will buy at the bottom of range 33 and sell at the top and then up from there. At the top of the chart, next to the Forward Open or Reverse Open comment, it will give you the current range number. So, if the current range was 26, then you would need to go up 7 ranges of however many pips each range is (likely to be 40 pips each range with the AUD/NZD) to start selling.

You can actually see the price where this will happen by pressing F7, and putting that range number in the DisplayLevel setting. If you put 33 in there and press OK, then it will display the forward open (long), forward close, reverse open (short) and reverse close prices for that range, which would be somewhere around 1.1700 or so. Once you see that , you know where it will switch over to selling. But don’t forget to put a 0 back in the DisplayLevel setting again, and then press OK.

A: “I am afraid that the price will move and never return to normal and I will have a trade left dangling like an abandoned child.” In theory, according to your example, that could happen. You would have a trade dangling like an abandoned child, as you put it. However, in reality, it usually doesn’t happen that way.

Yes, for a while, it might seem like that would be the case, but sooner or later, the prices return to where they were previously. With the RoboMiner, we had this happen over the summer when the price of the AUD/NZD went way up, to 1.2964, which was higher than it ever had gone since before 2000. But they eventually did go as low as 1.06xx in a recent week, which was lower than where we started. The thing to remember is that as long as you trade with a conservative lot size, you can weather those times of waiting.

Most of the time, things go well, but there are occasional times when you do have trades hanging. It has happened to me enough, and I have had them turn around and eventually close enough times that I don’t let it worry me any more. If need be, I just don’t look at my account for a while, other than to be sure that the EA is running OK. I just put it out of my mind, and then I am eventually rewarded with the profits I was waiting for.

If you have a sound trading system, no matter what system it is, there will be times when things seem to be going against you, but if the system is sound, then it will eventually recover and you will end up profitable. That is part of the mind-set that is necessary to be a successful trader.

TroubleShooting

Q: I am getting an error message 129 that says it can’t close a trade. What is wrong?

A: You are trying to trade 2 currency pairs at once, on 2 different charts, but are using the same magic number for each one. The magic number must be different. You could use 510001 as the magic number for the AUDNZD pair, for example, and 610001 as the magic number for the EURCHF pair. The EA for the one currency pair is trying to close an order for the other currency pair at a price that is invalid for that pair.

The magic numbers are what tell the EA it should be controlling those particular orders. And that is why each instance of the EA that you are using on different charts must use a different magic number.

It is also a good idea to have each magic number setting end with the number 1, for reasons that you will come to appreciate over time.

If you have any existing EURCHF trades open that have the AUDNZD magic number series as part of that trade, you will need to close them manually and start the EURCHF over again with a different number.

Once you have made certain that you are using a different magic number on each chart, and are certain that no EURCHF orders are open using the same magic number series as that used for the AUDNZD orders, then you should no longer have this problem.