FOMC

I've stopped my EAs ahead of this comming FOMC. I normally stop my EAs on FOMC, NFP, and bank holidays. Extremely volatile situation would widen spreads possibly causing an EA to malfunction. Also, on bank holidays, market tend lose a proper momentum, which may also cause an EA to malfunction.

Market is always there. I won't regret if the day I stopped my EAs would have been a successful day for other people who kept their EA running. The risk for such days is way too high compared to what I would have gotten.

IrisFX

I've stopped trading IrisFX. This bot is too risky. It would be very difficult to find a right broker.

Here are some suggestions regarding brokers.

IrisFX doesn't work with GoMarkets. Although they offer tight spread, I've tried their demo account and it kept winning and losing again and again. It just doesn't go anywhere. So, 1.5 pip spread is still not good enough.

I've tried FxOpen. It slips frequently, giving you bad fills for IrisFX. No good.

MB Trading offers one of the tightest spreads like 0.9 pip, but it sometimes slips. Not as bad as FxOpen so it may work well, but because MB Trading is based on FIFO (no hedge) rule, you have to have two accounts, one for long only and the other for short only (this bot places pending orders on both end by default). It will make your progress very slow. Plus, this broker offers only 1:50 leverage, making your progress even slower.

I haven't tried IrisFX on FXCBS, but in my past experience, FXCBS always slips at least one pip. Their execution is not reliable. So I don't even want to try IrisFX on their demo. For this EA, only 1 pip slippage makes it difficult to get a good result.

You must find a broker with one of the lowest spread, and every execution has to be almost no slippage or very small slippage. Otherwise, it'll keep losing. Actually, you must be prepared to lose your money with it. So be careful.

New EAs Added

I've started trading Wallstreet Forex Robot and Forex Growth Bot.

At a grance, Wallstreet Forex Robot seems to be woring extremely fine that's because I run it with very  high risk setting which means if it takes a loss, it would take a big loss as the default stop loss is said to be very high.

Very detailed, helpful review about this EA can be found at Brit's EA Review.

The results of Forex Growth Bot seem to be mixed depending on brokers or each person. Besides, you sometimes have to intervene and close some of open positions manually. So my recommendation is that you use the same broker as the  author and monitor what the author's EA has been doing and follow it as a guideline. The author's stats are found here.

IrisFX is still working fine after I changed my account. This EA is extremely broker dependent, and it's very tough to find a compatible broker. The hints are the broker must offer extremely tight spread and extremely fewer slippage.

Transfering Account

After making about 18% in about half a month, I've decieded to move my fund to a new account at the same broker that I use. I used a referrel link to open a new account with the same broker I've been using IrisFx because I could get 0.3 pip better spread using the referral link. So I would have to start the Myfxbook stants again from the beggining. But I believe that 0.3 pip better spread would definitely be helpful for IrisFx as this EA is very spread and slippage sensitive.

Reverse Osmosis Unit

As many of you might have known, there had been Great Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. I was far away from the most devastated area, but the damaged nuclear plants keeps emitting radioactive substances in the air and water (to the ocean and groundwater).

Last week, government reported that municipal water in some prefectures were radiation polluted and the quaity of tap water has exceeded the safe level for babies. After this announcement, everybody rushed to buy mineral waters and it has become harder to obtain water in stores around Japan.

In my area, tap water hasn't exceeded the safe level, but since we have two-year-old baby, I was worried about drinking water quality in my house. So I've decided to purchase reverse osmosis water filtering unit from a store in the U.S.

RO unit that I ordered costed about $300 (shipping to Japan costed additional $150!), but the investment would be much cheaper than regulary purchasing bottles of water in a long run. Besides, it's now very hard to purchase water bottles here in Japan. With a RO unit, you can turn unlimited amount of purified water.

Particles of radiactive substances can't go through filtering membranes of RO unit. So it's gonna be very safe. Also, I like purified water very much. It tastes much better than mineral water.

It's said that the problem of nuclear power plants last some years so I believe this investment would contribute the health of our family. Of course, the best solution is the stop of radioactive emission from the plants, but we have to do whatever we can do to manage our health.