Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! When I started out to learn automated trading, I was looking for some good and free information online. Ohhh the internet, such a shiny and beautiful place, where everybody can become a star! I have seen experts in suits with beautiful cars. I have seen people with bundles of cash in their hands. I have seen people living in Dubai, cruising around on a yacht! They all wanted my money to tell me the hidden secrets of successful trading. They talked about the holy grail and how to make a million with a small trading account. I didn’t believe them, so I looked further. And guess what? You can get free education online! No, I don’t mean all the free videos that I have released on YouTube these days. I am talking about free education from your broker. Well, my personal point of view is that brokers are the enemy. Let me explain that. Think about a salesman for used cars. Do you see him? What comes to your mind? When we were looking for a used car for my wife, we went to a car dealer that promised a “used car guarantee”. We found a car that looked promising, but when he tried to start it, the battery didn’t work. He fixed that, but we already were suspicious. My wife took a closer look and one of the tires was almost flat. He fixed that, too and gave us the keys for the car. The test drive was about two kilometers long. The car broke down and we had to wait for somebody from the car dealership to pick us up. It took almost an hour! When we were back, I forced the salesman to tell us the truth. The car was offered in a clients order and they didn’t check it in any way before they gave us the keys! They preferred to let their prospects test the car and fix it after the test drive! Now, do you believe we would at any time, under any possible circumstances buy something from that car dealership? The answer is: NO! Of course not, because it wasn’t a good experience! Now, what would a good experience look like? We went to another car dealer and wanted to get the keys for another car. He refused to give us the keys! Actually he brought us two hot cups of coffee, so we needed to talk to him for at least ten minutes. He asked us a few questions and wanted to join us when we did the test drive! I didn’t like the idea, but he insisted. When we went off the yard, he told my wife to turn left and use a certain road. It was full of potholes, so she didn’t want to drive there. But he insisted again and told her to increase the speed and drive right through the potholes. My wife was a bit nervous, but she did it and after we had passed that hardness test, she was very sure that she wanted to buy exactly this car. That was when my daughters were 6 and 4 years old. Today one of my daughters has finished school and is almost 19. This is a true story I have asked my wife at dinner, 10 minutes ago if it was really in 2006. Now SHE is driving that car! Do you think that this purchase was a good decision? Do you think that we would buy that car – or any other car – from the same salesman again? Well, that is surely a safe bet! Now let’s go back to trading. Why do you think your broker is offering free advice? Why do you think he wants to make you trade big amounts of money? Why do you think he offers you bonuses to do it as fast as possible? Well, from my own experience it depends on the broker. I have made good and bad experiences, but I don’t think free education from most brokers is the best way to make profits. It is simple math: If every trader makes a profit, what would happen to the broker? So I would suggest to take advice from different sources. Buy some books, join a few email lists and watch some YouTube videos. Make an educated guess what kind of trading style is suitable for you. I know that not everybody who visits my website is going to buy my stuff – and that is totally okay with me. Because I don’t need to sell the courses to make money for my living. I take the money, that is for sure,

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Do you like losses? Probably the answer is: NO! Nobody wants to lose money, so all traders try to avoid losses as good as they can. And what is the one thing that is promoted as the best way to avoid them? It is the stop loss. We all use it and there are several options for it. For example you can use a position based, fixed stop loss. The advantage of a position based and fixed stop loss is, that you can set it right when you open a new position. So with a position based and fixed stop loss you avoid the risk that you might have no stop loss when your computer goes offline. Or you could use a trailing stop. A trailing stop is a good way to secure profits and ride a trade as long as an existing trend is alive. Another option would be a break even stop, that is activated as soon as you are in a profitable zone. It will help you to avoid position based losses. With automated trading you can compare the different options and pick the option that promises the best results. But probably right now you do, what you always did. And I bet the most of your losses are produced by your own stop loss! It is easy to find out if I am right, all you need to do is to count your losses and find out, if you have decided to close the position with a loss – to avoid a bigger loss. What do you think is the reason why you do that? Well, probably it is fear! You fear losses. You want to avoid them. Because losses don’t feel good. But we want to avoid bad feelings. So what do we do? We open a position and hope for the best, but when we have an ongoing loss, we want to get rid of the pain. That is pure human psychology and that is why we close losses. You probably wouldn’t do that with injuries. If you accidently cut yourself into a finger while you are chopping carrots, that might also be a bad feeling. And I think you never would come to the conclusion that it is a good idea to cut off the whole finger to avoid more pain in the future. But when it comes to finances, people do things that they never would do in any other part of life. That is one reason that the best role in the financial market would be to be a broker. Brokers earn whenever you do anything with a position. They make money when you close a position and for them it doesn’t matter if you make a profit or a loss. All you need to do is to trade. A lot of people trade too big positions with too less capital. So they get frightened when a big draw down occurs. Now what? Could you stand the bad feeling of a possible loss – maybe not only for days, but for weeks? Probably not! You want to get rid of the pain, as fast as possible. Humans don’t like to wait for the results of a final exam. Humans don’t like to wait for the results of a physical examination. And humans don’t want to wait for the results of a potentially bad trade. The evolution gave us two things that cause all of our actions. We want to gain pleasure and we want to avoid pain! When it comes to trading, both things are available at any time. In my courses I often told the course members that I consider trading to be psycho terror. And you also might have heard that over 80 percent of new traders lose all their money within six months. Yes, that includes people like you and me. It includes doctors, lawyers and average people. People act based on their emotions and try to justify their emotional behaviour with logic afterwards. If you think that this isn’t true, just refuse to move your car for 10 seconds after the traffic light turns green. Probably you will find that the person behind you becomes furious before the 10 seconds are over – even on a sunday afternoon when nobody is in a hurry. One of the best ways to avoid losses is rarely mentioned by anyone. It is a way to not only avoid losses, but it also helps you to use your trading capital more efficiently. Most traders don’t even know that it exists! So how could you do that? Is it a stop loss that is based on magic algorit...

I made my first trade in 2013. It made a profit of 16 cents. On that day I knew, that I wanted to master this trading thing! My name is Raimund Bauer and if you are interested in this content, you are probably also interested in trading. Maybe you have already made some experiences with it – most likely not everything was pure pleasure, or was it? Most traders fall flat on their face within the first six months. And most of them never recover from that experience. That is the reason, why brokers try to squeeze as much money out of them – as fast as possible. The beginner is looking for somebody who will tell him the right entry that will make him a millionaire over night! Ohh, that magic entry signal, that is based on science that never fails! It is the most shiny thing, even more interesting as those fast sports cars and beautiful women, waving with bundles of money in their hands. They think that the entry signal is the most important thing to become a profitable trader! And guess what? It is not! Yes, there are differences between entry signals, but no, the entry is not the most important thing. You probably already know that. You have seen the price going in the opposite direction, right after you entered the market! You couldn’t believe your own eyes! You have been so confident, that this particular entry would make you a millionaire. It did work before, so why did it stop working as soon as it was about real money? And it probably didn’t take long until you came up with a clever idea: When the market did the opposite of what it should do, you would do the opposite too! Guess what? The market did the opposite of the opposite, now! How did the market know what you are doing? Hidden cameras? Is your broker cheating on you? Are you the victim of a worldwide conspiration? Probably not! Welcome to the wonderful world of trading, where your broker always wins while you pay – a lot of money – for every transaction. Those trading results are what happens while you made other plans. But still there is a chance that you can improve your situation. It is completely different from what you might expect – and most people can’t do it. So now you probably want to know what this one, most important thing is. Is it a complicated formula that was developed with a super computer? Or maybe it could be this big data artificial intelligence stuff that you have heard about? Ohh, could it be “the secret”, “the holy grail” or something that was included in the book “think and grow rich”? No, it is none of these things! Do you know how magicians do their tricks? They make you pay attention to some unimportant detail while they do something that you don’t notice! Maybe they take a saw and now they make magic moves with their arms, you see exploding fire in the background of the stage and afterwards they pretend to cut a virgin into two pieces. Can you believe that? A virgin? Who would believe in virgins these days? And who would cut one into two pieces? Actually the two parts of the virgin chest are big enough for two ladies. One shows the feet of the first lady and the other one shows the head of the second lady. Once you know that, you will no longer be a victim and fall for the trick. And actually you don’t really believe that magic exists, do you? Well, probably you do when it comes to trading. That is the area where you use magic numbers, you draw lines for support and resistance and you listen to news to get the insider information from the latest trading guru. Will the price go up or down? When will it do that? And for how long? These are the questions that have all your attention while you are missing the most important thing! It is more important than your entry signal. It is more important than what your trading guru told you. And it is more important than any kind of technical or fundamental data you can get. It is the fact, that you need to sell it for more than you have bought it! If you buy something for a dollar and sell it for fi...

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! The reason why I have automated all this stuff? I have a lot of customer requests that come in via email – so if you have a request, just send me an email- and preparing, recording and editing a 5 minute video takes about one to one and a half hour. We all have just 24 hours each day, and if you want to keep your family and your lifestyle, you need to decide what to do with that time! I want to keep my family and I need to eat, sleep, work and spend time with family and friends. A decision always means that we need to let something go to do something else. For example if I decide to keep a safe and secure job in a company, I decide to leave my family to go to work every day. I decide to accept the traffic jam on my commute and I decide to somehow get along with colleagues I maybe would not like to see in my spare time. I also decide to take the risk of being fired for reasons I can’t influence, for example if the company is going bankrupt due to false decisions of the owner. Some decisions might turn out to be a bad idea, for example if you are stressed out from a job you don’t like, that might harm your relationship. But the decision to automate trading is something that brings a lot of improvements. You probably also need to eat, sleep, work and spend time with your family and friends. If you are glued to your trading screen, you can’t do all that. You also know, that computers can calculate numbers much faster than humans. It might take you 4 or 5 seconds to calculate a multiplication for something like 856 *17. Try that and find out if you can beat your $2 calculator. Probably you have already experienced that you have opened a trade one day and the next day you might have asked yourself what was wrong with your eyes. Computers don’t have these kinds of problems. They don’t get tired. They can watch two dozen Forex charts, 24/7, without getting tired, bored or frustrated. They won’t do revenge trades and they know each price for each and every candle on those charts. They can calculate complicated algorithms in split seconds. Every day you read news about artificial intelligence and big data systems taking over the world. Automated cars, Facebook bots, search engines that still show you ads for the stuff that you have seen on Amazon two weeks ago. You already know that this is true and you already use computers to view a chart that is drawn based on computer generated data – to make a gut decision and be fooled by your eyes and emotions (more often than not). And you already know, that you want to benefit from that kind of technology, otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in automated trading. In the next few issues of this list we will go through the golden rules of automated trading

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! I have over 5 years real life experience with profitable MQL4 and MQL5 systems now, and there are only a few, easy rules that you need to understand to improve your trading results! Here is the first rule: Golden Rule 1 – You need to focus on results, not feelings! In October 2013 I asked the following question to the members of the MQL4 forum: What RaptorUK and other sophisticated MQL4 traders have in common? You can still read the thread today and find out, that people code for YEARS without ever creating a profitable system! Quote from the forum thread: “You assume too much . . . I don’t have a profitable EA”. So why would anybody have 18053 forum messages in a forum for automated trading without – ever – taking the time to create an automated and profitable system? The only answer I can come up with is: He must really like the forum participation! I learned that there are process oriented people (like him) and result oriented people (like me). I care about the results, the profit, the goal. They might enjoy the beauty of perfect code lines. Unfortunately I have been a member of a lot of forums where people beat up each other to get some kind of emotional satisfaction. They want to be right and they want to feel good. The first secret of automated trading is, that you won’t be the hero. You won’t get applause or the satisfying feeling that your genius brain was able to beat the market. Good automated trading is very boring. You will be unsatisfied with your results most of the time. The reason for that is, that the Forex Trading Framework (or any other good trading system) needs to be build in a way that it is able to survive the next crisis. Most traders fail within 6 months and lose all their money, because they are emotional. They enjoy when they make profits. They are sad when they make losses. They are desperate when they get the margin call. Conclusion: As long as you are trading to feel better you are doomed to be a victim of your own emotions! Solution: Scale down your account size until you have something that works! Would you have a sleepless night if you lose 17 Cents? Probably not! The amount of the loss is too small to harm you. That might be very different if you lose $1700. The only difference is the amount – and you create the appropriate feeling of guilt, shame and terror according to the size of a loss! But as soon as you can create constant profits on a demo account or Cent account, it only will take a few mouse clicks to scale up your account size! It doesn’t matter if you get results on a demo account. It doesn’t matter if you need 5 or 6 months to get those results The only thing that does matter is that you find – or create – a trading system you understand, know and trust! You need to trust it enough when you sleep. You need to trust it enough when you are on vacation. And you need to trust it enough in a crisis. If you can do that, it will help you to master rule 2 of our golden rules of automated trading….

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 2 – Don’t manipulate a working system People say: “Never touch a running system”! Last year I was invited to a birthday party and there was a barbecue. 5 guys were standing around the grill, trying to get the coals to glow! They used sticks and other gear to optimize the coals. They tried to improve everything, even used a hairdryer. It didn’t work! Today I think about that party whenever I have the wish to “improve” my productive trading system. I have bought a little tool, that works like a hobo stove! See the Wikipedia article Hobo_stove for details…. I bought this little thing for about $5 in a local store and now I just need to fill in the coal, use a grill lighter and come back 15 minutes later for a perfect barbecue experience! It is a reliable, easy system that has worked for me every time I used it. I still believe, those barbecue experts would think they could do it better – even if I would show them a video from that birthday party where they couldn’t do it! They probably would find reasons. The coal wasn’t dry enough or the wind wasn’t helpful. Whatever… It is not hard to come up with an explanation why they could do it better this time. We all still believe that we will have more money in the future, do our exercises regularly and become fit, thin, wealthy and smart. It is said that man will even try to find a solution for a flickering lamp on his deathbed, because humans are hardwired to believe that the future is going to be better – if we improve something! You can watch countless gamblers in Las Vegas doing crazy things to improve the outcome on slot machines. They might use a talisman or cover the display with their hands. They push buttons at a certain time and try to influence the outcome in any way they can imagine. But you and I know, that those slot machines are 100 percent automated today. You could hit those machines with a hammer and it wouldn’t change a thing about the money that comes out of those devices. And those gamblers know that – but they can’t change their behaviour – because they feel better when they do whatever they do. Humans are hardwired to look for heuristics to improve things. You can think of heuristics as an abbreviation to find faster solutions without spending too much brain energy. So whenever you see something that isn’t working as expected, your brain will try to find a better way. But it is lazy, so it is looking for a fast and easy solution that doesn’t cost too much energy. Usually this is what happened if we find ourself asking what we have seen on the chart when we started that one, big losing trade a few days ago. Golden Rule 2 – Don’t manipulate a working system Profitable trading is not about you! It is about profits! To be a profitable trader you must have rules and you need to stick to those rules. If you have a rule to close a trade when X happens and that produces a loss, take the loss! If you have backtested the Forex Trading Framework, you might have seen losses that occur just because your trading system needs to close all the open positions on the last day of your backtesting period. In reality you would never close all positions with a loss – just because it is December the 31th, but the Strategy Tester will do that because it doesn’t care! Caring, feeling good or bad, the desire to fix or improve something that isn’t broken is what humans do. We call that manipulation of a working system! If you want to manipulate your trading system, bend your trading rules, act according to your emotional state, you are probably broker food. You need to find something you know, trust and can stand. It doesn’t matter if it is the Forex Trading Framework, one of my systems or your own system. Every interaction with anything you do is based on emotional triggers. If you wouldn’t care, you wouldn’t do anything. Your broker will make a lot of money from people who are a victim of their own feelings.

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 4 – Do your exercises before you compete in the Olympics! One of the best swimmers is Michael Phelps. He broke several world records and took part in international swimming events for over a decade. Albert Einstein is known as the creator of the theory of relativity and he won the nobel prize in Physics in 1921. Now think about all the time both men needed to invest to do their exercises in swimming and thinking! I don’t know what would happen if somebody would decide to send Albert Einstein to the Olympics, but I doubt that he could beat Michael Phelps in the water. And probably Michael Phelps has never considered to win the nobel prize in any science profession. If you want to become good at anything, you already know that you need to train and invest the time it takes. According to the book “Outliers” (written by Malcom Gladwell) the time you need to invest to become a master in any topic is 10000 hours. The 10000 hour rule is based on a study from Anders Eriksson, a swedish psychologist who is an expert in the topic of expert performance. If you want to learn the piano, you need to do regular exercises. If you want to become a good runner, you need to run on a regular basis. It doesn’t help to play the piano just once. And it doesn’t help that you already know how to run. You need to do it, again and again and improve your skills. But when it comes to trading, most people think that they can skip the exercises – because their broker doesn’t demand it. In fact your broker makes good money with rookies who think that they can trade like world class champions. I have gotten emails from people who were convinced that they have the best system in the world – and they have made their decision based on a handful of trades! I don’t even consider something with less than one thousand trades to be a system. I have seen systems fail after over 10000 trades, so I am careful with what I do. Most people are security oriented, they never would drive a car with their eyes closed. But when it comes to trading, they think they can do it without any practice. They just look at a few candles, make a decision and trade huge amounts of real money, because they think it is the right thing to do. That is like learning to juggle with running chainsaws instead of balls! A big loss is what happens sooner or later – and now they can’t believe it! But when you think about it, you probably have spent years in school. Your teacher started with simple and basic things, like learning the alphabet. It took you some time to learn the meaning of each letter before you could write an essay or read a whole book. And you also needed to learn the digits and the basic math rules, before you could understand floating type multiplications. Most people spend over ten years in school before they even start to learn a profession. And that takes a few additional years on top. For profitable, automated trading you need to find a way to improve your results based on things that can be measured. It isn’t important, how you feel. It isn’t important what you believe the price will do. It is about results, that can be improved until you make profits on a consistent basis. Most of the time that is testing things and comparing results with other results. Fortunately that is not very time consuming in automated trading, because you can test a whole year within a few minutes. The backtesting process will tell you how your system would have behaved – you don’t need to do squats to exercise. But you need to have the patience and invest the time to find out what works – and what doesn’t work BEFORE you lose all your trading money! And to do that, you need to define what exactly you want to do – BEFORE you need to do it with real money. Because when it comes to real money, people start to bend their own rules to avoid a loss. In my opinion trading is very hard for average people,

This video here is going to show you how to test and optimize your target take profit value. Our Expert Advisor is running in the background here and I have coded for testing the different take profit values. Right now it is testing the 100 point take profit value and it’s only making buy positions. Once the equity becomes equal or above the balance the EA opens multiple positions. Please don’t try this on your real account. So, let’s see now how to code the Expert Advisor that shall test the take profit value in MQL5. Let’s begin by launching the Metaeditor from Metatrader. (Press F4 or use the little button here.) If you see the Metaeditor window now please click on: “File/ New/ Expert Advisor (template)” from template, click “Next”, let’s give a name to our file: “SimpleTakeProfitTest”, click on “Next”, “Next” again then “Finish”. We remove everything above the “OnTick” function even the two comment lines. Our first thing to do is creating a “CTrade”. “CTrade” is part of the “Trade” library so we shall import it from there. Let’s create the new instance and we call it: “trade”. Next we want to enable the user to make changes in the take profit value, so we use a variable for the user input; it’s an integer and let’s name it as: “MyTakeProfitValue” and we set 100 for the default value. Alright, now a few more calculations we need to do. Let’s get the Ask price first of all and we want to make sure we have the accurate number; so we need to define the number of digits accordingly. We use “SymbolInfoDouble” for the current symbol on our chart, then we get “SYMBOL_ASK”, after these “NormalizeDouble” and ”_Digits” helps us to obtain the correct number of digits behind the dot in the value for any type of currency pair we might select on the chart. This is because some pairs have 3 digits behind the dot and others have 5. Next we need to obtain the latest account balance with the use of: “AccountInfoDouble (ACCOUNT_BALANCE)” and we also need to get the latest number for the equity by “AccountInfoDouble (ACCOUNT_EQUITY)”. When we are done we continue with the creation of the simple buy signal. The buy condition is very simple; once the equity is equal or above the balance we are going to buy 10 micro lots of the selected Forex pair. Let’s continue. Here you can see the profit value variable we have previously coded for the user input, you will see in a short while what shall we do with it but first we code the chart output to display the Balance, the Equity and the profit value (MyTakeProfitValue) on the chart. So far so good, let’s compile our code. You can use the “Compile” button or the short key F7. If we have no errors or warnings we can get back to Metatrader. (Use the little button here or just hit F4 on your keyboard.) When we are in Metatrader we want to test our Expert Advisor. Let’s start the Strategy Tester by clicking on “View/ Strategy Tester” or using “CTRL + R”, we select the file: “SimpleTakeProfitTest.ex5”, let’s pick any currency pair and any time frame, now we turn off the visual mode so the test will be running faster and start the test. Only a few seconds and we must see the “Results” tab signaling the test is finished. We got a profit of: $2.863. Here is the graph and here we click on “Inputs”, and as you can see we can change the take profit value (MyTakeProfitValue) and it is 100 at the moment. Let’s make it to 200 and run a new test. Now we got a profit of: $37.732,70. It looks okay but here comes the exiting part; let’s optimize! Here we select “Optimization/ Fast Generic Based Algorithm”, click on the “Inputs” tab, we set the original value to 100, the start value also to 100, and the step value to 20 while we set the stop value to… let say: 300. So what is going to happen here now is the algorithm runs the test with different values, starting from 100, the next is 120, then 140 and so on until reaching 300 then comparing them with each other. Here we define the value we are optimizing for then run a...

Hello, this is an – automated – message for you! Golden Rule 3 – Do what you said you are going to do! One big problem with automated trading is that there are no strict rules. You can trade any kind of entry, use any kind of Expert Advisor and trade any amount you want. You can create the best trading plan – and break your own rules at any time. Jim Rohn once said: “The problem is not that it is hard to do. It is easy to do – and it is also easy not to do…”. Each and every trading system I have created – yes, it’s really over five years now – has seen good and bad results. When the results are good it is not so hard to stick to your trading rules, because you make some progress. When you are in a sideways phase nothing happens – now you get bored and you think about ways to make things more “interesting”. Every time when you notice that an emotion becomes the reason to do or don’t do something it gets dangerous! When you are in a draw down, the pain starts to hurt! Now you make losses, often you see losses that are causing your account to go far below your initial deposit! And now you desperately want to change the reality. That might cause you to “bend” your trading rules. Maybe you start to take smaller profits now to speed up the recovery. Or you start to trade more positions than you wanted. You might also decide to trade bigger lot sizes to cover your losses quickly. You might have a trading plan, but who is going to see those few little tweaks, anyhow? Now you change something that you said you wouldn’t change and it is easy to do. There are three possible outcomes from your action Outcome 1: Things improve When you change something and things improve, you first feel some relief. You have saved your account! But some time later the next crisis occurs, this one might even cause a bigger draw down! Now what? Go back to the original version and admit that your changes didn’t have any effect? Changing something else without knowing if your former change caused the second draw down? And what if something goes wrong again? Now you don’t trust your “system” anymore, because you subconsciously know that it isn’t a system anymore – because you have manipulated it – and you probably will manipulate it again and again… Outcome 2: Things stay the same When you change something and nothing happens you start to ask yourself the following questions: What would have happened if I didn’t change anything? Would my system have recovered? Is it the wrong time, the wrong currency pair, the wrong time frame or the wrong chart? Does automated trading even make sense when I don’t make enough profit? Or is it that I am not the right kind of person? Should I be more courageous or is that to dangerous? Now you start to doubt, that automated trading works and that you are doing the right things. You will probably start to look for other solutions, that promise bigger profits with less pain… Outcome 3: Things get worse! When you change something and things get worse, you feel like you have made a big mistake! Now you might try to desperately save your account from being flattened. But hence you thought that you have changed the right thing and it made things worse, you now ask yourself what to do. You see your account equity go down each time you check your Metatrader and now you are in panic mode. Most likely you will close all your open positions at the worst time and get out with a big loss… How do I know? Because I have done all these things before! Today I know that the only way to withstand is to make rules how to deal with everything BEFORE I am in one of these situations! That is the reason why people train! A fire fighter needs to know how to behave in a real fire and a doctor needs to train how to do surgery BEFORE the first person needs his help. So what I need to do is to build a system and train it in backtesting. These days I trade real money only after I have done the exercises most people don’t want to do!