FAPTurbo v3.0 Review

Website

Full of marketing tricks like "threats" to raise the price after selling a certain amount of copies, or affirmations like "special launch price". Videos, testimonials, and bizarre font; it looks like a trap for the junior Forex traders that easily get impressed by expressions like "gain money while drinking coffee" and "solution to live happily for ever".

There is a link to a real account statement that looks somehow real. It's announced there that the this account started at $5000, and now it became $42000. By doing some inspection; pasting the data into an XLS file and creating a graph - shown below - we could find that the account really touched the $31000 between 6/11/2008 and 31/12/2008, followed by very few profits, around $3000 till march of 2009, then it just relaxed until a deposit of $7000 was made on 27/5/2009, on that day the account balance was $42511, about 5 months later it was $42482. Their account statements can be browsed easily, a glancing at them revealed that one of them is running since 2005, and had a crash once since then which seems not to be FAP Turbo related, while other accounts ended with no logical reason when FAP profits started to decline or when it started to lose greatly.

Live performance

All the following statements are Forex Forex EA Lab verified.

FAPTurbo Live Update Account (Starting Balance: $5,100)

Here is a public traded real money account starting with $5,100 and now it has grown to around $36,500.

Started

Dec 24, 2010, 19:00

Deposit

$5,100

Balance

$469,000.44

Profit

$463,900.44

Gain

3,577.99%

These results are updated every 15 minutes by EA Lab.

FAPTurbo 3.0 Real Account (Starting Balance: $50,000)

Started

Oct 27, 2016, 14:00

Deposit

$50,000

Balance

$52,288.79

Profit

$2,288.79

Gain

4.58%

FAPTurbo 3.0 Multicurrency Trading (Starting Balance: $10,000)

FAPTurbo 2.0 Multicurrency Trading (Starting Balance: $10,000)

FAPTurbo 2.0 Bitcoin Trading (Starting Balance: $10,000)

Backtesting

In these backtests - as noted before - the default settings were mostly applied except the GMT offset that was set to manual, 0 and the log settings too that were set to false to speed up the testing.

Backtesting result seem to be opposing the forward test results:

6/2008 - 10/2009

Long term strategy

The balance curve does not seem comfortable in these backtests. It may was designed to work in the period preceeding the launch of the Forex robot, and it failed after that, not even their forward live performance test is running in 2009. This means that the Forex robot is not that much dependable, but because of the low trades number per unit of time, a higher range of backtesting is needed to confirm that.

The history center data was used instead of tick data for backtesting as this strategy is using very large tp/sl targets. There were almost identical trades with small scattered differences. In conclusion, this strategy didn't proof itself to be a good one, and you can safely ignore it, just as the authors did.

Scalping strategy

You can notice that even when the live account is not profitable anymore, all the scalper pairs are still profitable, this is what happens after merging the graphs:

Now, this became more perplexing and in need for another level of backtests synchronously with the real account when it was obviously not very profitable, this started around 06/01/2009.

2009/06/01 - 2009/10/01

Scalper result

Analysis

Now recall how the huge traders number using this Forex robot might adversely affects the market, as mentioned before. To confirm this we could have EURCHF as an example and start from now backwards showing the real trade over the backtest trade:

2009.09.30 18:42 buy 1.51711 close 2009.10.01 06:30 1.51734

2009.09.30 21:42 buy 1.51625 close 2009.09.30 22:57 1.51670

It's clear that the GMT offset difference is -3, and the trades are closed faster during backtesting due to the need of less pips to reach the profit target.

Slippage: 8.6 pips

2009.09.28 18:14 sell 1.50893 close 2009.09.30 10:57 1.50874

2009.09.28 21:16 sell 1.50940 close 2009.09.29 01:10 1.50945

Slippage: 4.7 pips

By testing through August, no matching trades on EURCHF could be found, this may be as the version being used back then was v47 in addition to the slower spread in the backtests compared to the authors server. Through July, a matching can be found:

2009.07.30 19:16 sell 1.53120 close 2009.07.30 23:16 1.53250

2009.07.30 23:15 sell 1.53140 close 2009.07.31 00:52 1.53110

Slippage: 2 pips

However, a difference resulted from those 2 pips; in the backtest, the position was closed at a profit, while on the real account it was closed at a loss.

It's now clear that FAPTurbo is destroying itself by slippage and may be the widened spreads, and up till now there is no clear evidence that the market has opposite moves to the FAPTurbo positions due to the huge mass of users entering the market simultaneously in the same directions.

Strategy and Parameters

It's mainly an Asian session scalper on 8 different currency pairs in addition to another unique strategy for EURUSD on the M1 timeframe is the "long term strategy". The included comprehensive manual attempts to explain everything related to the Forex market up to VPS solutions, it even didn't ignore history data and backtesting. The package includes ex4 and DLL files and the EA supports so many parameters that are briefly explained in the manual, with mention of this disclaimer:

Other settings can be left as defaults. All other settings can be left as they are, and you can be confident in the knowledge that we have worked hard to optimize the default settings to ensure you achieve good results.

A question arises; why the Forex robot parameters are so important if they could work without modifying them? The authors may think that an EA being full of parameters will be more satisfying for a customer, while the only parameter that could be modified by a standard user seems to be the "GMT offset". Accordingly, the following backtests were run on a modified GMT offset. You may also need to modify the "money management risk", it's 5 in the EA by default that is good enough for backtesting, but the "long term strategy" was manually set to be automatic with a lot factor of 1, which looks like a correct risk setting for the pips number involved in every trade.

The new and improved versions FAPTurbo 2.0 and FAPTurbo 3.0 got many enhanced features significantly supporting the capital risk protection, including the High Spread Protection System, Automatic Risk Scaling, and Built-In Loss Prevention System.