Forex Over Drive Review

Hello everyone. It has been quite a long time since I first blogged about my decision to test the Forex Over Drive robot. Since then I’ve posted numerous performance updates, and like I said in my last post related to Forex Over Drive the time has come for a final review of this forex product. I believe I’ve given it enough time to prove itself, so now is the time to draw some final conclusions.

If you wish to read all my blog posts related to this EA, here are links to all of them – in chronological order:

1) Forex Over Drive – New forex robot to test
2) First “Forex Over Drive” Trades
3) Forex Overdrive Performance Update #1
4) Forex Overdrive Performance Update #2
5) Forex Overdrive Performance Update #3 – Last One

Now let’s get into the heart of the review. I would like to first mention that I will let the performance statement do the talking. There isn’t much detailed criticism I can heap on this EA as I really do not know how it works internally. Before I talk about this EA’s performance I’m going to spend a few minutes describing what it is and some details that may be of interest to those of you who have never heard of it.

What is Forex Over Drive?

The Forex Over Drive robot is an expert advisor for the MT4 trading platform. It is capable of trading on many currency pairs but its authors recommend that it be used with only the GBP/USD & EUR/USD currency pairs. The time frame it trades on is M5 (5 minute chart)

Now let’s talk performance. I started testing this EA back in 2010 – 05 – 05. So it has had what I believe to be ample time to prove itself. But I am afraid to report that throughout this testing period the EA pretty much went nowhere. It caused quite a number of dramatic swings in my test account’s account balance – as you will see for yourself on the performance statement I will share shortly.

I used settings suggested to me by the EA’s creators, so I don’t think this poor performance can be blamed on me screwing around with the settings and mangling things. I personally think the strategy it employs is just not suited to the market conditions present from 05 – 05 – 2010 till today. What this means in simple terms is that it just plainly doesn’t work!

Have a look at my demo IBFX account performance statement here:

*it’s in PDF format – so just click on it to open or right click and save the file somewhere*

As you can see the relative and maximal drawdown figures are downright scary! There is no way I would accept a 58.97% drawdown and neither should you!

The core of the problem with this EA is that while the number of successful trades (it those closed at a profit) is greater than the number of losing trades those losing trades are quite big losers. When this EA’s stop loss gets hit it takes a mighty big bite out of your account balance. Another way of putting this is that its risk to reward ratio is quite bad.

There isn’t much more to say about this EA as it stands. I have as of today stopped testing it and I shall move on to other – and hopefully better – EAs. Now without further ado let’s get to the conclusion.

Conclusion: Not Recommended.

Stay tuned to this blog for more reviews and fun forex robot testing experiences.

Useful link: The Forex Robots Forum thread dedicated to thsi EA. If you want to voice your opinion to the world I suggest you do it here: http://www.forexrobotsforum.com/showthread.php?t=29

Thanks for your attention!

Cheers,
Alan