My BitCoin Bot is an EA that runs on Metatrader, so it’s a fully automated trading strategy that trades BTC/USD.
I actually started testing this back July so I’ve got roughly four months worth of experience with this and since my current broker has now stopped offering BTC/USD (with no notice) it seems a good time to wrap this up.
The sales page, as we’ve probably come to expect now, is covered with screenshots, testimonials and claims of ‘boatloads of money’ for no effort. I think we all take this sort of thing with a pinch of salt now, but I decided to test this bot out anyway.
The bot costs $297 per year, or $39 per month. I had quite some trouble getting set up initially. He recommends two brokers, so I went with the first one, deposited my funds and attempted to run the bot. It didn’t run. I went back and forth with the vendor, attempting to get it working, and eventually he just said to try the other one, FX Choice, which I again funded and set up.
This one worked, and soon enough I was trading at 10p a pip. The bot seemed to work smoothly, with some nice winning trades up to 167 pips and losers that were generaly no more than 25 pips, which seemed a good risk/reward ratio to me. After a couple of weeks, I was happy that it was running well with profits coming in so increased my stake to £1 per pip. I checked with the vendor first and he told me that stops were generally around 25 pips, so I figured a £25 risk on a £1000 bank was perfectly fine as it’s 2.5%. Again, the bot worked well, with profits coming in nicely.
Then it happened.
I logged in on the Monday morning, 3rd August, to an open position showing a loss of -£547.12.
Here’s what had happened. Over that weekend, the price of BitCoin shot up but for some reason I didn’t have a stop in place. So instead of getting stopped out at -£25, my position continued further and further into the red and didn’t look like turning back.
I contacted the vendor to ask what was going on and he said my bot should have closed the position at -£25 and had I not got the members e-mail the previous week about updating the EA to the latest version. I said that I hadn’t received any e-mail from him and what was I supposed to do now?
After investigating he realised that since he had given me a review copy of the bot, I wasn’t on the members e-mail list, and therefore didn’t get the e-mail about updating the EA.
Harsh, but I accepted this explanation despite the fact I had wiped over half my trading bank. I closed my position at a loss, upgraded to the new bot and started again.
Since the bot won’t trade more than a certain percent of bank I had to go back to trading at 10p a pip unless I wanted to deposit more funds into my account. Given the previous disaster, I decided against this and was happy to continue at 10p a pip knowing full well that it would take ages to recover the lost funds but at least I’d have the results data for this review.
By the end of August, however, it seemed that the vendor started using much larger stops, no doubt due to the huge volatility we see with BitCoin, and that meant my bot wouldn’t trade at any more than 2p a pip.
At this point I decided to just leave it running for another three months at 2p a pip and report on the pips profit as it would be easy enough to work out rather than trying to work out the pips on all the variable stakes I was getting during August.
So the results in total were:
Jul: 603 pips
Aug: 1 pip (not including my personal 547 pip loss)
Sep: 58 pips
Oct: 41 pips
Nov: 40 pips (to 8th Nov)
As you can see, July was a great month but the rest have been pretty unexciting. I noticed that my bot had stopped placing trades after 8th November and I asked the vendor what was going on. He said to contact FX Choice, my broker, who confirmed they were no longer offering BTCUSD due to liquidity issues.
The vendor has since offered me another broker to go with but I’ve decided not to bother. For 40-60 pips a month, I need to be trading at £10 a pip to make it worthwhile and, given my previous experience with the bot not closing my trade, I don’t have the confidence to trade with a £10K bank with this.
Obviously, had I not had that experience I would no doubt have a different view on the matter but I have no way of knowing if that loss was indeed unique to me or not.
Because of that, and the hassle of needing to set up three different brokers, I’m going to rate this service as Neutral.
You can see a video of my trial here:
You can try My BitCoin Bot HERE
