Monday Robot Review

If you are a new visitor I should let you know I'm reviewing my own proprietary forex robot -- I'm not providing a general review of robots.

The Good
Profitability continues. Sunday evening the robot earned 0.2% and over the course of Monday it earned 2.0% return. It's not obvious, but when capital is added to the robot old smaller positions provide less return when closed profitably. This means that it will take a little while to flush out those old trades and get accurate profitability numbers.

The Bad
The newly added meta-trading aspect didn't work. Well, I was able to get meta-trades to open in a separate account, but the platform hung after each purchase. I don't know if it's a platform issue or if I did something inappropriate with my code. Perhaps next weekend I'll have a chance to ferret out the details.

The Pending
The robot hasn't yet been in a situation where it has had to stop trading due to accumulated risk. So, at this point, I haven't had a chance to test the notification system under live conditions.

Oanda FXTrade On Ubuntu Dell Mini 12

Okay, it's working.

I have Oanda running a single FXTrade window while I'm open in another browser typing this blog post.

Here is what I did to get this working:

1. Close down extra charts -- only the basic platform window is running.
2. Eliminate extra currency pairs -- only follow two or three active pairs
3. Shrink the window -- show everything but in as small a footprint as it practical.

With these steps I was able to launch, sync, open a trade box and watch the graph update in real time.

This means you can trade using the Mini 12. However, if you want to do serious analysis or chart work you'll probably have to use a different platform. However, once you have your chart set up, or otherwise have a trading plan to follow, you can run FXTrade.

Excellent!

UPDATE: It's several months later. I don't know if a Java update, an Ubuntu update, or if an FXTrade update made the difference, but the Mini 12 is much more capable of running this application than it was originally. I can keep multiple charts open and I no longer have only a single currency in the quote panel.

Dell Mini 12 -- Ubuntu

I recently bought the Dell Mini 12 thinking it would be noiseless, so that I could leave it on overnight while I slept. I tend to wake up from time to time so that would be an easy way to check for Forex opportunities during the night.

Unfortunately, running the Oanda FxTrade application causes the system to grind to a halt. Right now my profile automatically opens multiple charts (1 min, 15 min and 1 hr) -- which if I'm very lucky is part of the problem. On launch I see the base chart and trading platform open up but it hangs after trying to display the additional material. If I have any success with future experiments I'll let you know.

Anyway, the Ubuntu Mini 12 is great. No, I don't mean you want to do massive computing tasks, but for high availability wireless web access this thing is great. The screen is very bright. The size and quality of the display is very nice. I've added a "cookie swapping" add-on to Firefox so I can switch user profiles on the fly.

In all, even though I bought this thing hoping I'd be able to trade Forex with it, I still love it even though it seems that I won't be able to. There will surely be upgrades in the future, better processors and more memory, which might make it available. I'll probably upgrade and continue the quest for a long battery life wireless trading platform.

UPDATE: It does work. Read this post to find out what I did...