Before releasing Shark 7.0, I wanted to make sure that everything works as it must be. That’s why I invited a small group of traders to beta test Shark 7.0 on their demo and live accounts and asked them to provide us with their feedback and suggestions.
The most critical but at the same time the most helpful beta tester is a true professional and well known member from the forex community. While my office staff calls him “The Forex Pope” you probably know him under his nickname “Josef.” He has many years’ experience with automated trading systems, and is a moderator, contributor and highly respected senior member of several authority forex forums.
Read on to find out how much profit (lot’s of it) Josef archived on his live account during testing, how he outsmarted the Shark 7.0 and why he calls Shark 7.0 a “Hardcore Scalper.”
Note: Josef wrote this review originally for Donnaforex.com, but allowed to republish it here. And, although I am not 100% agree with what he wrote, I didn’t change or censor it in any way.
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Republished review by Josef starts here
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EA Shark 7.0 – Hardcore scalper from forexeasystems.com
Shark 7.0 is, what I would call, a hardcore scalping system. It is based on a quite interesting strategy and is so far the fastest scalper I’ve ever used. When I started testing it, I had strong doubts whether it could run successfully in a live trading environment. Well, Shark 7.0 proved me wrong.
Back test results
I have come across experts with amazing back tests, which failed on live accounts, but I’ve never come across an expert that fails during back testing, but returns stellar results on live accounts. My opinion is that back tests have a value when they are properly done. However, they have to be taken with a big grain of salt.
EURUSD 2007-2012
Data source: Dukascopy | Modeling quality: 99% |Settings: default
GBPUSD – 2007-2012
Data source: Dukascopy | Modeling quality: 99% | Settings: default
Well, that’s some “pretty butterflies”, but can we expect the same results during forward trading on live accounts? I don’t think so. Probably, it’s a good idea to divide the profit factor and the net profit by two and multiply the relative DD by two to get a more realistic picture.
Live results
As the robot uses very tight stops and does not hold trades longer than a minute or two, I was quite skeptical that it would run successfully on a live account. However, tempted by the back test results, I decided to give it a try.
After a couple of days, I started to feel confident that Shark 7.0 CAN run profitably on live account and changed the lot size from 0.01 to 0.05 lots per trade. May 17, I attached Shark 7.0 to GBPUSD and started playing around with settings. Adding GBPUSD as a second currency pair was a good idea, but playing with settings and disabling the volume and the spread filters turned out to be a very bad idea.
The result: 10% drawdown. Anyway, as it was me who outsmarted the system by disabling the volume and spread filter, I can only blame myself. Actually, the vendor told me not to disable them. After I switched the inputs back, Shark 7.0 pushed the account back to the profit zone with just a couple of trades.
Test log:
08 May …Test started with fixed lots
09 May…Enabled money management, 0.5% risk per trade
17 May…Disabled volume and spread filter and attached the EA to GBPUSD
17 May…Enabled volume and spread filter
Test period: 08 May > 01 June (3 weeks)
Profit: +14.75% (After spread and commission; Trades executed because of disabled filters are not taken into account)
Number of positions: 45
Note: Graph shows results before commission. Though I know how to use a PC, I am not well trained with excel.
Considering the low risk per trade of 0.5%, +14.75% profit in a bit more than three weeks is a solid figure and much more than I expected.
Logic
A robot that uses stops of 1.5-1.7 pips cannot survive in live forward trading. That was my opinion before I started testing it on my live account. As Shark 7.0 proved me wrong, I started digging to find out what it does.
While I didn’t figure out what activates its trade logic, I believe I understood in details what it does when the logic is active. For better understanding, I made a couple of screenshots.
Price moved up, and the expert placed a pending sell order very close to the actual market price. SL distance: 1.5-1.7 Pips; TP distance: 9.0 Pips
Price kept moving up, and it modified the order SL and TP to keep the distance between the pending order and the market price. When I saw that for the first time I thought “Hey, Thor, SuperScalper, NMI and MDP do the same, just with larger stop loss levels”
Now, what is interesting is what happened after the pending sell order became an active order. It placed a pending buy order just one fractional pip above the SL of the active sell order and modified the order to keep the distance of one fractional pip to the SL of the sell order.
It kept modifying the pending buy order until the SL of the active sell order was below the entry price. After that happened, the pending buy order was deleted.
Note: I used the visual mode for my observations, but I cannot guarantee that the logic description is 100% accurate.
What I didn’t find out:
What activates the logic
First, I thought of Bollinger bands, WP or candle height, but it’s definitely something different. On some candles, the logic becomes active after 10 pips, on other after 30 pips.
How it trails active orders
This is another thing that really confuses me. It trails orders dynamically and in both directions. Example: The trade was 10 pips in profit, and the trailing stop was two pips away from the actual market price; the price went down another three pips, but instant of keeping the distance to the market price, it changed the trailing stop from two pips to five pips and a few ticks later to four pips. First, I thought it was a bug but the vendor says it’s not.
Pros:
+ Though I didn’t figure out what activates the logic, I like the idea behind. As it places orders only when the market moves quickly, there is a great probability given that either a sell or a buy order will close in profit.
+ It uses pending orders only. I consider it to be an advantage, as it decreases slippage greatly.
+ trades two currency pairs.
+ It does not open more than one trade at a time.
Cons:
- As SL is placed very close to the market price, dishonest brokers may play dirty games.
- I am certain that Shark 7.0 will not work with market makers, and results will vary from broker to broker.
- It cannot be used on 4 digit platforms.
- The final version input parameters are limited to money management settings only. Other parameters are not accessible by the user and can’t be changed. To my mind that’s a bad thing for experienced traders as they don’t have much “space” to maneuver with their settings. Who knows, maybe they change that after seeing this post.
- The user manual does not include any information regarding broker and VPS requirements. That’s not a big deal for experienced traders but clearly, a disadvantage for newbies.
Conclusion:
Spike scalpers have large profit potential, but show weakness in case the price doesn’t reverse enough. As Shark 7.0 logic does not depend from reversals alone and returned same nice profits during testing, I believe it has a large profit potential.
However, as mentioned at the beginning of the review, Shark 7.0 is a hardcore scalper and requires optimized trading environment. Dealer plugin, slow execution, high stop levels and bandit brokers will act like poison for this robot.
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Republished review by Josef ends here
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About the author from this review:
Josef is a forex insider with many years’ experience and highly respected moderator, contributor and V10+ senior member on several forex forums. His advices helped thousands of new forex traders all over the world.
