FAPTurbo Review

FAPTurbo is an automated trading forex robot released at the end of 2008 which created a lot of interest and was bought by a large number of people. Like all of the robot systems, it runs on Metatrader 4 (MT4).

Marketing Claims

The creators claim your account will double each month and that you can switch the software on, plug it into your broker and go on vacation.

Cost

Price: US149.00

After an initial starting price of $99, the current price is $149, but they claim on their website that the price will increase to $349 and they may even start charging a monthly fee. FAP Turbo can be used on an unlimited number of demo accounts and a single live trading account. FAP Turbo is updated on a bi-monthly basis, so you will need to download it regularly to ensure that it doesn't expire.

What is Included in the Package?

Immediately after purchasing the FAPTurbo product, you are required to register on their member zone where you can download the trading robot with manuals and also watch a number of training videos. The product includes the following main components:

• The Short Term Trading Strategy
  
  The short term trading strategy of FAPTurbo  uses a scalping technique that will only trade on 4  currency pairs in the 15 minute timeframe, namely EURGBP, EURCHF, USDCAD and GBPCHF.  It performs only 1 to 5 trades every day with very strict money management. The short term strategy really has a lot of intelligence built in and various filters are used to ensure that only premium trades are taken. One of the best features of this system is the so called “Stealth Mode”, which introduces fake stop loss and take profit targets in order to hide the real values from brokers. This is a great way to avoid becoming a victim of things like stop hunting and other doubtful broker practices. There are other trading robots that use a similar stealth system such as ForexAutoCash.
  
  An additional version of the scalper which allows people to adjust the trading times and the TakeProfit and StopLoss levels has recently been released called the FAPTurboPro.  This is recommended for advance traders only.

•   The Long Term Trading Strategy
  
  The long term trading strategy is basically a modified and improved version of ForexAutoPilot. There is a long story behind this that is explained on the FAPTurbo homepage, but to summarize - the FAP Turbo developers were given permission by Marcus Leary to modify the ForexAutopilot code to see if they could address its perceived shortcomings and then sell it as a separate product. What they ended up with is a system that appears to be much safer and more profitable than the original ForexAutopilot.  A fixed stop loss strategy has been implemented to limit drawdowns, bigger profits are taken from winning trades, and a variety of filters and indicators have been added to avoid trading during risky and volatile periods.
• 
   
• Documentation and Training
  
  One thing I noticed immediately is that the FAPTurbo  documentation and training material are much more detailed than the ones you receive with other Forex robots like ForexAutoPilot. All settings are explained in some detail in the manuals, even the ones you don’t need to change, and there are videos in the member area to show you exactly how to set up the FAPTurbo robots on your computer.
  
   
• Forum and Online Mentoring sessions
  
  FAPTurbo runs a members-only forum which discusses latest news from developers and a monthly mentoring session is run by the developers to answer any live questions. Unfortunately, with so many people having bought FAPTurbo, is very difficult to get into the mentoring sessions which have a limit of around 500 people. A transcript of each session is sent out via email after the event.

Who Wrote It?

Apparently a team of three guys have developed FapTurbo:

• Steve Carletti (lead developer of FAP Turbo and a professional programmer) 
• Mike (a whiz with “complex numbers” and an old university buddy of Steve’s) 
• Ulrich (an open source programmer and another old university buddy of Steve’s) 

Out of all of them, Steve and Mike seem to be most active on the support forums. Mike also has a twitter site where he releases latest news item about FapTurbo.

The creators post live results on their website to prove the power of the system.  Although you can run Metatrader 4 on your home Windows-based machine, they advise the hiring of space on a virtual server so you can be certain the system is always connected to the Internet.

The Negatives 

What is particularly frustrating about FapTurbo, a system that apparently could really make you a regular income, is that they have sold so many copies that the brokers are preventing people trading it by widening the spreads.  As most MT4 brokers are market makers, they take the other side of the trades and on average seem to lose money on the FAPTurbo trades.  This is particularly the case on trades with a lot size of less than 1 which they can't easily or cleanly hedge . Also as the robot trades can open and close quickly, the brokers often don't have time to hedge these positions in the market.

While this is a good indicator that the system can make serious money, it is very inconvenient for people who then have to then find another broker.  I am at a loss to know why they continue to sell so many copies when other systems are quickly pulled off the market once the developer realises that if too many people try to trade the same system it will affect the results.  The FAPTurbo developers have in fact just run a competition in March 2009 for their affiliates to see who could sell the most copies.

Which Broker to Use 

When choosing a broker you might like to pre-check a few things:

• Do they allow Expert Advisors? 
• Do they allow scalping trades? 
• Check that the spreads are fixed and are equal to or below - EURGBP (5 pips), EURCHF (8 pips); GBPCHF (10 pips), and
  USDCAD (6 pips) 

Refund Policy

As this product is sold via Clickbank, there is a 60 day refund policy.

How it Works

Scalper Entries 

Even though the short term strategy in the manual is described as a “scalping strategy”, according to the manual the scalper is not a traditional scalper which does high volume of small trades around the spread. Instead it aims to make 1 - 5 trades per day using a tight profit target of 6 to 15 pips.

The manual does not describe how the system decides to enter the market, but from what I can tell by watching it trade and inferring information from the settings and forum discussions, the entries are filtered as follows:

• Looks for entries between 20:00 GMT to about 01:00 GMT (i.e. from the close of the New York session and into the Asian session). 
• If the brokers spread is too high, e.g. 5 pips for the EUR/GBP pair and 6 - 8 pips for the other pairs, the system will not make an entry. 
• If the day has been too volatile it will not enter today (controlled by the scalper_simple_height_filter setting) 
• It will only open trades in the direction of the trend (determined by a moving average - which is settable by the user) 

There is another setting based on using a filter based on “custom levels”, but I don’t know what they are.

As mentioned above, the documentation does not provide much information about how it actually works.  FAPTurbo seem to rely on a relatively well known feature of the forex market, namely if a trend is established by US traders in the afternoon of the New York session, Japanese traders tend to carry it on in the Asian session. The slower moving nature of the currency pairs used by FAPTurbo means that the scalping trades are less likely to be stopped out by a sudden market movement, thereby enhancing the benefits described above.

Scalper Exits 

Again there is no real documentation about how the system exits trades. From what I have seen discussed on forums, there are three major exit conditions:

• A profit target of 6 to 10 pips is used (the target is based on the pair used and potentially some other property such as the recent price range movements) 

• A stop loss is used which varies between 53 and 112 pips (the target is based on the pair used and potentially some other property such as the recent price range movements) 

• There is also a time based stop loss which will exit trades posting a small loss after a certain amount of time (but I am not sure about the details of this one) 

The system comes with a feature which actually hides the real stop loss and profit target from the broker.  The system will actually trade with a much bigger fake stop and fake target set as part of the order, but the internal logic of the system will still use the narrower spread exits described above.

Scalper Position Sizing 

The user has the option of setting the position size manually, but they can also rely on setting a risk factor variable (called the “Lots Risk Reductor (LRR)”) and then let the system calculate the lot sizes automatically for them.

The auto lot feature simply calculates the number of lots based on the LRR as a percentage of the free margin left in the account.  For example, if you have $10,000 remaining margin available and the LRR is set to 5%, then the system will open a $500 position.  The system contains some logic then to calculate how many lots that represents based on the type of account.  Note that this is not the same as risking 5% of your account on a trade as the system does not use the width of the stop loss to calculate the size of the trade. Therefore, if a trade fails, you can loose significantly more than 5% of your bank.

 Scalper Performance

As mentioned on their Website, the FAP Turbo makers claim to have turned $370 into $7,300 in 2 months, $2,500 into $8,700 in 45 days, and $5,100 into $25,100 in 30 days. There are others out there who have also published their live statements, which show similar results. For example Mark over at forex-systems-reviews.com traded $5,000 up to $30,000 over the period of a month (see statement here).

View ForexRobotShop's live results based on a $10,000 starting bank on 5th February, 2009.

EA settings:

• FAPTurbo V36
• Short - term(scalper) - High Risk Level*  
• EURGBP - LRR 5% MaxSpread 6
• EURCHF - LRR 5% MaxSpread 6
• GBPCHF - LRR 5% MaxSpread 12
• USDCAD - LRR 5% Max Spread  6
• FAPTurbo - Long Term
• EURUSD - LRR 1%

Update on Performance

When FapTurbo was first released the live results published on their website were very impressive, however since January 2009, the liquidity in the forex markets appears to have fallen off sharply and so too has the results on FapTurbo.  Their latest live results are not showing anywhere near the initial good results.  Whether this is temporary problem, or whether they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg by selling too many copies remains to be seen.  It might be best to trade it first on a demo account before going live.

Customer Service

Because they have sold so many copies FAP Turbo is unable to provide an acceptable level of customer service and they are encouraging people to take out a subscription to FapWinner , a group that gives advise on trading Forex AutoPilot.  This will cost you a one-off payment of US$99 + US$49 per month subscription for 12 months. 

When FapTurbo was first released, email responses were slow and very robotic, and if you try to call the help line the voice mail was usually full.  They hold a regular mentoring session and so many people try to log in that it crashes the system.  Most of the issues raised on the forum seem to relate to activation problems and bad spreads from brokers.  Quite frankly, if it wasn't potentially such a good system you wouldn't persist with it, but once you get it working you usually don't have any problems until you need to activate the new version.  With activation, you can now use the same number as the previous version so that should save time.

Conclusion

It is obviously your choice as to whether you trade FAPTurbo or not. I am trading it live and intend to continue to do so as long as I can find a broker who offers tradable spreads

I have installed it on a virtual server (not the one they recommended as so many people were trying to sign up, the server company couldn't cope) and so far the results have been promising.

Visit the official FAP Turbo site

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