Million Dollar Pips Best Settings

Similarly to my earlier report about my experience with Forex Autopilot, I will try to review here what I see as strengths and weaknesses of the Million Dollar Pips robot and what I think are the best settings for this system.

About this site:
This site as well as the Report/Review and the Stop-Loss Watch Dog™ Robot will be most helpfull to those who are considering or investigating the Million Dollar Pips robot as a means of earning money online, automatically. Again, I assume that you are familiar with the concepts of Forex and Automated Forex Trading software (EA) and are now trying to determine whether the Million Dollar Pips EA is a reliable and profitable system and what are Million Dollar Pips' best settings. If you have not heard of Million Dollar Pips you can read more about it at .

"The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" - The Million Dollar Pips at a glance

Firstly, let's quickly review MDP's strengths and weaknesses - this way you may decide if this Forex Software is of interest to you and whether you want to continue with the details of this report.

"The good" - why MDP is a good robot:

Inexpensive - currently priced at under $100!
Developed by a professional trader (William Morrison/Eugene Lipinsky)
Developer has a proven track record creating profitable EA's (the Forex Invest Bot is also developed by them)
Works with the MetaTrader 4 platform (MT4), the universal and industry standard trading software, offered by most forex brokers to their clients (free of charge)
Results of live account trading available - not just backtests
Results are published by a third party service (myfxbook) which guarantees that results are impartial and unbiased
Results of live trading go back since 2011 which is more than sufficient to verify whether a system employs a profitable trading strategy
Best Million Dollar pips settings for the most part are the default settings so tweaking the system is NOT necessary, e.g. the published results on myfxbook are achieved with the default settings.
At the same time the system exposes all of its internal parameters which may be adjusted by the traders to better utilize the particulars of their broker's environment if need be.

The system comes with a full money back guarantee which means you may try it and simply return it if it does not work for you.
And last but NOT least - Million Dollar Pips MAKES MONEY! Obvious as it may be this is probably the most important question that people are asking and possibly the very reason why you are reading this review.

"The Bad" - the potential problems with Million Dollar Pips:

Works with the MetaTrader platform. I know I listed this as an advantage but this can also be a drawback as the MetaTrader platform was originally designed to be a DD ("Dealing Desk") brokerage system and to use the Million Dollar Pips robot effectively you will need a NDD ("No Dealing Desk") broker. So you will need to make sure that the broker you select is a NDD broker AND is providing the MT4 platform to clients. Don't worry - I explain how to find out whether your broker is a DD or NDD broker.
MDP is a scalper robot. While this has the advantage of quick entry and exit, meaning that the trader is exposed to the market conditions for a short period of time it also means that you need to choose your broker carefully. So again - it MUST be a NDD broker (ECN or STP).
Being a scalping system the MillionDollarPips-Robot will also require a reasonably fast computer system, and a quick connection to your broker's server; or a VPS hosting account with a quick connection to the broker.
The Million Dollar Pips trades one pair only (EURUSD) and looking at the source code - it does not consult with movement and price action of other pairs. While this makes the system simple to use it also means that it has a more "limited view" of the market as compared to an EA which examines and correlated between several pair. To be fair, so far results of the system are so good that obviously this has not been a problem.

"The Ugly??"

The NDD broker types: ECN vs. STP

Both ECN and STP brokers are NDD brokers (NDD stands for "No Dealing Desk", meaning they do not have a "Dealing desk" and do not take the opposite side of their clients' orders). Therefore they don't care if you're profitable in your trading as your gain is not their loss. As a matter of fact - they would prefer you to be a profitable trader because the more you trade the more commission you will be paying them.

A ECN broker is a NDD type of broker which allows all participating parties to see their orders with a Level 2 detail, that is you will see the order as "Bid Price/ Amount needed" or "Ask Price / Amount needed". This is what Level 2 (aka "Market Depth") means. You are able to see how many people are willing to buy/sell the pair at a given price which means you will know the supply and demand and will thus have a better sense of the market sentiment and whether buyers or sellers are currently "running the show". The ECN broker will simultaneously route your order to the externaly liquidity providers and try and match your order accross the best available offer accross their network (ECN actually means "Electronic Communication Network" or - according to other definitions - "Electronic Currency Network"). What this means to you as a trader is that you will always be getting the best price at that instant and that your orders will almost always be anonymous (i.e. your account info will not be sent along with your order).

The STP brokers are also NDD brokers but they differ from ECN brokers in that they will only route your orders straight through (hence the name STP which mean Straight-Through Processing) to their external liquidity providers. You can not see the Depth of Market with a STP broker and your client information is usually sent along with your order to the liquidity providers. Your order is still filled at a fair market price (the best price available from the liquidity providers at that instant) and execution is approximately as fast as with the ECN broker.

Nothing I could classify as "ugly", really... As mentioned MDP comes with a full money back guarantee so those not happy with the Million Dollar Pips performance may simply return it and get their money back.

I am listing below everything that I could think of that could be a turn off for some folks but really I am "jumping the shark" here:

1) I have seen various testimonials both on the system web-site and on other forex sites which range from praise to plain fraud allegations, and among each kind there's some which sound credible and some that don't. Truth be told, none of the reports I've read where people say "Million Dollar Pips does not work" contain enough details to judge whether the people used the right type of broker.
2) On the product sales page the person who is advertised and credited as the creator of the Million Dollar Pips software is William Morrison when if fact the name of the developer is Eugene Lipinsky who is a Russian programmer. Why.. I do not know... possibly a marketing decision or perhaps Eugene is the developer and William is the marketing, guy? Other than that I do not see why would a person who had already developed a profitable system in the past and had thus built reputation for himself decide to release his new product under a different name.

At any rate - the 10,000% profit that the Million Dollar Pips system had made over the past two years remain a fact regardless of who and why is advertised as the system creator which IMHO is what interests most traders!

Million Dollar Pips and myfxbook - why is this important

Before we continue with analyzing the Million Dollar Pips performance - two words about myfxbook (here's a link to the Million Dollar Pips account page at myfxbook):

I can't stress enough the importance of the fact that the MDP developers gave myfxbook investor rights to their trading account! This means that:

a) The results are examined and analyzed daily by an independent 3rd party. The myfxbook service is the defacto industry standard system for verifying results of automated fx systems. It is used by hundreds of developers and thousands of users. When a system is verified by myfxbook (look for the "Track record verified" green check mark, just above the system's graph) you may rest assured that these results are indeed the real results of the system, running on a live account and running at this very moment, processing live market data!

b) This is not some quick backtest where people can optimize the robot for some particular period of time in the past, see which are the best settings which will generate best results and then publish these backtests results.

c) The developer putting their system on myfxbook for everyone to see has a lot of confidence in their system. They are NOT trying to make some quick short-term profit selling their system to novice trades using some over-hyped sales letter. Why is this so? Simple - results on fxbook go back months, sometimes - years (in the case of MDP it is years!). These are systems which in a sense can withstand the "test of time" and this says two things about the software developers: they are in this for the long run and not for the quick buck and b) they are active and constantly working and improving their system and - consequently (which is very important for us, the users!) - providing support!

The BIG QUESTION: "What are the best settings for the Million Dollar Pips EA?"

To answer this question let me first ask you what does "best settings" mean to you?

The settings which will generate you the most profit? Tempted as you may be to go with this "obvious" answer, I want you to think twice before you say "Yes"!! Think why are you buying an automated system? Well... yes, to make money, of course! But not simply make money, but to make money worry-free, "on autopilot" so to speak! You want the "set it and forget it" type of robot, not a system which you need to baby-sit all the time, worrying whether the currently open trades will turn out to be winners or losers!

As I explained in the "Best Forex Autopilot settings" report the ultimate question every user needs to answer is "How greedy am I?" So... how "greedy" are you?

Are you willing to part with 10%, 20% even 30% with your projected profits to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of looking at your account only to find out that the system had gone halfway through your available margin? I know I am! I've done manual trading, I've done automated trading and I know that the peace of mind for me is far more important than a few extra pips a month! I may not be a millionaire but I have a steady stream of income and enough free time to do whatever else I want and I am not stressed out about how the next trade is going to turn out!

With the above in mind let us review the Million Dollar Pips' performance and see what can be identified as truly the best settings for the system!

The system live trade report is available fromhttp://www.myfxbook.com/statements/114107/statement.csv . I have not used the system for as long as they have, so let's use this data instead as it will be a lot more comprehensive compared to my data which goes back only a couple of months.

The main advantage of the MDP system is that it is a scalper robot, meaning that your open trades will be exposed to the market for much shorter period of time compared to e.g. a "swing" type of system. Look at the chart below:

This chart shows the distribution of system winner trades versus trade duration. The orange dots show how many pips each trade gained and the blue line shows each trade's duration (in seconds). As you can see most trades are closed below the 12 pip mark and almost all winning trades are under the 20-25 pip level. As far trade duration - most trades are closed after 2 minutes and very few go over 3 minutes.

We will see what this means in a moment, for now let's look at the next 2 charts which are very similar to the first one, in fact they contain the exact same data, but they also shows the mean (average) values for both profit and duration and their standard deviations. (If you do not KNOW what standard deviation means - a simplified explanation would be that the standard deviation is the range where the vast majority (at least 68%) of the data is contained, and two standard deviations will contain practically all of the data (95%)).

The horizontal orange line shows the average trade pip value for the MDP system. The grey channel is the standard deviation range for the closed trades' pips value.

Similarly in this graph the blue channel displays the standard deviation of the trades duration and the blue line display the average trade time.

So essentially these two charts confirm what was determined by simple observation of the first chart:
1. The average winning trade for the MDP robot is around 7 pips.
2. The average trade duration for the MDP robot is around 70 seconds.
3. Most trades (approx. 68%) will gain around 15 pips before being closed by the robot and almost all will be closed under 20-25 pips.
4. Most trades will be active for 120 seconds and almost no trades will extend over 3 minutes.

By now you probably understand where I am going with this. As with most good systems, there has got to be a "sweet spot" where the software is both sufficiently secure (i.e. incurring a minimum drawdown) and reasonably profitable. And there is!

Based on the above data (btw, if you want to download my calculations in an Excel .xls file format you may click this link) I defined that I do not want to be waiting for any profitable trade which is outside the 2-standard deviations mark in terms of either pips or duration. Based on the analysis of the data for the past 2 years it is just not worth waiting for such trades to be closed by the robot - the benefits are far outweighed by the risk of these trades going against you eventually - so I will just close all such trades as soon as I see them.

In other words I will be closing every trade which is profitable and :
a) whose duration is above one standard deviation from the mean duration;
or
b) whose pip gain is above one standard deviation from the mean pip value;

To put this into real values:
a) each trade which has been open for more than 2 minutes (67 + 55 = 122)
or
b) each trade which has gained more than 14 pips (7.3 + 6.7 = 14)

But am I not loosing too many pips/profits by doing this? Let's see.

We will review the sum of all the trades which meet the above criteria and see what we will get.

And... just to be on the safe side!... here's what I will do. Even though most of the other winning trades which lie outside our criteria are also winners I will not count them as winners! I will simply discard them as if they were 0-outcome trades! This of course is not realistic as these were obviously winner trades and I am now counting them as 0-value trades but I don't care! It is always a good idea to provide some safety and us discarding all of these good trades will serve as a safety and will significantly skew the analysis against us and thus will show us what the worst case scenario could be if we implemented this strategy.

So what's the score?

1. The "stock" MDP results are:
Total Pips Gained (Winner pips - Loser Pips) = 7445.7 - 3441.6 = 4004.1
Total $ profit = $256,578.95 - $147,088.92 = $109,490.03

2. My "best settings" results are:
Total Pips Gained (My Winner pips - Loser Pips) = 6820.1 - 3441.6 = 3378.5
Total $ profit = $232,607.94 - $147,088.92 = $85,519.02

So by implementing this strategy we are reducing our gains/profits by around 20% (dollars:22% pips:16%).

Hmm... Is it worth it?

To have the peace of mind and not have to worry about that one trade that the robot did not close on time and will now be waiting on it for hours, possibly days to come out of the red? If you ask me - Yeah! HELL YEAH! Like I said earlier - everybody needs to find out what their "greed factor" is. I set mine at one standard deviation above the mean and that's good enough for me. If you like to play around with the values, perhaps change them to 2 standard deviations or any other number - you may do that, just substitute the values you want to test in the spreadsheet I used for calculations.

MDP: "Best Settings" also means "Best Environment"!

Let me emphasize again that important as the above analysis is, it is equally as important if not more important, to choose the right broker for your Million Dollar Pips robot. A broker with a Dealing Desk will not be a good choice as they will trade against you and with the Million Dollar Pip robot relying on mini-breakouts it will be very easy for them to manipulate the quotes and turn most of these small winner trades against you. So it is very important to use a ECN type of broker (or at least a STP broker).

How to select a ECN/STP broker?

You may take a look at this list of ECN/STP brokers, which I have compiled a while ago (also available as .CSV file download) or you could do your own research on the internet and look for a list of brokers.

Let's say you found a broker which looks decent and offers good spread/commission rates. How can you tell if they are a ECN/STP broker or not? Here's what to look for:

Can you see the "Depth of Market" in their trading platform or in your client account webpage? ECN brokers being a Level 2 account provider should allow their clients to see the "depth of market".
Find out what is their minimum account size? An ECN account will typically require at least a 10,000 deposit and a STP broker account will typically require around $1000-2000. So if broker tells you that you can open a ECN account with $150 deposit you should take this statement with a grain of salt and expect a lot of fine print in their TOS agreement.
Ask them straight if they are a ECN or STP broker! Don't rely on the big flashy "we are an ECN broker" slogan on their web-site. Some of them are not really ECN and even those that do offer ECN/STP trading - it may not be their standard account setup. Ask them if they offer ECN/STP accounts and what are the differences compared to their standard (read "Dealing Desk") accounts. Ask who their liquidity providers are and what type or MT4-bridge software they are using. If they claim to provide ECN accounts then they should have some sort of MT4-ECN bridge and similarly - STP brokers should use a MT4-STP bridge on their side. If you call them and get evasive answers to any of these questions my advise is - stay away from them, find another broker.
Get their MetaTrader app and open a demo account order and look what Order Execution types are available when you go to open a new Order. A ECN/STP broker should have a "Market" execution type and not "Instant Execution". If you see that you can open a Instant Execution type of order it is a very good indication that this broker (or at least your current account type) is setup to go through their dealing desk. It may be possible that demo accounts are setup as DD accounts so again - you may ask them if that is the case.
Finally - ask them whether they allow automated trading and whether they allow scalping. You may still use robots and MDP in particular even if they say "No" but this again is an indication that they are a MM type of broker and will be taking the other side of your trades so again - better choose a different broker.

One more thing which is also very important is the connection speed ("ping") between you and your broker. Your MT4 platform displays the ping value in milliseconds ("ms") in the lower right corner and you will want this value to be around 250ms, definitely under 500ms for MDP to work well.

Once you start trading on a real account it may be a good idea to rent a VPS server to host your MT4 platorm, you may get these for $25 a month or even less and there are several benefits to running your MT4 terminal from a VPS, such as: not having a computer in your house that needs to be on all the time generating noise, heat and wasting power. Also this way you know that your MT4 client will be running on a powerful workstation which is backed up and maintained regularly, etc.

Again - the ping from your VPS to your broker should be as low as possible (in the 250ms range).

These are my two cents about how to ensure your Million Dollar Pips experience generates you money rather than ending up being one of those "it just doesn't work!" testimonials... hope it was helpful :)

Read more about Million Dollar Pips at the developer website...