I've been thinking about what to do with some leftover cash I got in my UK bank account.
Every since I managed to set up an account, then a savings account, then a premium savings account, I've been annoyed that there's still about a grand leftover being unused - just in case I need it for something unforeseen.
But it's just sitting there. My Hive is getting APR, sometimes as high as 9-10%. My HBD is getting 20%. My savings in a regular boring account, 4.5%. But I don't have these options with my money in China so that's 0%, and the stuff I got on Binance is just sitting idly waiting for a distant future day when things go boom.
But for the remaining 1,000 quid, I just felt something had to be done with it.
So I started looking around and as social media tends to do, it scanned my brain and gave me a pretty scammy looking advertisement for a trading bot. Apparently it was upheaving the entire economy of the world with its AI technology able to get 1000% returns in a week and is really simple and intuitive for beginners.
So of course I'm like... yeah if you say so.
But.
BUT.
I investigated anyway. The concept generally about using a trading bot intrigued me, so I went and checked the reviews. ALL 5 stars! Incredible.
The reviews are... somewhat manufactured, to say the least. They're all a solid paragraph long, almost certainly made by chat GPT, and any bad reviews are somehow pushed down search feeds. You can find reddit posts where everybody is screaming SCAM!! and some other places. Pretty split opinions!
Their results are rather opaque if not non-existent and their content ended abruptly over a year ago.
At first I was happy to leave it there, but I found something a bit odd. The amount of effort this bot, 'GalileoFX' put into scamming people was somewhat disproportionate in my opinion.
They had a website with instructions, a decent help desk, forums. They had a guy showing his face on YouTube giving trading advice and such. No mention of AI anywhere on the official places.
And, to be clear, there were places where genuine reviews and comments said they made profit, or that they struggled at first, or that it's not as advertised but works, this kinda thing.
On top of that, reading the 1-star SCAM!! reviews reveled they were mostly retards. 'Lost $600 overnight!!' - yeah, why are you setting the bot up to access $600 unattended, you absolute fuckwit.
So I thought to hell with it, let's see what's going on and get my own opinion.
For a trading bot? I thought these things were free!
Whatever, I was going down the rabbit hole. I bought it, set it up on Meta Trader 5 and spent some time figuring it out.
As expected, there's no evidence of AI technology whatsoever. In fact, as far as I could tell, it's just a standard trading bot that buys according to your parameters, and then sells according to your parameters, with a bit of extra coding in between. There's nothing sentient about it. When the candles go up, the bot puts in sell orders. When the candles go down, it puts in buy orders.
Great. Buy low, sell high. The bot gets the idea.
And that's just the thing... It's not as advertised, but it is a functioning trading bot, which I do now own, without any further payments. Does it make money? That's what I was about to find out.
At first I set up extremely aggressive parameters on EU/USD forex so I could quickly get a feel for what was going on. I mean, the bot was setting up a new order every minute, both buy and sell. I only deposited 100 GBP in which I got 50 GBP credit extra from Vantage, the broker I got meta trader from.
I'm not a gambler so I have no desire to keep pumping in money, it was my hope I could simply make that 100 survive. If not, then I'll just move on with my day job.
Now I'm not familiar with MetaTrader so at first I thought I was already making big bucks, $3, $5, $25 - holy shit, this was just after an hour or so!
But it turns out I was just confused by the layout design, and I actually lost about $3 overall. Nevermind, that was just a testing phase anyway!
Later, I challenged myself to get back to $100, which I did with a few bucks extra.
I got more arrogant and started increasing the lot size, you know, just tweaking the settings to match the markets and such. But then something terrible happened...
I lost $30 in one fell swoop simply by clicking my mousepad by mistake. Dear god. Now I started to panic, and in my panic trying to set things right, I lost $70 trying to be more aggressive than was sensible. This is very unlike me... I knew it was only $100, and I knew I'm just doing it for a casual experiment, but I just felt like I set myself a challenge, and I wanted to win it with a scammy bot.
In the end, I had to leave my office at work, so I had to bite the bullet and cancel the final order at a new low, otherwise I'd be commuting for an hour, unable to take action until I got home, at which point I was clearly going to have lost it all.
So, I was left in the end with a disastrous $-7.
But let's be clear here, none of that was the bot's fault. The bot, though seemingly just an absurdly overpriced regular bot, was functioning as intended. I was just an idiot.
Anyway, thanks to that extra 50 credits I was awarded for joining up etc, I still had 40-something left to use, despite being 7 bucks underwater. So the next day I gave it a shot and this time decided to behave properly.
I set the parameter's to mildly aggressive (because I can keep an eye on it for an extended period), with small lot sizes where I'd lose at worst $3-4 a shot, but mostly no more than $1.
I set my parameters of bullish/bearish trends and turned OFF stop losses - I wanted to control this myself. I still don't trust this bot. However, I set a conservative take profit instruction where I'd get about $1 per win, and a max of 5 orders. Markets would have to swing something crazy to lose over $20 with these settings.
Within a couple of hours, I went from $-7, to $+5, and by the time I went to sleep, I was up to $14.
I decided to leave it on for the night. I woke up halfway through to find that my computer had updated and shut everything down. Bastard.
But even at that point, maybe 2-3am, I was up $27!
It seems my more sensible approach to this whole thing was working autonomously as designed. I think the main key here was to not set a stop loss.
Having had almost all my trading experience on crypto, the volatility of forex is just pathetic and even its most extreme movements barely registers to me as anything worth talking about. It's not like the Euro or the USD is about to collapse, so it seems obvious to me that they're going to keep trading sideways constantly, with a slight slope up or down from day to day.
Even if it bears down long term, there's no point in its history where that doesn't climb back up. So as long as I set the lot size small enough that my pathetic remaining funds can withstand it, I'm all good.
With that in mind, as the sideways motion carries on, I'm just picking a buck here, a buck there, and re-building my little $100 empire until hopefully, I'll break even again from that initial 200 Euro payment.
As the money increases, I'll increase the lot size and see if I can make any worthwhile profits.
I'd probably say... no?
I'd say it's super dodgy and an absurdly overpriced rip-off. But if I end up making my money back and then some, perhaps not. What it certainly isn't is a fake bot that illegally accesses your bank account and swiped your money clean, or something. At least, so far.
I suspect those advertising for it were not fully affiliated, offering false promises and fake premises to the bot itself, as the website doesn't seem to mention any such lies. They do claim seemingly exaggerated profits, doubling your money in a week and such, but that's nothing new, I suppose.
I wouldn't yet suggest anyone else use it, tbh. I have a lot of free time at the moment to keep an eye on it and damage control, and it's money I have free to play with on the side so... no big loss for me if it all burns down.
But who knows, maybe a week from now after my first Lambo, I'll come back and start promoting it free of charge.
And that is what I've been up to the last few days. Fun story.
