Some comments about winning or losing money with the Z systems.

When you use such a pre-made system, you do that at your own risk. In the manual you can find a description of the trading method and the backtest performance. You can use the info to develop your own system, or you can use the ready system. In either case please understand that we promise nothing. Although my own Z systems have ended every single year from 2011 to 2015 with a profit, that does absolutely not mean that you'll get the same results. First, results depend on broker and account, and on a bit of luck due to the system variations. Second, you will always lose money with any system when you enter it after the first profit on a demo account and exit it after the first drawdown on a real account. It would be much better to do it the other way around.

- We won't provide live records. In the beginning we just had not thought about that, and meanwhile we have deliberately decided not to provide live records, since we're NOT a system vendor. I have not even connected my systems to myFXbook. Zorro is a development platform and should be used for that rather than for trading pre-made systems. But if you do, don't complain.

Of course, when you find real issues like the damaged AUD/USD history in the Zip file, we're grateful for such information.

To jcl

I completely agree with what you say. I also understand wholly how important it is for Zorro to have some scripts up and running, as this will attract new users, who will then proceed towards becoming programmers, thus completing the virtuous circle.

I applaud you for releasing the Z systems, and would also add that your help pages and manual are excellent.

Following the disclaimer you've posted above, I'd like to make the following two observations. I'd also like to stress that this is entirely in the spirit of constructive criticism; anything else you could rightly disregard:

1 – New users are easily put off. Because they are likely to begin their Zorro career with the Z systems, I think you are mistaken not to publish results, including which broker, settings, and all other items germane and necessary to replicate your success in trading with the Z systems. Of course, you are not offering any guarantee of success - that's a given.

2 – New users are unlikely to be good programmers. They may be excellent at coming up with trading ideas, but these scripts may be lost to Zorro due to low user programming ability. Therefore the uptake of Zorro could well be affected.

In the light of 2 above, have you considered creating a script wizard? NinjaTrader has a very basic one – not that I like NinjaTrader at all; I discovered a bug in it a long time ago which I think may still be unfixed. AmiBroker has one, but I haven't tried it as I wished to get familiar with programming. There are several wizards for MetaTrader 4 and 5, but the stand-out one is at fxdreema.com.

Perhaps you'd consider asking Radoslav, the creator of fxDreema, if he'd like to develop a tool? He's based in Bulgaria.

As you rightly say, Zorro is a development platform, and from what I've seen an excellent one. Your addition of an API for Interactive Brokers just shows how serious you are in your endeavours. You thoroughly deserve to succeed.

But – and I think it's a big “but” – new users are your life-blood, and making access to Zorro easy (wizard), attractive (profits visible on Z systems, and how achieved), and inexpensive (which it is) are vital ingredients.

Thanks for an excellent product, which I hope continues to grow and improve. I look forward to being a small part of that journey!

This is an interesting suggestion. The problem with those script wizards is that they place an additional abstraction layer between you and the trade algorithm. So they limit you much stronger than a plain language would. But you're right, they would probably make strategy development much easier for new users. We'll look in the possibilities of those wizards in the next time.

While I think that Zorro is a great tool for testing, writing, and analysing strategies and while being thankful for giving this and your insights away for free, you are charging people to use your Z systems either via monthly subscription or for a few hundred dollars/euro one time fee.

For which there would be no motivation whatsoever, if not for the very good test results in Zorro for especially Z12.

Judging by what quite a few of your paying customers write reality more often than not does not live up to the backtest results. I think it is more than understandable that those who were moved to give you money for using your Z systems by the test results want to know if they are making a mistake or if your systems simply are not as profitable as they expected.

Either way,

thanks for this great tool.

Yes, but this does not change what I've said about the profitability of those systems. We have to charge the 5 EUR for some of them because that's simply the payment to their freelancing developer, Richard, for writing and maintaining them. And if you offer us a good system and are willing to maintain and support it, we can certainly enter the same agreement with you.

Are there known issues with Z7 at the moment? It seemed very buggy during testing the demo. Z12 seems to work wonders though.