After volunteering this morning, I came home to check on my tractors. Except for the Aviator, they had a good start to the month. Aviator was quite the disappointment. I knew it was in drawdown but didn’t know what it had planned.

I am not saying Aviator knew it would hit the 35% drawdown percentage, but that is what it did. After hitting 35%, it sold all of its positions. I was left kicking myself that I hadn’t raised the drawdown to 50%. Instantly, my account value dropped by over 1/3. When I acquired the bot, I was told the bot hadn’t exceeded a 10% drawdown in testing. I am not questioning their statistic. The testing didn’t include a scenario where AUDCAD, AUDZND, and NZDCAD all choked as badly as they did this morning.

None of the graphics available from myFXbook on Aviator make this loss look good. Any hope of having another “great” consecutive month is gone. At this point, I hope to find settings that allow this bot to produce without choking again.

So, after turning off trading on the bot and glaring at it for a few minutes, I decided I shouldn’t put the bot on mothballs. I tweaked the lot sizes down and inflated the drawdown to 50%. Ideally, I will learn expensive lessons on demo accounts. Since that opportunity has passed with this bot, I will monitor it very closely. While it did contribute to last month’s gains, it was less than 10%.

Not every month can be a winner. June has a big uphill battle ahead of it. I like the winning months much more than the losers. Hopefully, the other tractors can cover for this month’s weakest link!