Welcome back Zulu-traders.Here's my weekly update from the demo accounts i'm following.
Trendcatcher added 136 pips on the week, but is still down -287 pips since the beginning of the demo period back on 11/1/2009. In terms of his public profile, he's only down about 27 pips since 11/1, so my 2-lot limit is making a big difference in terms of his profitability. Overall, i'm not convinced this provider can pick trades any better than chance, and he often stops out trades with losses under 100 pips.
Next up is Coolie1997 who had 127 pips in closed profits for the week. The graphic above shows his public facing account history which shows nothing but green since 10/18/2009. What it doesn't show is the 4 lots he has open already which have a -360 pips in open losses. So in that respect, Coolie is starting to resemble some other Zulu providers who paint the tape green by taking profits when they have them, but let losses ride until they come back into the green. Anyway, we will continue to watch this provider as he provides a lot of good trades.
Next up is Isunia who is up +199 pips since the beginning of the demo period back on 11/1/2009. Interestingly, he has hit my 180-pip stop twice, and still come back to show a profit. That's pretty impressive and i'm going to keep watching.
Next up is TheKillerz who is on a terrific roll. His demo account closed out mid-week in fine fashion, see The Killerz Comeback. I opened up another account on Friday where he pulled in another 64 pips on Friday alone. On the public side, he is up +3400 pips in the 7 weeks since he started this new account. When I run his public record through by 2-lot, 180 pip filter, he comes up with a gain of +468 pips. When I increase that stop to -300 pips (per his suggestion) the results are identical. I think more work is required to discover the ideal stop for this provider.
Next up is Student who has gained 50 pips since I added him back on 11/2. On the public side, he has gained 25,000 pips in that same timeframe, but he has done so by opening multiple trades of 100 lots each. Overall, i'm not impressed since his gains are too small to overcome the nasty 150-pip gap that will come eventually.
This difference between public and actual performance makes me angry, because Zulutrade could fix this problem and keep new Zulu-customers from going off the cliff, but they refuse to do so. If they did, it would saved me $1000's of dollars in losses before I discovered this reality. I think this deception is what is keeping Zulutrade from getting really big. Come on Zulutrade - I know you are reading this blog, so bow to the pressure and do the right thing.
Next up is wqq899. This provider has been a complete disaster and has hit my -180 pip stop on 4 of his 7 trades. Not sure what I saw in this guy. Next.
Last up was Sophistication who took a beating his his short GBP/USD trades and closed out the 2 week period down -969 pips. He hit the 180 pip stop 7 times in the 2 week period and definitely is not working for me as a provider.
Lessons learned are the usual - public records on Zulutrade are very deceiving and it takes a demo account to really discover the truth about how providers will perform in your real account.
My local database of Zulu provider history now has 350,000 records in it. I'm planning to run my concurrent lot, stop filter through the provider history to find out who the real winners are. This will allow us to wander of the beaten path of the top 100 providers and discover some new talent that is undoubtedly lurking among the approximately 700 providers in my database.
So stay tuned for that and have a great week.
Tcxmon,
ReplyDelete>Lessons learned are the usual - public records on Zulutrade are very deceiving...
Very true.
coolie1997
Thanks for the post Tcxmon. It may actually be some time before Zulutrade starts helping give us better public data, however they appear to be trying to make improvements. Sometimes I wonder how many serious FOREX traders that actually make money stumble upon Zulutrade and think scam when they poke around and maybe even do demo's. At any rate it may be unprofitable to show non-deciving records right now for Zulutrade. Maybe they don't want everyone to know that 99% of signal providers are not making money or they will loose customers. Who knows???
ReplyDeleteOn another note our efforts at poking around on Zulutrade and making that data public should hopefully be helpful. You probably put 10X more effort than I do and I believe the public is grateful for it. If you search Zulutrade on Google you come up in page 5 right now. Two days ago you were page 8. I hope to see you on page 1 some day.
As some humor... When I type in Txcmon, misspelling your name, into google, Zulutrade TOP comes in close to the top on page 1, I must of misspelled your user name somewhere in my posts. :)
Coolie-
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for reading and for the comments.
Townjet-
I had a converation with my buddy Ross who is a professional web designer regarding what I can do as a blogger to make my posts appears in Google searches. He referenced a term I hadn't heard before, "Search Engine Optimization" (or SEO). I Wiki'd it and came up with this post->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Based on reading that and my conversation with Ross, here's what I came up to make my blog appear in more Google searches:
1) Title of each entry and the blog (including the first 250 words) should include terms you want to be found on under search hits. That's why my blog titles always begin with 'Zulutrade'.
2) Sprinkle your URL where ever you can on the Internet. Twitter, Facebook and anywhere where you can leave your URL will increase your search score. The more sites that refer to your site, the more popular you are and the higher you appear on the Google search algorithm.
You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tcxmon
In my other blog (http://tcxsystems.blocks.com) I get almost no traffic, but as soon as I Tweet a post, I get about 25 hits. Don't know if those are human or machine readers, but I know that search engines (including Google) crawl the Twitter-sphere.
Another interesting search is go up to Twitter and search on Zulutrade and you can see who else is Tweeting about Zulutrade. Twitter is a great resource for building Web traffic and its totally free.
Finally, I learned from the above Wiki article that Google now customizes search results based on source IP. So its great to hear I showup near the top on Zulutrade searches. But your search results may be affected by your past Google search and click behavior. To factor out your source IP, search from somewhere you have never searched from before (work or public pc) and compare your results to what you get from your home computer.
Thanks again for the great comments, guys.
Tcxmon