Welcome back to Zulu traders.Happy one-year anniversary to provider Pro-B5 who closed his first trade on the Zulutrade system one year ago back on 11/12/2008.
We have a long history with Pro-B5 starting back in February of 2009 with the post Shaken out of Pro-B5.
He had a big run over the summer of 2009 and landed at the top of our provider picks in early August leading to our post Pro-B5 Promises and Delivers. Pro-B5 generously responded to that post, weighing in on a number of issues dear to Zulu signal providers and subscribers alike in his response Pro-responds back on August 6th.
From there, things got rocky, leading to my post Pro-B5 takes a hit and Pro-B5 wipeout back on September 19th. Since I left Pro-B5, he has had a net gain of 335 pips with only 5 losses since then with a max loss of -129 pips back on 11/1/2009.
As a provider, Pro-B5 is probably as real as it gets. He rarely opens more than one lot at time which sets him apart from the bulk of Zulu-providers who open many lots and run large drawdowns.Also on the plus side, Pro-B5 trades like he is using his own real money which is rare on Zulu. Also since he opens few concurrent lots and manages his open stops, you don't need do a lot of manipulation to see how your would have done with a reasonable stop and lot-limit
On the negative side, Pro-B5 takes relatively small profits. Since September 1, his average winner has been about 13 pips and his win % rate has been close to 90%. With a 90% win rate, he would have to make better than 18-pips per winner to come out on the positive side of the sustainability equation when using my 180-pip stop.
But since he manages his own stops, we can use his average loss of -72 pips (since September 1) instead of my stop value. In that case, if he wins 90% of the time and takes on average 13 pips per trade, he comes out on the positive side of sustainability equation
Also, his win size has improved somewhat lately and he took a 43-pip winner back on 10/14.
Overall, Pro-B5 is a solid member of the Zulu community and we thank him for his ongoing service. You can follow Pro-B5 on Twitter at https://twitter.com/prob5
Cheers and good trading,
Tcxmon
I have kept an eye on Pro-B5 since I started into Zulutrade back in April 09. I got excited, as I thought I had discovered the one and only good signal provider on Zulutrade. Which was correct for a time. Then things got a bit rough and I realized that his pip gains were not cutting it when it came to his inevitable loss. I lost a good chunk of money with Pro-B5, but not as much as I did with Bigwin. I have come to find that my issue at times is making the "next lot investment step". Meaning if I have been trading with a signal provider and they make me $500, do I utilize that $500 and start trading another lot, or do I wait until $1000? I waited till $1000 for Bigwin, and then he had big losses on beginning of Aug. Poor timing I suppose. At any rate it is good to look at these guys over the year, and get a birds eye view of what they did. I like your graphs you post, very nice.
ReplyDeleteTownjet-
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments and kind words. Looking back over a year's trading results, its easy to overlook the drawdowns you would experience along the way.
Pro-B5's profit to drawdown ratio is 0.28 which means he provides 28 pips profit for each 100 pips of drawdown. That puts him in the 44th percentile (231 out of 515) of providers I track in providers in terms of the amount of pain you can expect.
So the are other providers that will give you more bang for the buck in terms of how much you are going to have to tolerate in drawdown to come out with a profit.
Regardless of who you pick, it takes a certain amount of confidence (and faith) that the provider will recover from drawdown when it occurs. And that's where examination of the trading history comes in to give you the confidence to stick with a provider through a drawdown.
Thanks again for reading and for the comments,
Tcxmon
Zulu-fans-
ReplyDeleteOne last thing before we close this chapter on Pro-B5. In terms of 'Live Trade' last week, he was in 83rd percentile (33 our of 188) when measured by "Sum of Live Trade" for last week.
Pro-B5's sum of Live Trade for last week was 113 which we estimate to be $113.00. If we add up Pro-B5's earnings for the last 6 months, we get 442 pips, which comes to about 18-pips on a weekly basis. This assumes we disregard some anecdotal evidence from Coolie that "Live Trade" numbers are understated 1 to 4.
Anyway, if we can trust the Sum of Live Trade number, it means that Pro-B5 makes over 6-times what his average customer makes in a given week.
What's my point? The point is that Pro-B5 has more interest in gaining (and not loosing) customers than in gaining pips. This might explain his increasingly conservative trading style.
One interesting query would be an all-providers query showing pips earned by customers versus dollars earned by providers. Stay tuned for that Zulu-fans,
Tcxmon