Zulutrade - Demo accounts update - 12/4/2009

Welcome back to Zulu-burbia.

Well I've recovered from my iPhone envy enough to get together a recap of demo accounts. I skipped demo accounts review last week, so our hard-working providers are overdue for an update.

First up is TheKillerz who has been utterly sublime since adding him as a demo back on 11/13/2009. Since then he had 28 straight winning trades and picked up 685 pips. His streak was broken this past Tuesday when he took a pair of 45 pips losses on a long EUR/USD position. He recovered later in the week and is now up +722 pips in just under 3 weeks. And that's on a 2-lot position limit with a 140 pip stop which he didn't come anywhere close to hitting!

The other day I was joking with JT over at http://zulutrade-top.blogspot.com/ about how I didn't want to start gushing about how awesome TheKillerz has been lately because as soon as I do so, providers seem to blow up. At least that's what happened with Pro-B5 and Coolie 1997. Anyway, Mr Rabea is on a roll and let's all hope he keeps it up.

Next up is EliteCapital who is up +122 pips since adding him back on 11/19/2009. His performance has been a bit of a zig-zag and he's hit my 180-pip stop 3 times in the 2 week period since he's had an open demo. He went into drawdown on a pair of USD/JPY trades last week on the Dubai news last Thanksgiving Thursday. At that point, he was down -307 pips and thinks were looking pretty bleak. But he came screaming back with a single AUD/JPY trade where he picked up +402 pips on that trade alone.

Next up is PraetorianGuard who is up +33 pips in the 3-week demo period. He performance has been pretty similar to EliteCapital which is not surprising since they are the same provider. I would describe the performance as "lumpy" and he has also hit my stop a few times since the start of the demo period. Overall, I like this provider, but I'm thinking for my account size and risk parameters, a micro account with 5-lots max and a 250-pip stop might get better results.

There's most definitely a "sweet spot" in terms of lot sizes and stop losses such that taking the same amount of capital it would take to buy 1-10K lot would be split into 10 1K mini lots which can be allocated to the provider. In fact, looking back on drawdown analysis from Lot Limit and Stop loss , most good providers came in less than 1000 pips of drawdown. So it starts to look like .. open an account, and deposit $1000. Allocate 1 signal provider to that account and give him 10-micro lots max with a 200-pip stop per position. That's it, either boom or bust. If your not willing to allocate $1000 (1000 pips) to a provider, your probably going to panic out before the provider is able to trade his way back out of a drawdown. But I digress.

Next up is Coolie 1997 who is now -76 pips down on the demo period. His long NZD/USD and AUD/NZD positions both hit my 180-pip stops which took is performance into the red. On the public side, Coolie is still with those trades as well as a pair some other trades. Also on the public side, he recently took a 500-pip (system default) stop on a long GBP/JPY position. Another reason the avoid the GBP/JPY, it rips your account to pieces and a 180-pip stop just isn't enough as we saw with EliteCapital and PrateorianGuard.

Recent addition king trade made no trades this past week which was a bit of a disappointment. By the looks of his live followers, he's got a lot of new users who have made 0 pips with him who are just waiting for him to spring a trade.

I meant to follow Student but I spaced out and missed a week of demo. I'll have an update for him next week.

We're going to take a look at Zulu's recent additions from a Web-scraping perspective and see if we can extract the live follower data for each provider. If we can do that that might lead to some interesting queries and allow us to see how much deviation there is from Zulu's public "Followers" versus "Live followers." Check back later for that.

That's it, enjoy the rest of your Friday and the weekend.