Zulutrade - Live account update

Welcome back Zulu-traders.

It was another bruising week in my live account and my live account is now nearly wiped out.

The week started out on a bright note (and I breathed a sign of relief) when I saw the bulk of my remaining funds were successfully withdrawn leaving just over $500 or 500 pips remaining. I'm still waiting to receive the check, but I'm not too concerned about that since I've withdrawn money successfully from FXCM in the past.

Before I get too negative, there was some good news. Cheetah had a decent week and picked up 35 pips on 4 straight winners with a max drawdown of -18 pips. Cheetah was back in his old form (after a rough week last week) and was carefully picking trades with low drawdown. Cheetah is now the only live provider remaining in my account.

Now back to TheKillerz who had another rough week. I had a feeling his trading would continue to be rocky, so I was quick to hedge or second-guess his trades. He was inactive until noon EST on Monday and it was looking like he was taking the week off. He then went short EUR/USD and I hedged that trade quickly. TheKillerz closed that trade with a -67 pip loss, and I was able to take a 13-pip profit on that hedge. On Tuesday, TheKillerz went long GBP/USD and I closed that trade out with a -25 pip loss and he ended up taking a 30-pip profit.

I then took the controversial step of reversing TheKillerz signals for Thursday. He came in and bought GBP/USD and Zulu did the opposite and sold. I also hedged this trade and ended up taking a 3-pip profit on my hedge and a 25-pip loss on my reversed signal. At that point, I decided second-guessing the provider was a bad idea and removed the reverse.

Well Friday came along and I woke up in the hole -50 pips. That trade continued to go the wrong way and TheKillerz ended up taking a nasty -126 pips loss on that trade. Had I kept my reverse in place, I probably could have closed the week in the green. But it shows the slippery slope of trying to second-guess your provider.

So this drubbing puts me close to out of the Zulutrade game. I still have a few hundred pips left and Cheetah on the live account, so let's see where that takes us.

Finally, some of my demo providers had good weeks. But it shows the difficulty of the Zulutrade game - if a user has an excellent record in the demo account, how do we know that performance will carry over to the live account? In almost every case Ive seen, the provider works for some period of time, then goes into drawdown and wipes out whatever gains they made and then some.

I can't get over the feeling that the behavior of the providers is influenced by the number of live followers they have. That's may be tough to prove -but it does show a fundamental flaw in the Zulutrade model - that providers are compensated by transaction and not on the profitability of their own subscribers.

That's enough pain for now, check back later for updates on my journey to profitability in the forex markets.