Zulutrade Provider Coolie 1997 comments

Welcome back, Zulu-traders.

We heard back today from our recent favorite Coolie 1997 who offers some perspective on his absence from active trading on Zulutrade and his change in style.


By way of background, Coolie 1997 entered the Zulutrade scene on June 29, 2009. Through the end of September 2009, he racked up an impressive 2000+ pips. He was able to pull in pips from a variety of pairs rarely seen on Zultrade such as NZD/JPY, EUR/JPY and EUR/AUD just to name a few. Even more impressive was that he did so with a remarkably small amount of drawdown. His success landed him in the top-10 providers on Zulutrade (by user count) which is a pretty impressive accomplishment in such a short period of time.

Anyway, after my buddy Townjet over at http://www.zulutrade-top.blogspot.com/ had an excellent September with Coolie I jumped on the Coolie bandwagon. Since adding Coolie to my live account back on 10/13, i'm now down almost -700 pips down sending my account to fresh lows. Depressed by this change of character, I posted Coolie what's the deal? and Townjet posted Putting a hold on Coolie 1997 both in the last 2 weeks.

Coolie has commented today as follows:

Hi Tcxmon,

Sorry for a long absense.

I have been seeking what trade style is the best for Zulu and me. Zulu users like short term gain, and my real trade style is very long one. The change of trade style made the users' lot smaller.

The total lots of all the users became 10-15%. Even though my job prevents me from trading 24 hours a day, the answer is almost 1), not 2).Sorry again for a sudden change and a big loss, please use me effectively by putting stop order, betting small lot, etc.

See you sometime,

coolie1997

So Coolie has retreated to a longer-term trading style. In terms of his recent performance, he has closed +357 pips since I dropped him, but he has -334 pips in open losses. His open losses are about 12% of his total closed profits since account opening back in July. He's nowhere near "risky provider" status (where Max Drawdown exceeds closed profit), but he's clearly at a higher drawdown rate than we have seen historically. But he does lend some long term perspective to currency trading with larger tolerance for drawdown.

Anway, we thank Coolie for his comments and wish him all the best with his trading.

Stay tuned for the weekly update,

Tcxmon

Zulutrade - Coolie 1997 - What's the Deal?

Greetings Zulu-traders.

We've seen a marked difference in trading behavior and results of our recent favorite Zulutrade provider Coolie 1997 in the past few weeks.

In response to my post Zulutrade Provider Coolie 1997 responds! back on 10/13, we had a lively exchange with 14 comments where Coolie responded to various questions and described his method for his Zulutrade positions. Based on his performance, and degree of loss control, we went live with Coolie back on 10/12. From there, he went onto a high of +59 pips on a max drawdown of -89 pips.

That was the end of his run and now i'm down about -500 pips on Coolie not counting the -100 pip open loss in an EUR/USD position. Every trader goes through drawdowns and that is to be expected. But this is an outright change in behavior. Here is some hard data to back up that observation:

From his start on Zultrade back on 6/29 through 10/13 Coolie had an average high of 49 pips, and average max drawdown of -41 pips and an average profit per trade of nearly 26 pips. Since 10/13, he's had an average high of +48 pips, an average max drawdown of -103 pips and an average gain of -79 pips.

Also, Coolie hasn't closed a trade since 10/22. In term of his open trades, here are the stats:

AUD/JPY 10/27 - 1 BUY at 84.14 - now 80.99 down -315 pips
EUR/USD 10/27 - 1 BUY at 1.4813 - now 1.4712 down -100 pips
EUR/JPY 10/27 - 1 BUY at 136.864 - now 132.38 down - 448 pips
USD/JPY 10/23 - 1 SELL at 91.93 - now 89.98 up +195 pips

Overall, he's down about -668 pips on open positions. Generally, I don't have a problem with that except for the sharp difference in trading behavior. Many of these positions moved in and out of profitablity (within past profit-taking behavior anyway) but these trades seem to be abandoned overall.

I don't know what's going on with Coolie, but here are my theories:

1) He's decided to revert to his own trading style (long term position based on fundamentals) he uses for his own real money and eschewed his prior Zulutrade trading style (aka 6th sense).

2) He's no longer engaged with Zulutrade and busy with work, personal or other family matters.

We're not due an answer, but Coolie, if you are reading, please give us an idea what you are doing. Absent your response we have to conclude you are not longer engaged and have to go onto to find other providers who pay more attention to our money.

To Coolie 1997 and all our readers - hope all is well with you and your family.

Best regards,

Tcxmon