Zulutrade - More awesome new features!

Welcome back Zulu-fans!

Well I have to hand it to the programmers over at Zulutrade for some new features they quietly slipped in in the last day or 2. These are great features and definitely worth a look.


First up, click on the Performance tab and click "Show Advanced Filters". There's a new checkbox to filter on traders that are trading their own money. Clicking this box shows a total of 55 traders trading their own funds versus over 2,600 active providers on the system. Right at the top of the list in terms of number of followers is Got Pips?

This filter by itself is incredibly useful. Its interesting to note, however that of the top 20 traders on the Zulu system by Live trade listed here Top providers by Live Trade, none of them trade their own money. It was interesting to see Trendcatcher on the list since we've often remarked that he trades like its his own real money.

Next up, click the provider history page for TheKillerz and note the little flag indicating his country of origin. Now scroll down and click on the new "Live Followers" tab.

Now you can see the live accounts that are following that provider, and how each of them has done in terms of total pips earned with that provider.

Take a look and you can see me in there "FXCM 16010xx" and that I earned 271 pips following TheKillerz. You can also see FXCM11xx from Germany who is following a whole bunch of recent favorites from Coolie1997, Bigwin, Cheetah, EliteCapital, King Trade and TheKillerz as well as Surfing which i've never really considered following.

This last feature seems like a bit of an invasion of privacy - kind of like your stock broker disclosing your account positions to their other customers. But its all anonymous enough, so I overall I like it. It provides a whole new way of fishing for promising providers.


Let us know your comments, useful feature or invasion of privacy?

Its you chance to speak out, Zulu-fans. Check back later for comments.

Zulutrade - New demos for EliteCapital and PraetorianGuard

Welcome back to the wild world of Zulutrade!

Where else can you turn on your computer and find that someone on the other side of the world (who you don't know and will never meet) just made you 20 bucks?

Anyway, while combing the Twitter-sphere, I came across EliteCaptial and his more agressive sister account PraetorianGuard,

This provider seems to have all the right stuff as follows:

1) Good choice of provider names with no embedded spaces or funny characters that will crash my web-crawler

2) Nice account graphic indicating some degree of effort and sophisitication

3) Professional profile description that seems to match my own objectives which are account growth with a minimal tolerance for risk.

4) EliteCapital takes about 20 pips per winner and would have hit my 180-pip stop 7 times in his 127 trade history. That's about a 95% win rate and puts him well on the positive side of the sustainability equation. Running him though my 2-lot, 180-pip stop filter, he would have earned 690 pips versus his public records 2315 pips.

5) PraetorianGuard takes about 14 pips per winner and he would have hit my 180-pip stop 2 times in his 70-trade history. That's about a 98% win rate, and stepping down to a 95% win rate, he comes out on the positive side of sustainability, but not so much as EliteCapital. He would have made 431 pips after my stop, limit filter versus 829 in his public record.

6) Both providers put in a daily effort and trade almost every day, perhaps missing a day here and there.

Keep in mind that these are relatively new providers, EliteCapital has only been around for 8 weeks and PraetorianGuard only for 3 weeks. But even in that brief time, they have earned a spot on my demo account.

You can follow this provider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EverquestFX.

And you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tcxmon.

Cheers and check back later for more updates.

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

More on the Margin Call -o- meter ™

Many thanks to Digian and James over at
http://www.zulutradeblog.com/ for bringing up the issue of the Margin Call -o- meter ™. I must confess James is the originator of the Zulutrade blog concept, and i'm just a wanna-be.

Anyway, the Margin Call -o- meter ™ is a quick, graphical way of letting the user know how likely they are to blow-up their account based on their provider and account settings. The data appears as a thermometer-like zero to 100 scale. They even color-code it so that low numbers are a nice soothing green and the higher-risk values are a high-blood-pressure inducing orange to red. As you can see above, the meter shows my current odds of blow-out at 82.8% which is pretty high for a conservative guy like myself.

By way of background, Zulutrade updated the o'Meter in the past few months to include a calculation regarding the number of open positions each provider is likely to open. To prove this, let's take a look at a few sample setups.

First, setup your account for provider Bigwin. Click the Advanced link and set him for 1 Max total open trades with a Stop value of 180 pips. The screen will look like this:






Next, setup your account with provider Pro-B5. Click the Advanced link and set him for 1 Max total open trades with a Stop value of 180 pips. The screen will look like this:






That's a pretty big difference, 58% chance of blow-up versus 2.1%. What's the difference? You can't see it on the setup screen but its the number of concurrent positions opened by the provider.

Why should Zulu so strongly consider the number of open positions? Its because Zulutrade is merely an interface which passes orders to the FCM for execution.

Consider the scenario where ZT sends a trade to the foreign currency merchant (FCM). FCM executes the order but for whatever reason the confirm doesn't make it back to ZT. Signal provider sends another order, but ZT's order limits are not honored because as far as ZT is concerned, you don't have a position open. From there it gets ugly and you can imagine what happens next.

I've had some minor issues with Zulutrade executions, but nothing that bad yet.

What's the moral of the story? Don't bet your mother's, grandmother's or your kid's college fund on currency trading. And btw...

Cheers to James and his Mrs for their new arrival!

Open a free account on Zulutrade at http://zulumon.zulutrade.com/

FxArena Mystery Trade

Some Zulutrade users have reported trade disputes - situations where stops were not honored or something went amiss that ended up costing them money. I had a related issue this week.



I was watching my account pretty closely on Wednesday after the Pro-B5 blowup. All of the sudden I saw a loss for $-84 come out of nowhere. This struck me as strange since this wasn't close to my stop of -150 and providers generally avoid losses like the plague. I checked the trade history, open positions, and could find no public evidence of this trade anywhere.

I sent an e-mail support@zulutrade.com and they gave a short reply about a stop being hit. I replied that this was nowhere close to my stop level. They came back the next morning asking for the broker ticket # (which I had already sent them) and then heard nothing back.

To this day I still don't see any evidence of this trade in the public record. I suspect it was a mishap where the trade went into the system and got lost. It didn't appear anywhere until it got closed out.

Anyway, be aware that this is one of the risks of dealing with Zulutrade, that their system could screw up and you could loose money as a result and they have no obligation to reimburse you. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often and my other signal providers quickly made up for the loss.

Shaken out of Pro-B5

After last week's revelation that Pro-B5 was the conservative arm of "Probability Based Wave-5", I added Pro-B5 on Monday with one lot and 150 pip-stop

He scalped me a few pips on Tuesday and all was well in Zulu-land.

Then came Tuesday and he did it to me again! He went long GBP/JPY at 141.70 at the worst possible time. To add insult to injury, he added positions on the way down. Fortunately, I was limited to 1 lot, so damage was minimized. My 150-pip stop was hit later that morning. This was eerily reminiscent to a recent trade he made by going short GBP/JPY at 118.95 (at the exact bottom) under the provider Probability Based Wave-5.

I went back and checked subscribed counts and Probability Based Wave-5 has only 38 subscribed users, while Pro-B5 has almost 300 subscribed users! Naturally being drawn to the account where he's going to make 10 times the profits, he migrated his aggressive strategy over to this supposedly conservative account! Goes to show you what a minefield picking providers can be!

Lesson learned is that this provider is too risky for me. I want to have open a most 2 lots per provider with a 150-pip stops so Pro-B5 is not for me. I removed him on Thursday. He did make a few other winning trades, but overall this provider cost my account -80 pips.

Click here to open a free Zulutrade account