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 - Demo Accounts update - 11/13/2009

Welcome back Zulu-traders.

Here's my weekly update from the demo accounts i'm following.

Trendcatcher added 136 pips on the week, but is still down -287 pips since the beginning of the demo period back on 11/1/2009. In terms of his public profile, he's only down about 27 pips since 11/1, so my 2-lot limit is making a big difference in terms of his profitability. Overall, i'm not convinced this provider can pick trades any better than chance, and he often stops out trades with losses under 100 pips.

Next up is Coolie1997 who had 127 pips in closed profits for the week. The graphic above shows his public facing account history which shows nothing but green since 10/18/2009. What it doesn't show is the 4 lots he has open already which have a -360 pips in open losses. So in that respect, Coolie is starting to resemble some other Zulu providers who paint the tape green by taking profits when they have them, but let losses ride until they come back into the green. Anyway, we will continue to watch this provider as he provides a lot of good trades.

Next up is Isunia who is up +199 pips since the beginning of the demo period back on 11/1/2009. Interestingly, he has hit my 180-pip stop twice, and still come back to show a profit. That's pretty impressive and i'm going to keep watching.

Next up is TheKillerz who is on a terrific roll. His demo account closed out mid-week in fine fashion, see The Killerz Comeback. I opened up another account on Friday where he pulled in another 64 pips on Friday alone. On the public side, he is up +3400 pips in the 7 weeks since he started this new account. When I run his public record through by 2-lot, 180 pip filter, he comes up with a gain of +468 pips. When I increase that stop to -300 pips (per his suggestion) the results are identical. I think more work is required to discover the ideal stop for this provider.

Next up is Student who has gained 50 pips since I added him back on 11/2. On the public side, he has gained 25,000 pips in that same timeframe, but he has done so by opening multiple trades of 100 lots each. Overall, i'm not impressed since his gains are too small to overcome the nasty 150-pip gap that will come eventually.

This difference between public and actual performance makes me angry, because Zulutrade could fix this problem and keep new Zulu-customers from going off the cliff, but they refuse to do so. If they did, it would saved me $1000's of dollars in losses before I discovered this reality. I think this deception is what is keeping Zulutrade from getting really big. Come on Zulutrade - I know you are reading this blog, so bow to the pressure and do the right thing.

Next up is wqq899. This provider has been a complete disaster and has hit my -180 pip stop on 4 of his 7 trades. Not sure what I saw in this guy. Next.

Last up was Sophistication who took a beating his his short GBP/USD trades and closed out the 2 week period down -969 pips. He hit the 180 pip stop 7 times in the 2 week period and definitely is not working for me as a provider.

Lessons learned are the usual - public records on Zulutrade are very deceiving and it takes a demo account to really discover the truth about how providers will perform in your real account.

My local database of Zulu provider history now has 350,000 records in it. I'm planning to run my concurrent lot, stop filter through the provider history to find out who the real winners are. This will allow us to wander of the beaten path of the top 100 providers and discover some new talent that is undoubtedly lurking among the approximately 700 providers in my database.

So stay tuned for that and have a great week.

Zulutrade - How to rank providers

Welcome back Zulu-traders.

I must admit I've been baffled up to now as to how to submit my own rankings for providers I have used in the past. I had an IM converation with Julia from ZT support this evening and she filled me in.

I think my education and experience as IT professional was working against me in this case. Anyway, here's the procedure.

Basically, you go to the provider profile page and scroll down to the bottom just above the trade history. Hold your mouse over the 1-5 stars next to the 3 questions. If you have used the provider in the past, you will be able to click one of the 5 stars which auto-blank from the right and auto-fill from the left. In other words, you can select any number of stars from left to right.

If you have not used the provider, the mouse cursor will become a red "Do Not Enter" sign.

Notice that there are no negative ratings. Its kind of like a survey with choices "I like the performance of my local politician" with choices "A Little, Somewhat, Moderate, Moderately Positive, Very Much". There is no choice for bloody awful.

Provider ratings is another interesting way to compare provider popularity. More on that in a future post.

Cheers and good trading,

Tcxmon

Zulutrade - Pro-B5 Anniversary

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

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

Bigwin is back!

Welcome back Zulutraders!

After a 2-month hiatus, Zulutrade provider Bigwin is back!

Bigwin disappeared from the Zulutrade scene after that nasty GBP/USD breakdown that occurred at the end of September leading to my post Bigwin Blows up, skips town. I was disappointed at the time because of all the providers on Zulutrade, I made more from Bigwin than any other provider. The graph above shows his total affect on my account. At one point he was up over 1000 pips, but gave it back on a nasty GBP/JPY trade.

Its good to see Bigwin sticking to the GBP/USD and EUR/USD which are his core strengths. When he starts trading GBP/JPY it gets a little dicey.

Looking at Bigwin's trading history across all timeframes, he positive in every timeframe from 3 days up to one month. The 3-month history looks nasty and shows down about 5,800 pips. Then he's positive in the 6-month and every other timeframes out to his 8-month history on Zulutrade.

The difficulty is that at times he opens a large number of positions which exaggerates his returns, both good and bad. It would be handy to see how he did if I could limit it to 2 lots with a 180 pip stop. Its so frustrating that Zulu doesn't give you the ability to see how the provider would have done with a 2-lot limit, and some type of reasonable stop loss. I have to get that query going, stay tuned.

For the time being, i'm thinking of dropping Coolie and going in one lot on Bigwin. We'll see.

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

Zulutrade - Range based stops by pair

Greetings from the land of Zulu.

As a follow-on to my post about stops a few weeks back, I took a look at daily ranges for the top-10 pairs on Zulutrade.

To find the top-10 pairs, I ran a query against my new MS-Access based database of Zulutrade history which has contains over 100,000 trades over about 400 providers. The plan is to update the data once a week after the close on Friday and see what intesting facts and trends that we can glean from the data.

Anyway, back to the issue of stops. I concluded in the other post that you need to look at the range of the pair. The table above shows the Average True Range (ATR) for the top-10 pairs. The second column is 1.5 time the ATR. The idea is that if your stop value is less than 1.5 times the ATR, you are likely to get stopped out based on nothing more than average daily movement.

To get these values, I used the free charting available at http://www.dailyfx.com/charts/. Select your pair, then switch to Daily time frame. Add the ATR study with a lookback of 14 bars. Click View, Information and you can see the latest ATR value as well as see its historical trend.

It makes sense to revisit these values about once a week. I read a while back that the legendary Turtle Traders were provided a printout of ATR values for each major commodity pair once a week on Mondays. The point is there a solid historical precedent for using ATR to determine stop values.

I currently use a fixed stop of 180-pips. Based on the table above, my stops are probably too tight for about half the pairs and just about right for the others. Zulu has a feature where you can set custom stop values by currency. I haven't gone as far as setting up custom stops by pair, but that's the next logical step.

That's all for now, have a great day.

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/