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 - Top Providers by Live Trade - 11/13/2009

Welcome back Zulu-traders.

To your left please find a list of the Top 20 providers on Zulutrade from 11/8/2009 to 11/13/2009 for positions closed in that period.

If you've been following this blog, you know that we can't completely rely on this figure to be accurate. Based on feedback from provider Coolie1997, we estimated that these figures can be understated by a factor of 4. In other words, the trade values are in reality 4 times larger as we see on the left with each unit being a Mini (10K) lot.

By the way, Coolie came in at #31 on the list with 40 live trades closed.

I haven't done any diligence on these providers, so I can't say they are worthy of risking your own hard-earned dollars. Even so, its interesting to see who is on top in terms of having the greatest dollar following from users with live accounts.

As promised, I ran my 2-lot, 180-pip-stop filter through my Zulutrade History database with some interesting results. I need to do some additional work to calculate the requisite drawdown (and required account size) before I share that data. Stay tuned and perhaps I can get it out later in the week.

Cheers,

Tcxmon

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

Bigwin stumbles - gets back up

Back on 8/4, I took some heat in an anonymous comment regarding my support for Zulutrade provider Bigwin. The criticism compared him to FxMarkets, a provider who whacked my account with a 600-pip loss (in almost no time) back on 1/5/2009.

Later it was revealed that FxMarkets was one and the same as about 1/2 dozen other providers on Zulutrade who were among the best performers and had the biggest followings. I found out the hard way that this provider tended to open many GBP/JPY positions, let them run into the red and then wait for them to come back. Check out my blog entry for 2/22/2009 for more info.

Anyway, I don't think the comparison is warranted and here's why.

Bigwin took a hit on the recent run in the GBP/USD up to 1.70. He went short at the breakout point at 1.67 and at one point he had almost 86 positions open at once which is clearly unrealistic. I stayed with Bigwin during that period with a 2-lot limit and a 180-pip stop thanks to feedback from Zulutrade provider Pro-B5.

The performance graph from above shows that at one point I was up almost 900 pips using Bigwin. His recent stumble cut those gains in half, yet he was able to come through the period and sustain and upward trajectory. Some of the gains he made on the rebound came from a later short he put on after I got stopped out of one of his earlier positions in that same run.

Of course, you could make the point that the only thing that bailed out Bigwin was the fact that the breakout failed, and GBP/USD moved back toward 1.67 and below in his favor.

In his performance last week, Bigwin managed to pull in 46-pips even though he didn't trade at all on Thursday and Friday 8/20 and 8/21. So for the time being, i'm still sticking with Bigwin with a 2-lot limit and 180-pip stop.

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

Pro-B5 responds

Zulutrade provider Pro-B5 has generously responded to my post and has some interesting things to say about the Zulutrade platform. His whole response is below, but here are my key takeaways:

• I reduced my stops from 500 pips to 180 pips
• Pro-B5 communicates regularly with ZT founder Alex Leon regarding allocating a fixed amount of capital to each provider. This would result in realistic performance history and address the fact that the performance on the site is purely theoretical - since its based on unlimited capital.
• Technical problems with trade opening and closing are an ongoing risk with the ZT platform are solely at the risk of the ZT user. I knew this already, but since it hasn't happened to me in a while and I needed a reminder.

In summary, Pro-B5 is a real asset to the Zulutrade community and we are grateful for his efforts! Full text of the reply is below:


Hi TCX System

Interesting Post, just as a guide, I have to be careful about the daily range on the GBP-JPY which is about 280 to 326 pips per day. Only after having study that will I place a trade.

This is why some time I will not trade on Zulu if the price action is at the extremes. Since I will not risk a big stop or put the client’s money at risk in such a foolish trade.

I will let the other providers play games. I am here to win, and yes I will lose. But I will get back my losses in an orderly fashion like you seem that I have done, One trade at a time MAYBE 2 lots but never will I go nuts trying to keep a "green Tape" ever again. I leave that to those others that call themselves traders.


I know that Zulu has had problem and I took the heat from the users that did not have their trades close in profit and suffered on a winning trade of 23 pips a lose of close to 200 pips.

They take there anger out on (me)the signal provider at times when it is out of my hands That is why I think the rating is nothing more than a place to vent anger and means nothing to me. Also I e-mail Mr. Leon almost 3 times a week and I know for a fact biased on his e-mail that Zulu is addressing the problems with painting the tape and will put a fix amount of capital on every signal providers to match a real demo . This will keep them from opening so many trades. To me people blame Zulu for their own acts of greed and foolish mistakes. I am sure if the problem was on Zulu they would make it “good” and correct it” . But they sometime also take heat when say the API for FXCM goes off line and trades will not close. They have problems we all do.

Now what happens when there is a tech mistake? People do not want to hear the excuse. We all risk money when we trade. I risk a trade that is positive going into a loss because Zulu has a problem. But I deal with it and move on to the next trade. There is no need to cry about it .That will not get back my loss. I am reasonable and I will get my loss and my clients. Zulu can correct the problem which I have witness this first hand.

We all have seen when people are on a roll with “painting the tape” they feel they got the next Holy Grail and can do no wrong, but when they give back all the winnings and all their trading capital it is to late. But since most of Zulu’s clients are retail traders they just never learn.

The world 4 top hedge funds one binging Paul Tudor ( Tudor Fund) which avg a yearly return of 58% and one year made 98%, What makes people think they will make 50%+ per month is beyond me. Again it shows they know very little about trading and are hoping to get rich quick,

Also there is NO need to use a 500 pip stop NEVR set it at 180 max. Because bet your lost damn dollar I will close the trade unless God take my life at the moment I am closing it. Other wise it will get done , and” no if” about it.

This is an open source e-mail post it if you like,

If you or any one suffer losses because of my wide stops 9 months ago .I am TRULY SORRY. This will never happen again .Watch my actions not my words.

No one is prefect but a real trader must stand by his belief and I will stand by mine. Even if I lose 90% of my people because other make more pips by “painting the tape” or using 500 to 1,000 pip stop lose .Than I really do not need user like that . I want real investor large or small.

Thank you , and wish you all the Best

Pro-B5


Sincerely,Pro-B5

Risk Warning:The Off Exchange Retail Foreign Currency Market(FOREX)has opportunity for large potential rewards, but equal opportunity for large potential loss. Be aware of the risks and be willing to accept them in order to invest in the Forex markets. The possibility exists that you could sustain a loss of some or all of your initial investment and there for you should not invest money that you cannot afford to lose. Nothing in our e-mail or website shall be deemed a solicitation or an offer to Buy/Sell currencies ,we are not liable for any loss or damages. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits as past performance of any trading methodology is not indicative of futures results. Hypothetical or simulated performance results have certain limitations. Unlike an actual performance record, simulated results do not represent actual trading. Also, since the trades have not actually been executed.

Open a free Zulu-trade account at http://zulumon.zulutrade.com/.

HomerPoet morphs into mmtwta

Greetings fellow Zulu-Traders. By now you must all think i'm obsessed with HomerPoet since I blog about him repeatedly. Well he has made some progress rebounding from some recent drawdowns. Even so, he's down over -1500 pips from his top at +2000 pips which puts him into the risky provider category. Despite these blotches in is record, he still has better than 95% profitable trades. In any case, due to these stains on his record he probably figures its better to make a fresh start to gain a new following. Thanks to the Zulutrade's feature we know when an old provider assumes a new identity. As of last week, Homerpoet re-emerged under the new name mmtwta.

So far he's off to a solid start with 5 straight profitable days picking up +325 pips. Also, he's got 100% profitable trades which should garner some attention. This time he's taking between 25 and 30 pips profit per trade. I would like to see this number much higher - closer to 50 pips. That will help to overcome that occasional excursion beyond -150 pips which would be my expected stop.

I added mmtwta for one lot with a 150 pip stop. I live to regret it, we will see.

Update on High Rollers

Here's an update on last week's observations regarding Zulutrade provider High Rollers.

As expected High Rollers was idle until Thursday. But this week, he came in earlier in the trading day at about 8:30 GMT or about 3:30 AM EST. He took only 2 trades, one at 8:30, and another at 8:35. He exited both positions at 8:38 and took 22 pips on the first trade and 28 pips on the second trade. I was setup for 2 lots per trade, but limted to 1 open trade per provier per currency, so I bagged 40 pips in an 8 minute period!


In terms of lessons learned, we clearly have the correct day of the week, and the correct half of the day (AM GMT), but we are still missing the entry signal. Taking a look at the chart, we are looking at a triple top pattern playing out over an 8-day period. The sobering part of the analysis is that the entire week's trading activity happened within the single bar under the blue arrow. How's that for selectivity?

The only downside is that good currency trading can be pretty boring most of the time. I am having a similar experience with HomerPoet, but i'll cover that more in another post.

Click here to open a free Zulutrade account

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

Signal Providers revelation

This past weekend Zulutrade activated a feature that let's you see what signal providers are using multiple names. This is important because it easier to really know who's who.

The biggest find was the following:

4X Finance, 4X World, FxMarkets, GBP$, GBP/JPY Club, JackPot, Never Lose$, PipGenerator, Pound Cake, Scalpers GroupClub4x

Are all the same provider!

This is significant because these are among the top providers in all of Zulutrade historically. This provider is almost exclusively a GPB/JPY seller and will do well when GBY/JPY is in a downtrend - which it was for much of last year.

Beware, however, because this provider likes to keep large open losses (as large as -1000 pips) to keep his win % so high. So don't use this provider unless you can stand large open losses. You may make money short term, but eventually, you will go into an extended drawdown.

Click here to open a free Zulutrade account

Selected Signal Providers - 02/22/2009

Here are my currently selected signal providers:

Live Account
Oxford Gobal Fx Fund
JzFx
High Rollers
FXArena
HomerPoet

All providers set to 2 lots max except for Oxford and JzFx set to 1 trade open max. Stops set to 150 pips on all providers.

Demo268
FxCompass - FX Compass has done well
Averaging - not so well

Demo664
OneSignalOneProfit - Climbing out of a drawdown impressivly
Forex Builder - Loosing
FXArena - Looking good

Demo067
Shorttrade - Shortrade is a winner
10pips - nothing doing

Demo761
Forex Guru - Can't figure this person out its a guy, girl what

Demo814
Never Lose$ - Same as FXMarkets
No Drawdown - Both had a good week

Demo033
Cobotan - Very consistent but drawdowns too large for my taste

Demo150
Homerpoet very consistent

Demo746
High Rollers rules supreme

Demo226
Firepips doing nothing

Demo130
Mayfair swing
Magic FX both not impressive

Click here to open a free Zulutrade account

Provider selection criteria

Here are my critera for selecting signal providers. I'm a relatively conservative investor and I want to grow the account, as safely as possible with capital preservation a high priority:

1) No large, open drawdowns.

I avoid providers that hang onto large, loosing positions for weeks or months. Ideally the provider should have no open trades, since I usually do my analysis on the weekends.

2) Consistent effort

I'm okay with part-time traders, but I need to see at least one trade every 2 weeks or I assume the provider is disengaged.

3) 85% or better winning percentage

4) No "Painting the Tape".

Whenever I see an entire screen worth of the same trade, I assume the provider it taking multiple open positions. I'm limiting my trading to 2 open lots per provider at one time, so this is a negative.

5) No large drawdowns in History

Whenever I see multiple trades going more than -200 pips, in the account, that's bad. My stops are set to about 150 and those trades would all be loosers for me. Plus, I can't understand the fact that a trade would go that far against the provider without them closing it. I can't take those type of drawdowns.

6) Must have at least 3 weeks history.

7) Must have live, subscribed users.

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Top 10 things you need to know about Zulutrade

Top 10 Things you need to know about Zulutrade:

1) Most of the providers are trading demo money.

They can afford to sit out large losses because they don't feel the pain.

2) Profits will likely be 1/10th of the demo account.

Demo accounts use full-size (100K) position size. Unless you will have 50K to invest, you will be using a Mini Account (10K) and the profits (or losses) will be 1/10th of the demo account.

3) The size of the loosing trades (amount lost) in most cases will be larger that the size (amount won) of the winning trades.

This doesn't mean you can't make money. As long as your winners outnumber your losers, you will be in the black! For example, you may have series of winning trades, and you are up 160 pips. Then a trade could come along where you loose 120 pips, and you are now back down to +20 pips.

4) Drawdown is inevitable.

Trading forex is extremely unpredictable, and even the best good traders will have loosing trades.

5) Beware of providers with very high % profitable.

They often leave trades open for as long as it takes for them to become profitable again.

6) Some providers trade under multiple names.

Zulutrade recently added a feature now where we know who is really who which is extremely helpful.

7) The Zulutrade platform has had some history of issues where trades were not placed or execute properly. If you loose money because of a glitch in Zulutrade's system, Zulutrade will not reimburse you for funds lost. This has not been a issue for me.

8) Currency trading is stressful and every unpredictable. If you are going to invest real money, start small and slow.

9) Zulutrade support can sometimes be spotty and I get the sense that is an extremely bare-bones operation.

I'm not too concerned about this because my money is with the FCM in my case FXCM which is safe.

10) Picking signal providers is a lot of work, and that's where I will try to help with this blog!

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Welcome

Welcome to my blog regarding Zulutrade!

Zulutrade is a fascinating on-line economy that makes it easy to trade foreign exchange, without having to do to the trading yourself. Instead, you pick amongst Zulutrade's 100's of experienced Forex traders, and they do the trading for you. Best of all, its totally free to the investor and there are no maintenance, performance or other fees of any kind.

Imagine for a second the Zulutrade dream - people all over the world working hard to stuff money into your pocket while you go on with your life!

Well it sounds amazing, and it is. But of course, there are always "gotchas", things they didn't tell you ahead of time that you would only know having gone through it yourself. We'll i've been through it and this blog is dedicated to making it easier for you to be successful with Zulutrade. I'll tell you the low down and share my latest provider picks.

That's enough for now - may the pips be with you!

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