Dropping my signals from ZuluTrade

This is going to be a short message as I’m rather angry at the moment.

I’ve decided to remove my signals from ZuluTrade with immediate effect as I have just received an email from a friend who is running my signals on his account.

It appears that ZuluTrade is not 100% reliable and today he received an order without a stop loss. The original stop loss was 45 pips and his order managed to get down to 166 pips before he realised and closed the order manually. This is four times the stop loss he should have suffered. Obviously he’s not impressed.

I have had other people report this to me on demo accounts before but I was assured at the time that it had never happened to anyone before.

I’ve contacted ZuluTrade advising them of this fault and my decision to remove my signals at this time.

All I can say at this point is

Do not use ZuluTrade at all – their platform is not 100% reliable.

You would be better off taking your money to a casino.

This leaves FX-Auto as the last man standing in the mirror signal provider stakes. Let’s see how they work out over the next few months.

You can sign up for a demo FX-Auto account here.

Cast Iron Man Results

Well, I can whole heartedly say I’m glad that January is over. Cast Iron Man has had the run around from the markets this month. Many times prices spiked and took out stops from trades that later went on to make the targets. This is obviously pretty frustrating.

Still, I knew that a losing month would come along eventually as the backtests indicated. The strategy isn’t bomb proof – no strategy is. What I do know is that the majority of months will prove to be winning months.

I have of course been busy, not just looking to tweak Cast Iron Man further – although, I have to admit that I’ve reached the 95% stage and any further tweaks will be fine tuning rather than ground breaking – but I’ve also been working on new trading robots. I have a couple of interesting strategies that I’m trying to get to grips with at the moment, but over the long term they aren’t as good as I would like them to be. As with Cast Iron Man, I will only accept that the strategy is good if it backtests well over the long term.

I’m going to be raising the amount of capital I have in my FX-Pro account over the weekend. Primarily because at the moment there isn’t enough capital in there to trade some of the pairs at a percentage of risk that I’m happy with, so I have been slightly overexposed. I need about £2500 in there in total to have the risk settings I’d like to be using.

Hope you all have a great weekend and here’s to a profitable February!

ZuluTrade announces partnership with Dukascopy

Well folks, I never thought I’d see the day but ZuluTrade have gone and added Dukascopy as one of their brokers. This is delightful news. For those of you out there that aren’t aware. Dukascopy are one of the largest ECN brokers in the world, with very tight spreads. I actually run my large Cast Iron Man account with Dukascopy.

Hopefully Tradency ( FX-Auto ) will follow suit and we’ll be able to choose from which ever of the two provides the best latency.

You can open a ZuluTrade account here and take advantage of one of the best brokers around.

Forex Neutrino Backtests

I’ve been away over the last few days at a seminar so I’ve not had a chance to take a look at the Forex Neutrino product yet, but I plan to do so over the next few days.

However, I did get a chance to run the expert advisor. I ran both sets of settings through. As usual I ran it over the last three years ( pre- crash, crash and post crash ) which I think is the only way to judge a trading robot at the moment. Don’t trust any shorter term backtests. It’s very easy for sellers to cherry pick the periods where their robots work best.

For some reason, despite reloading the history again and again I could never get the backtest on the one minute chart to report better than a 25% modelling quality.

This worries me, it implies that the trading logic is  not very robust in some respect, which is a shame because the results that it does report on the one minute chart are actually not too bad.

The scalping version on the five minute chart is the usual scalping robot that wins the best part of nothing when it wins and then loses an absolute bucket load of money when it loses. Here are the backtests I got ( again apologies to my email subscribers you will not see the images on your email ).

I’ll take a look at the manual strategy over the next few days, in the meantime if anyone has any experience of trading the strategy in either a demo or live account it would be good to hear about it.

Forex Neutrino

So, in true tyre kicking form I’ve purchased a copy of Forex Neutrino. Over the next few days I’ll let people know how I get on, One initial thing I’ve found is that the website isn’t even complete.
On purchasing the first product they try to sell me “Upsell 1″, then “Upsell 2b”, then “dl1″ and finally I find a page that has “dl8″ on it but no product to download. Whoops! Not an auspicious release so far. I’ve submitted an email to the site and I’ll let everyone know how I get on, but I have a general attitude that problems in any element of a product generally imply that there will be problems in other areas!

Cast Iron Man

It looks as though the markets are starting to play ball this year. I’ve had three winning days out of the last four and another few good days will see this month reverse it’s losing streak and although I don’t expect as good a performance as the previous two months I’m hopeful it will keep the equity ticking in the right direction.

Unfortunately the trade on EUR/USD that I received on my live account with FX-Pro today that contributed to my winning day did not trigger on either the Alpari demo account running ZuluTrade or the demo FX-Pro account feeding FX-Auto.

This does sometimes happen as I do assess price action on the approach to a breakout in order to filter out some of the poorer opportunities. Unfortunately small differences in broker price feeds or platform disconnects ( which the Alpari demo account was experiencing today ) can affect the trades generated.

Which leads me onto my offer to run a premium trading service for anybody wanting to maximise their chances of getting the best returns with Cast Iron Man. I’ve had several responses so far but not quite as many as I would like before I invest in setting this option up. I know it’s that time of year where people are assessing their budgets and planning for the coming year and the idea of committing $5000 to an investment decision is a difficult one, but I do believe that it will be a worthwhile one. So, if there’s anyone else out there that feels that this might be an option for them, possibly later in the year even then please let me know.

Cast Iron Man Version 3 compounded results

I’ve finished compounding the results of the three years of backtests I have for version 3 of Cast Iron Man and so I’ve been doing some data analysis of those results over the last few days. Obviously I chart equity and drawdown curves in order to look at how the portfolio of currencies performs when traded together.

Now, Cast Iron Man should only really be considered as a long term bet. Trading results from day to day and even from week to week are in effect meaningless as it’s quite possible to lose heavily one week and then win back your losses and more over the next week or so. In backtest there are even some months that suffer a loss overall, fortunately these are rare. I’ve put together a chart of the percentage equity gain from the backtests for the consolidated basket of currencies over the last three years. There is one for each of the risk scenarios that I describe on my “Appetite for Risk” page.

Here they are. Enjoy.

Apologies to my email subscribers, as you won’t be able to see these charts on the email. You will need to check the blog for the images. By the way if you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, then please do so using the box to the right. That way you can keep up to date with developments on Cast Iron Man as they happen. I will not share your email address with anyone else ever!

On a seperate note, JT over at ZuluTrade Top made an excellent post yesterday about the dangers of ZuluTrade, definitely echoes my post of yesterday. You can read it here

Cast Iron Man and ZuluTrade

It’s come to my notice that there are some of my subscribers on ZuluTrade using other signal providers on top of my own.

I cannot stress this highly enough. Unless you absolutely know what you are doing. Do not do this.

It can be very tempting to think of the riches that you might be able to achieve the more providers you add to your account, but the only thing you should be considering with trading is how much you can afford to lose. If this is not your mindset then I’m sorry but trading probably isn’t for you at this moment in time. Put your money somewhere safer.

Stacking up multiple providers, unless you have worked out your risk accordingly will, during testing market periods ( like now! ), lead to massive drawdown on your account and even the possibility of wiping it out.

That said, there are obviously people out there that can profit from multiple providers. So here’s a guideline.

When you look at a signal provider if you download their trade history into Excel and then analyse the data working out possible position sizes from the maximum stop losses by using that currency pairs pip values and generating things like equity and drawdown curves from a consolidated trading statement of the traders you plan to trade,  then carry on, I apologise for the lecture.

If you look at a provider and think “He looks good, I’ll trade him” then you really need to ask yourself whether you’re trading or gambling.

There are many tricks that can be used to get higher up the ratings on ZuluTrade, these include -

Running massive stop losses and waiting until a trade turns in your favour before closing.

Opening multiple positions all in the same direction to increase their pip count.

Opening larger than the 0.1 lot position that ZuluTrade ask you to open in order to get a multiple of their pips counts.

Sorry for the lecture but I feel that these things need pointing out, I would hate for anyone to lose their money from using ZuluTrade.

If anyone has any questions then please feel free to contact me here.

Cast Iron Man

I have a good friend who has been running Cast Iron Man on a live account on Alpari with ZuluTrade since the beginning of the new year and so I decided to compare the trades that I had generated in the Alpari demo account that submits trades to ZuluTrade for my subscribers to take.

Here is the summary.

Now fortunately my friend has come out 62 pips to the good compared to the signals I submitted, however I think that the correlation between the live Alpari trades and my signals from my demo Alpari platform is appalling. Given that I submit a stop loss and a take profit with the trade I would expect the odd pip slippage maybe due to some latency issues on trade opening but to have such a marked difference after running for only eight trading days is worrying.

My friend has also agreed to open up a live account with FX-Auto which will allow us to do a detailed comparison over the next few months of which service is better for mirroring your signals ZuluTrade or FX-Auto . I will obviously keep everyone informed as it is important to be using the premier mirror service for trading.

On that note, some people have expressed concerns about the brokers offered by the mirror signal providers. With this in mind I am contemplating setting up a premier service myself for people wanting to trade Cast Iron Man with other brokers. My favourite broker is Dukascopy and I think they are planning to release MT4 within the next few months!

So, here’s what I’m thinking – and I will only do this if I have serious interest. If you wanted to run with another broker, for example Dukascopy. Then I will run the robot for you, directly on your MT4 account on a server in Geneva, close to the Dukascopy offices. You would get the same latency that I get with my live account currently. You would also get to use the broker of your choice with the best spreads and order fulfillment.

Now, I need to know if people are interested in this option before I put any serious effort into working out the details and costings.  However, I will mention that in order for this to be cost effective for me you will need to be investing upwards of $5000.

If you are interested in this option then contact me here.

It must be Christmas!

So, here’s a backtest from Forex Mercenary. Look at all those winning trades!

It must be Christmas!

Wait a minute it IS Christmas.

Something very dubious here folks.