What spurred such a topic?
I have been following (not subscribing) to a signal provider through MQL5 for at least 4-5 months now after seeing some pretty phenomenal growth figures, coupled with very manageable draw down and who had managed to get a decent following to their services. What provoked my interest further was that it was a Martingale Strategy that had gone on for about 3 years and had over 5000 trades. Pretty good effort really. As you can see from the first screen shot, the equity curve is just beautiful, and it is not a testing, highly optimized curve from a strategy tester, it is real live trading. But I guess with all good things, it had to come to an end..... well not quite yet, but very possibly.
From memory, the initial deposit was $1000, and it grew to a profit at its peak of close to $125,000 <----- Thats right, $125K which is quite a decent return. Today that balance is down approx $55K in realised losses and almost $20K in unrealized draw down. What took 3 plus years to build has taken a combination of about 3 weeks and 20-30 something trades of losing trade, no SL, double up, further losing trades, still no SL, double up and on and on it went. This is a Martingale at its finest.
For the provider, its not all bad. Even if they realise the losses now its still a very handy profit to rebuild from, but considering a total position size of about 18.7 standard lots ($187 per pip), and a current SL value 111 points away from the market, that $20k could balloon by another 20K. The second graph shows the martingale failing and its just so picturesque, like a cliff face has been reached and you've tumbled over it.
This has been a phenomenal run. 5000 trades for the growth of $1K to $125K but the writting is on the wall. All those small wins - $20, $150 etc only to face a few monsters which obviously have the trader frozen, believing in what has always worked and not allowing for rational thinking. The upside to it all, is that I believe from the set up they have made a considerable amount through signal fees plus what they have withdrawn over time. The lesson is more for subscribers, who may just jump in and follow and be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Worth much discussion!
I have been following (not subscribing) to a signal provider through MQL5 for at least 4-5 months now after seeing some pretty phenomenal growth figures, coupled with very manageable draw down and who had managed to get a decent following to their services. What provoked my interest further was that it was a Martingale Strategy that had gone on for about 3 years and had over 5000 trades. Pretty good effort really. As you can see from the first screen shot, the equity curve is just beautiful, and it is not a testing, highly optimized curve from a strategy tester, it is real live trading. But I guess with all good things, it had to come to an end..... well not quite yet, but very possibly.
From memory, the initial deposit was $1000, and it grew to a profit at its peak of close to $125,000 <----- Thats right, $125K which is quite a decent return. Today that balance is down approx $55K in realised losses and almost $20K in unrealized draw down. What took 3 plus years to build has taken a combination of about 3 weeks and 20-30 something trades of losing trade, no SL, double up, further losing trades, still no SL, double up and on and on it went. This is a Martingale at its finest.
For the provider, its not all bad. Even if they realise the losses now its still a very handy profit to rebuild from, but considering a total position size of about 18.7 standard lots ($187 per pip), and a current SL value 111 points away from the market, that $20k could balloon by another 20K. The second graph shows the martingale failing and its just so picturesque, like a cliff face has been reached and you've tumbled over it.
This has been a phenomenal run. 5000 trades for the growth of $1K to $125K but the writting is on the wall. All those small wins - $20, $150 etc only to face a few monsters which obviously have the trader frozen, believing in what has always worked and not allowing for rational thinking. The upside to it all, is that I believe from the set up they have made a considerable amount through signal fees plus what they have withdrawn over time. The lesson is more for subscribers, who may just jump in and follow and be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Worth much discussion!
