How to lose 1.2 million dollars and burn 300 subscribers

Have you read post #12?

yes.. but you can close it and be positive.. or let it run, turn around and lose part of it (again noob move)

no reason to take it off the market?? how about put it in YOUR ACCOUNT?? i dont know, just a wild guess :O

Exactly.. its the move of the greedy noob, where they want to win "all of it" and leave NOTHING on the table, trying to predict the last pip in a move and trying to overcome all the small loses they took in the past and FIANLLY turn positive (the classic 1 to a million "risk reward" ratio)

Risk-reward is a silly thing to think of anyway. Fortune favors the bold. Misfortune befalls the senseless. Profiting in a negative-sum game just comes down to being more bold and less senseless than the competition at the right times.

Very Well.... as Redeflect say....this is reality......
No Hope and No Fear

This is not the heaviest case. Recall financial crisis, billions gone...

Here is the Video For the time period indicated on the screenshot.
The .csv Trading history has been taken down from the signal site and I am having problems creating the spreadsheet I talked about.
I will continue to work on that.
Keep in mind that there may have been nothing malicious about this on his part.
I believe that he became drunk with his own success, and with the market continuously going up and confirming his Magical touch by bailing him out over and over, it is not hard to see he is not the only one who could come to believe that. Just look at the recent Stock Market gains and all the Genius traders it created.
Furthermore He did make money not only for himself, but probably a lot of other people that had been with him for some time.
So it is fair to say that only the people who believed in his total infallibility, got greedy, and that did not subscribe to the idea of limiting their potential losses with a small account size, got burned. Recent subscribers who were forced to have the minimum account obviously are the most innocent affected.

I was looking at him and when i saw the trading action displayed as you can see below in the video, I waited to see what he would do in a serious reversal.
I take no pride in knowing on the last Friday, that unless he added substantial money, that any kind of decline or gap would do him in.
Unfortunately to many of us like to fly to close to the sun.

https://mega.nz/#!LM4zVaiA!YyV0Mdus9xw2Eg8wxkGE0CMxb50XZZLgv7lziq3PXk8

Noob move.. like i said, he tried to milk a trend that you never know how much its going to last and he got burned real bad.. "just a correction like all the others" and he got recked..

yesterday i took a lost (the first of the year) by a dumb ass mistake 100% my fault.. the mistake? the signal wasnt a clear one and i said "oh but it looks good anyway" BOOM !! lost trade, broke my own rules for idiot..

it can happen, after all we are humans.. BUT with such an account and he let the market suck every $ down to the last one?? thats a big NO NO

To be sure, I am not doing all this to gloat, or to chastise or ridicule a trader who was probably trying to do his best, but to show everyone that when Euphoria kicks in and you think you can do no wrong, the market has a very effective way to remind you of your limits and bring you back to reality.
Attached are new link to a Video showing the entire Trading History, and a expanded Excel sheet doing something like a deep dive into the numbers.
Well maybe not a deep dive, but certainly a snorkel.
Disregard video link in Post 26
You can download the entire Trading history here in an Excel sheet that shows every trade, Plus:
Max DD in Pts on each trade
Max Number of positions held while that trade was active
Max Number of DD on all Positions held while that trade was active
Max DD in Dollars
Total Size of all position in lots.
This tool is really designed for the Forex Market. His acct was in Euros plus I had to convert the Symbol from his broker to what my broker calls it. So there may be a little slop in the numbers.
Also there is a GMT Time Offset between those two brokers which additionally may or may not have a DST adjustment. I could adjust for that, but I am to deep into this as it is. This may skew the entry and Exit left or right of some candles. This does not subtract from the overall impact that this learning exercise should have. When you see some trades in the video start and end out in space and not near a candle, that is more than likely a limit order that was not picked up.
Most importantly how, you can find any trade on the chart and in the spread sheet and follow it through, or vice versa.
If you have any suggestions, Pm me.
https://mega.nz/#!iAgGFTyJ!gEAIwWL3GfvnazzXkURYvd5xflw5wurjBeRNdBlf7Ps
https://mega.nz/#!fBQnjJKB!7U3wB55L36JhEeNSEiXUZh-stJ9se9L9vEW98HZirME

Why fishy he withdrae 3-5 weeks before? He doesnt have havee right to withdraw? You also say it scam... Why? Many people attract to him for a reason.

He isnt professiomal trader. Just as you let your own account tank someone else could judge you the same way. We all stop following system at some point.

He isnt professiomal trader. Just as you let your own account tank someone else could judge you the same way. We all stop following system at some point.


I am not here to apologize for him, but to be fair, it was very clear that he used his account size right from the beginning as a stop loss.
So withdrawing all his winnings and encouraging others to do the same was a prudent move, regardless of his Batschite trading style.
70+ orders on the chart at the same time? Holy Guacamole!
So as I said before, the account was his SL. I don't think he wanted to blow about $9000.- a month in subscribers fees. but this has to be some of the wildest trading I have ever seen. How could he possibly keep track of 70+ orders at the same time. It would be hard enough to do if he had each order clearly marked on the chart as we have the luxury now to see....after the fact.
The final orders raining down to the Margin call look like Bagdad during the first night of the war.

Fxarcher , you still do not speak clearly.
If you want to make a useful service to this Community, you must tell the whole truth , you have to say everything you know about this affair.
If you want to do it, of course.

Fxarcher, but do you were one of 300 Fabbrizio Ravaglia's subscribers ?
Have you lost many money ?
Practically , how did this signals service worked ?
Please , describe to the FF Community your bad experience.
But describe it without videos , spreadsheets , csv , etc : please , only simple and clear words.

What is the point of this thread? A little history and answer to the redoktober's question will help better in understanding.

http://www.signalstart.com/analysis/abbey/28358

This is a classical one...... distort the real picture with a combination of leverage and stacking up losers till they go into profit by luck....
and one day - you run out of luck - that is for sure.



It all looks perfect but is rotten to the core if you understand the whole picture....

redoctober….Hitrader
Ok, these are fair questions. Let me give you the absolute truth.
I was not a subscriber.
I did not lose any money.
I did not a have bad experience.
What is the point of this thread?
As I said before it is not to gloat about the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude), but to provide an insight into how easily one can be attracted to big gains, reasonable DD, a smooth Equity curve, excellent Win/Loss ratio, over the top Sharp Ratio, ( ShumCapital-Cent described below had a Sharp Ratioof over 2.0 at one time, a ratio of 0.2 is normally outstanding.) or any other accepted positive parameters.
Until you see the trading history visually played out before you like a movie, and have hard numbers on a spreadsheet speaking to you, you got nothing! Bupkiss! Yes, you can look at a history and see that his trade size was within accepted limits, and yes he was in multiple trades at the same time, but to what extent, that is the real question. You can take a chance and subscribe, even make money, after all, a lot of others are also subscribing.
If you do not think there is value to what I am doing here and that there is something wrong with the above statement, tell me that again after you have seen the info provided by the links in post 28.
I am actually asking to be critiqued there.
You can stop reading now if you are only interested in the short answer.
Following is the long version.
Late last year I started to look at the possibility of investing through a signal service. I had looked at signals before with FXCM and gave up because it was not very transparent, and any trial was limited to 30 days. There are other Signal Services out there, but if they do not give you the trading history in an acceptable format, they are hiding the performance record of the trader to detriment of the subscriber. They are basically saying…give me money and then I’ll tell you what the real story is. It is not the problem of springing for the first month rent, but getting put into all open trades at the opening. That is why I looked at MQL5. They seem to be the most transparent by at least providing a trade history.
I proceeded under the belief that there must be traders out there that had success in the market, and had nothing to lose and everything to gain by letting other people invest alongside them.
It is my belief that the only time a successful trader chooses not to provide this service, it is because they do not like the hassle of having to explain themselves and the additional pressure of having to perform to someone else’s expectations. I see no other downside. Just saying.
I also believe that a new inexperienced trader can learn from a good example.
I was obviously attracted to traders that seemed to show great growth over medium to long time periods. To quote a friend of mine, “I am not in this for Minimum Wage”
I know that “Time” is subjective, but I figured minimum 6 month to longer.
While there are other signal Services, MQL5 seemed to have not only the advantage of being more substantial and established, it had a listing of the entire trading history of the signal provider for me to see.
I started to look at some of the high gainers, and found that some had very erratic Equity curves but there were several that showed not only reasonably smooth equity curves, but also somewhat acceptable Draw down (DD) percentages.
One signal that sprang to the forefront was a signal by a Russian trader called Shum Capital Cent.
About 6 months history 2400%, 75 winning trades, 1 loss, (looked like a fat finger mistake), 24%DD…. Wow!
It took me almost 2 days to laboriously draw every single one of those closed trades from his published Trade history unto to the appropriate chart pair. The results seemed nothing short of astounding. I had found the world’s best trader. I even told him so in a PM.
Short at the top, out at the bottom. Long at the bottom out at the top. In for month at a time, on some trades. Since I had not subscribed, I could not see the trades that he was open on, but his Balance vs Equity was only about $250.00 negative. Not too bad! His subscriber base was growing steadily, and I was just about to subscribe when I opened MQL5 one day and found that his subscription was FREE!
Long story short, he apparently had a 1 Cent account (hence the name), even though his standard trade lot was always 0.01. I found out after digging in some more, that MQL5 rules state that a 1 cent account cannot be open for $ subscription and had to be free.
But here is the clincher; I could now see his current trades.
He was open on 84 trades, some reaching month back. To be fair, unlike Abbey who was only Long, Shum was less than $300.00 under water and more importantly he was Long and Short at almost equal percentage, so any major calamity notwithstanding, he had a chance to not crash his account which was his SL….mostly.
He was obviously very bitter about being forced to give up his subscribers, and sometime later shut the signal down.
I decided right then and there that I needed a better and more systematic approach to weeding through the signal offerings.
That is when I developed the tools to analyze any trading history to the point where I could see everything that ever happened.
To be accurate, even with this tool, I cannot see the total picture until I subscribe and see the open orders, but, and this is a big but, I can see the trades that are closed. Probably better than the trader himself.
You can see if the trader taking prudent although aggressive trades or is he just wildly stabbing at the market, namely Grid trading or Martingale or if he is just plain batshit. Remember being batshit does not preclude anyone from being lucky, at least for a while.
I can see the pattern and frequency of trades with total clarity, and furthermore, when the history is exported onto a spread sheet, I can not only see every trade and all the important data about that trade by itself, but also what happened during the time that trade was open. How many other trades were open and what did that do to the numbers. DD in pips and $.
Abbey was especially visually clear (the video above in Post 28. This plays out on the 15Min chart. I have another on the 1Hr chart which is less time consuming.) because he traded only one instrument, the SP500 on a platform that used a different Symbol name he thereby forced most subscribers to subscribe to his broker. (There is a way around that, but that is another story). I overcame the Symbol obstacle by replacing his symbol with my broker’s symbol name in the trade history. The result was truly breathtaking... for me anyway.
Towards the end Abbey had over 300 subscribers on MQL5, not counting other signal services.
This why I have stated that I do not believe he was intentionally trying to blow the account. There was no upside to that.
So…Why am I doing this?
In part I like to repay people like Hanover and countless others who have selflessly contributed to the advancement of the forex community. (Thank you for the over 2000 indicators, Ea’s and Scripts I have in my Navigator). Mostly, though, it is a self-serving exercise which I hope leads me to becoming more reasonable in my quest to find a Signal that I can hang my money on, one that will not disappoint in the long run.
I am also hoping to I help someone from looking at subscribing blindly to a signal along with many others, without taking some of these things into consideration.

I am going to go out onto the limb here. If anyone found an interesting signal and if you want a look behind the curtain, I could possibly run a .csv history for you. No charge off course. PM me. Subject to withdrawal.
After all, I have other useless although important work to do.

New 1Hr Tf Video to Abbey.
https://mega.nz/#!CFwjELjC!-faPy3zcsmZW9cVPgbF1PEcRAVNlHn3rkIBaDcPpKy4

Well Fxarcher , synthesis is not your best characteristic , lol !

However now your idea is clearer and thank you for your detailed report.

Even if you're not one of 300 and so you have not lost money , you wanted to denounce publicly this ugly affair : very good !

If everyone acted like you, there would be far fewer cheated traders.

PS : I was thinking to post this event also on "Scammers - Hall of Shame " thread .
In that place, some of the 300 "scammed" could describe his bad experience and tell us something about mr.Fabbrizio Ravaglia and his fatal Abbey Signals Service. We'll see ...

redoctober
English being my second language, maybe you can explain Synthesis to me, or is it syntax?
Just imagine what would happen if i take more than an hour to write a post next time.
But to your comment, I am not sure that you understand that i am not publicly denouncing Abbey as much as I am trying to point out the pitfalls of not checking more than a few parameters before jumping in to a signal. I quote from above:
"one can be attracted to big gains, reasonable DD, a smooth Equity curve, excellent Win/Loss ratio, over the top Sharp Ratio"

In my opinion, a scammer starts with the intend to defraud. As i said before that is not what anybody I talked about has done.
A scam in my way of thinking always has one major component, and that is that you are promised something that you do not deserve. I have never seen anything else.
Bernie Madoff was a prime example. everybody knew, or thought they knew, that he had the inside track and they wanted to be part of that. Only Bernie knew he was scamming.
I don't think Fabrizio was thinking that. I believe he thought he had the magic touch and was sharing his good fortune for a reasonable fee.


Hudithepfupf....That Abbey example you are showing is from a site that does not give you a trade history.

Anyway guys... I do appreciate the comments

I've got a dream , no sorry , I've got a suspect.
I suspect that you are Fabbrizio...
Fxarcher = Fabbrizio Ravaglia
Am I doing wrong ?

Your out of your friggen mind!
Look me up.
I am exposing his batshit trading in excruciating detail, which you are either to lazy to look at or to stupid to understand.
Just because I am objective and do not think he did it on purpose, you think this German is now Italian?
I see your from Switzerland. Do yourself a favor and go to a lower altitude.
This whole exercise here just proves the old adage that no good deed shall go unpunished.