Over the past two months I've been copying the trades I place on my live account over to Zulutrade. My own account is less than $5,000 right now and while I am not afraid to trade moderately big on position size, it seems to me that my account is going to grow a lot slower than I would like.
So my plan has been to take whatever revenues I can glean from Zulutrade and use it to fund my own account so that I can eventually start trading larger position sizes without cranking up the leverage to dangerous levels.
Right now I'm trading 10 pairs all on one account. In testing my strategy, the various pairs tend not to march in lockstep where success is concerned. That is, when one or two are doing poorly, the rest may be doing average or better than average. The result has been a good pattern of success so far (you can check it out at http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/134464) but I am really wondering what it's going to take to break into the Top 10.
See, there's no real way to know all the variables that Zulu plugs into it's backroom algorithm for determining the ranking of various traders. Obviously absolute ROI, win rate, drawdown (both realized and floating), the number of winning months all go into the ranking, but really...the whole thing is very mysterious.
For example, look at the current signal provider in the #6 position, Call of Pips (http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/89291) as compared to GreenFX777-3 (http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/93709) who sits in the #34 spot. Both of these traders have multiple profitable months under their belt, both only have one losing month, both have a win rate higher than 70%. But why is Call of Pips in the #6 spot? The other guy, GreenFX777-3, has all of his winning months closing out in excess of 10% with most months higher than 20%. This is not the case with Call of Pips....so why is he ranking so high? His floating drawdown was worse too. Is it because Zulutrade likes to reward traders to put on a lot of positions and Call of Pips is sending in about 18 signals per week while GreenFX is only doing 12?
I don't really know, and to be honest, I think that there are so many variables that getting ranked in the Top 10 and staying there for any length of time might be a lot less straightforward than anyone would think. I do have a plan to try and overcome this so as to rank well against the competition, but it's going to be a few weeks before I can implement the strategy. As there's plenty of time, I'll not make this initial post overly long and will write out the strategy itself in a couple of days.
From there my purpose for this journal is to be a reference of my progress as well as try and see what type of things influence one's Zulurank. Perhaps, just as people have found the "secret sauce" for getting websites to rank well in google for specific key words, we can discover what the individual characteristics Zulutrade weights more heavily in building their ranking structure.
So my plan has been to take whatever revenues I can glean from Zulutrade and use it to fund my own account so that I can eventually start trading larger position sizes without cranking up the leverage to dangerous levels.
Right now I'm trading 10 pairs all on one account. In testing my strategy, the various pairs tend not to march in lockstep where success is concerned. That is, when one or two are doing poorly, the rest may be doing average or better than average. The result has been a good pattern of success so far (you can check it out at http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/134464) but I am really wondering what it's going to take to break into the Top 10.
See, there's no real way to know all the variables that Zulu plugs into it's backroom algorithm for determining the ranking of various traders. Obviously absolute ROI, win rate, drawdown (both realized and floating), the number of winning months all go into the ranking, but really...the whole thing is very mysterious.
For example, look at the current signal provider in the #6 position, Call of Pips (http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/89291) as compared to GreenFX777-3 (http://www.zulutrade.com/trader/93709) who sits in the #34 spot. Both of these traders have multiple profitable months under their belt, both only have one losing month, both have a win rate higher than 70%. But why is Call of Pips in the #6 spot? The other guy, GreenFX777-3, has all of his winning months closing out in excess of 10% with most months higher than 20%. This is not the case with Call of Pips....so why is he ranking so high? His floating drawdown was worse too. Is it because Zulutrade likes to reward traders to put on a lot of positions and Call of Pips is sending in about 18 signals per week while GreenFX is only doing 12?
I don't really know, and to be honest, I think that there are so many variables that getting ranked in the Top 10 and staying there for any length of time might be a lot less straightforward than anyone would think. I do have a plan to try and overcome this so as to rank well against the competition, but it's going to be a few weeks before I can implement the strategy. As there's plenty of time, I'll not make this initial post overly long and will write out the strategy itself in a couple of days.
From there my purpose for this journal is to be a reference of my progress as well as try and see what type of things influence one's Zulurank. Perhaps, just as people have found the "secret sauce" for getting websites to rank well in google for specific key words, we can discover what the individual characteristics Zulutrade weights more heavily in building their ranking structure.