The European Union has published new regulations applying to retail Forex, CFD, and the few remaining binary options brokerages in its territory. If you have an account with one such brokerage, the regulations will affect you when they come into force during the late spring and summer. This article will outline how the new regulations will impact your bottom line.
Details of the New ESMA Regulations
In March 2018, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the financial regulator and supervisor of the European Union, announced new regulations concerning the provision of contracts for differences (CFDs) and binary options to retail investors. It is unclear exactly when the regulations will come into force, but some time in May or June 2018 looks to be the most likely date, and Forex and CFD brokerages located within the European Union (including the United Kingdom, for the time being) will be forced to comply. The regulations will need to be renewed by ESMA every three months to remain in force over the long term.
The regulation concerning binary options is very simple: they may not be sold. In simple terms, this is the end of binary options as a product sold from within the European Union.
The regulations concerning CFDs are more complex but still relatively straightforward. Firstly, there is some confusion as to what exactly is a CFD, with many traders thinking that spot Forex is not considered a CFD and will therefore be exempt from the new regulations. They are wrong: spot Forex is technically defined as a CFD. In fact, every asset you see available for trading at Forex / CFD brokers will most likely be subject to the new regulations.
The new regulations will implement the following changes for retail client accounts (more on who is a retail client; later).
-
The maximum leverage which can be offered will be 30 to 1. That will apply to major currency pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, etc.
-
Other currency pairs, major equity indices, and gold will be subject to a maximum leverage of 20 to 1.
-
Individual equities cannot be offered with leverage greater than 5 to 1.
-
Cryptocurrencies are subject to a maximum leverage of 2 to 1.
-
Brokers will be required to provide negative balance protection, meaning it will be impossible to lose more money than you deposit.
-
Brokers will be required to close a clients open positions when the account equity reaches 50% of the required minimum margin by all open positions. This ;margin call; provision can be tricky to understand, so will be explained in more detail later.
-
Bonuses or any other form of trading incentives may not be offered.
-
Brokers will be required to display a standardized risk warning which will include the percentage of their clients who lose money over a defined period.
Understanding the ;Margin Call; Regulation
The best way to understand the 50% margin call provision is to use an example. Imagine a client opens an account with a Forex broker, depositing ;100 in total. The client opens a short trade in EUR/USD, by going short one mini-lot (one tenth of a full lot). One full lot of EUR/USD is worth ;10,000, meaning one mini-lot is worth ;1,000. To find out the minimum margin required to support that trade, we divide the size of the trade (;1,000) by 30, which comes to ;33.33. This is the minimum required margin to maintain the trade. Half of that amount is ;16.67. Now assume the trade goes against the client, with the price of EUR/USD rising above the entry price. As soon as the price rises far enough to produce a floating loss of ;83.33 (;100 - ;16.67), the broker must close the trade out, even if the trade has no stop loss or has not yet reached the stop loss. In theory, this means that a client;s account can never reach zero. Examples involving multiple open trades will be more complex, but will operate according to the same principles.
What Will This Mean for Traders?
The regulations will only apply to ;retail clients;, so you might try to apply to be classed as a professional trader. To get a broker to classify you as anything other than a retail client, you will have to show you have financial qualifications, a large amount of liquid assets, plenty of experience trading, and usually that you also trade frequently. Most traders will be unable to qualify, although it is worth noting that one London-based brokerage, IG Group, has stated that their proportion of clients now classified as recently increased from 5% to 15% of their total customers.
The major impact these regulations will have on traders is simple ndash; the maximum trade size they can possibly make at brokers regulated in the European Union will shrink. Many will say that the maximum leverage limits still offer far more than any trader could need, and I agree. I am wary of leverage and I hate to see anyone using leverage greater than 3 to 1 for Forex under any conditions, or any leverage at all for stocks and cryptocurrencies. Commodities can also fluctuate wildly in value. Too many people forget that the biggest danger in leverage is not overly large position sizing, it is that a ldquo;black swan rdquo; event such as the CHF flash crash of 2015 could happen and wipe out your account through huge price slippage. However, there is another factor that is widely forgotten: why assume that a trader rsquo;s account at one Forex broker is all the money they have in the world? For example, a trader might have $10,000 in the bank. If they deposit $1,000 at a broker offering maximum leverage of 300 to 1, they can trade up to $300,000. At a leverage limit of 30 to 1, that trader will have to deposit their entire $10,000 fund to trade at the same size. In a real sense, that trader might now have to take on more risk to operate in the same way, because if the broker goes bust, while beforehand they might lose $1,000 now they could lose $10,000! Even without negative balance protection, that broker would still have to come after them to try to get an extra $9,000 which they theoretically risk. Yet we saw after the CHF crash that brokers don rsquo;t come after every single client whose losses exceeded their deposit, due to legal costs and reputational issues. This shows that although the stated purpose of the regulation is to protect traders from excessive losses, the story is not as simple as you may think.
Beyond having to deposit more margin, and automatic margin calls, the other major change for traders will be that they will enjoy negative balance protection. This is a positive development which hopefully will make brokerages focus more heavily on the risks they are taking with their business model in the market. At the same time, a possible side effect of the new regulation is the potential increase in average deposits, leading to brokerages being more stable and better capitalized with client funds. Two final notes: brokerages will have to report on their websites the percentages of clients who are losing and making money, although the period over which the statistics must refer to is currently not clear. This will help to shed light on the debate over what percentage of retail traders are profitable, although some brokerages have already released what they claim to be accurate statistics showing that clients with larger account sizes tend to perform better as traders. Additionally, bonuses and promotions will be banned. I welcome this, as not only do they trivialize the serious business of trading, they are almost always a trick offering the illusion of free money whilst preventing traders from withdrawing any profits until a large number of trades are made (read the fine print the next time you squo;).
What If Yoursquo;re Not Happy Remaining in the EU?
Traders with accounts at affected brokers who cannot obtain professional status classification and feel they really need higher leverage than the ESMA limits outlined above might look for a solution by opening accounts with brokers outside the European Union. The most obvious destination would be Australia or New Zealand, where it will still be possible to find reasonably well-regulated Forex brokerages offering leverage in the range of 400 to 1. A recent development that is not talked about much is the growing difficulty of transferring funds to and from Forex brokerages in less tightly regulated jurisdictions. You might decide to open an account with a brokerage in Vanuatu, but you may find that a bank within the European Union might just refuse to send your money there for a deposit. This means that going far offshore, depending upon where you live, may not be a feasible option. In any case, the new regule impossible to live with, and overall there is a compelling case that they are a net benefit to any trader, so why migrate?
Who Makes Money with Zulutrade? | Trading Forex
Zulutrade is an automated trading broker. It works quite simply: traders are exhibited as mirror signal providers, but Zulutrade can only be used with certain brokers. The brokers pay Zulutrade per trade executed through them. Signal providers get paid at the amount of half a pip per lot traded from the provider’s signals, when they are profitable.
So, what happens is the “user” signs up with Zulutrade, and looks for signal providing traders to mirror. Zulutrade maintain statistics that are honest and transparent on all of these traders, showing who is making money, allowing users to view the trading records of those traders before choosing. Overall, it is set out to enable a very transparent and logical process.
How are the Trade Copiers Doing?
Not all the trade copiers allow their results to be publicly viewed. However, examinations of a sizeable random sample of those that do show that over a typical Quarter, 90% are not making money but in fact are losing money. This seems surprising, as even with access to a large number of traders that have been performing statistically well, allowing for diversification and vetting, it would seem that the trade copiers are doing no better statistically then new traders that just open accounts and begin pushing buttons before they fully understand what is going on?Can this be explained? It certainly can, and even if you are not interested in mirror trading in general, or Zulutrade or another automated trading broker such as eToro in particular, please read on as you might learn something that comes in useful for your personal trading methodology and expectations. It has nothing to do with which Forex broker is used with Zulutrade.
Profitability vs Consistency
An old trading proverb says “You can take many small losses, or you can take one catastrophically huge loss.” What this saying is trying to get at, is that the most reliable ways to make money by trading the market do not necessarily deliver regular profits. Even the best trading methods do not work with a high level of individual predictability on individual trades, and can suffer from a strong of losses. In fact, the most profitable methods overall usually produce something like twice as many losing trades as winning trades, with the winners being so large that they more than make up for the losers.This is extremely hard for many retail traders to accept. They believe that a skilled trader is right most or even nearly all of the time, and when a trade does not make money they think that something necessarily went “wrong” in the analysis and/or execution.
This belief is compounded by algorithmic ranking of traders in league tables using formulas that punish losing streaks, such as the formula used by Zulutrade. This is logical mathematically, but it has the effect of promoting traders that have either been riding a lucky streak, or who have been trading in a non-robust way, i.e. by worrying more about consistency than overall results. The overall result, in the final analysis, is what makes money.
Fooled by Randomness?
In his book “Fooled by Randomness”, Nassim Taleb posits the case of a universe of 10,000 hedge fund managers, and shows how over a typical 10 year period in the market, just assuming pure randomness, there would be about 10 fund managers that would have recorded a positive return each year. Profiles would be written of these star managers, praising their incredible discretion and judgement, implicitly assuming conservatism and market savvy achieved this incredible result.By way of example, the image below shows how excel only needed about 2200 iterations to randomly produce a sequence of 11 consecutive positive numbers from a range from -0.5 to 0.5.
There is no doubt that at least some of the star traders shown in the Zulutrade signal provider rankings simply got very lucky. Needless to say, anyone who has been very lucky for a long time, has a luck that is likely to change!
So the top-ranked traders in Zulutrade or in any other similar algorithmic ranking are going to consist mostly of traders that either are making money by luck, or who are pursuing strategies that are not robust and so will crash and burn eventually. Of course, there will be some genuine diamonds in the mix, but how will the trade copiers pick them out? It is even possible to make a good and meaningful selection of traders to copy with the data provided by Zulutrade? I don’t think so, because the statistics just show you the performance, but don’t really tell you anything about how the performance was achieved. You would have to look at a few hundred individual trades and see what was going on when each trade was made to really understand what that trader was doing. Their Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown is actually probably not going to tell you what you really need to know to decide whether to invest in them.
Zulutrade’s ranking formula is proprietary and secret, but is stated on their website to be based upon maturity, exposure, and draw-down. On every one of these criteria, with the possible exception of exposure, most trade providers that best satisfy these criteria are probably heading for a fall, because the promoted traders are the ones that have been skating on thin ice longer than anyone else.
I really don’t mean to insult Zulutrade or imply anything about them, as they are offering an honest and transparent service, plus a ranking system that will identify the diamonds that make money, but unfortunately a much larger amount of trash as well. Ironically, things are made even worse by the operations of the trade copiers themselves.
How Trade Copiers Mess It Up
In the context of the ranking system, most trade copiers will approach it in a way they consider to be intelligent: select high-performing traders, quickly fire any poor performers, and increase trade sizes on the winners just before they stop making money and start losing.The effect this will have is to make results even worse, as the copiers will be chasing yesterday instead of tomorrow, and will not be sitting through the losing streaks that the true long-term winners will usually generate. Market conditions change frequently and rapidly. In fact a typical day for any instrument will see it move in the opposite direction to yesterday, as the market ranges most of the time. The end result will be adding to losses and cutting winners short, effectively.
Many hedge fund managers will tell you about how they attract an influx of investment into their funds just after a period of very strong performance, and how they know that these “chasing” investors are often disappointed when, quite naturally, a period of worse or even negative performance follows.
Trade copiers are not traders, they are investors managing a fund of funds, and they usually do not have the research tools made available to them to have a real chance of picking out the diamonds, which is a hard enough task even for market professionals.
Source
Who Makes Money with Zulutrade? | Trading Forex
Zulutrade is an automated trading broker. It works quite simply: traders are exhibited as mirror signal providers, but Zulutrade can only be used with certain brokers. The brokers pay Zulutrade per trade executed through them. Signal providers get paid at the amount of half a pip per lot traded from the provider’s signals, when they are profitable.
So, what happens is the “user” signs up with Zulutrade, and looks for signal providing traders to mirror. Zulutrade maintain statistics that are honest and transparent on all of these traders, showing who is making money, allowing users to view the trading records of those traders before choosing. Overall, it is set out to enable a very transparent and logical process.
How are the Trade Copiers Doing?
Not all the trade copiers allow their results to be publicly viewed. However, examinations of a sizeable random sample of those that do show that over a typical Quarter, 90% are not making money but in fact are losing money. This seems surprising, as even with access to a large number of traders that have been performing statistically well, allowing for diversification and vetting, it would seem that the trade copiers are doing no better statistically then new traders that just open accounts and begin pushing buttons before they fully understand what is going on?Can this be explained? It certainly can, and even if you are not interested in mirror trading in general, or Zulutrade or another automated trading broker such as eToro in particular, please read on as you might learn something that comes in useful for your personal trading methodology and expectations. It has nothing to do with which Forex broker is used with Zulutrade.
Profitability vs Consistency
An old trading proverb says “You can take many small losses, or you can take one catastrophically huge loss.” What this saying is trying to get at, is that the most reliable ways to make money by trading the market do not necessarily deliver regular profits. Even the best trading methods do not work with a high level of individual predictability on individual trades, and can suffer from a strong of losses. In fact, the most profitable methods overall usually produce something like twice as many losing trades as winning trades, with the winners being so large that they more than make up for the losers.This is extremely hard for many retail traders to accept. They believe that a skilled trader is right most or even nearly all of the time, and when a trade does not make money they think that something necessarily went “wrong” in the analysis and/or execution.
This belief is compounded by algorithmic ranking of traders in league tables using formulas that punish losing streaks, such as the formula used by Zulutrade. This is logical mathematically, but it has the effect of promoting traders that have either been riding a lucky streak, or who have been trading in a non-robust way, i.e. by worrying more about consistency than overall results. The overall result, in the final analysis, is what makes money.
Fooled by Randomness?
In his book “Fooled by Randomness”, Nassim Taleb posits the case of a universe of 10,000 hedge fund managers, and shows how over a typical 10 year period in the market, just assuming pure randomness, there would be about 10 fund managers that would have recorded a positive return each year. Profiles would be written of these star managers, praising their incredible discretion and judgement, implicitly assuming conservatism and market savvy achieved this incredible result.By way of example, the image below shows how excel only needed about 2200 iterations to randomly produce a sequence of 11 consecutive positive numbers from a range from -0.5 to 0.5.
There is no doubt that at least some of the star traders shown in the Zulutrade signal provider rankings simply got very lucky. Needless to say, anyone who has been very lucky for a long time, has a luck that is likely to change!
So the top-ranked traders in Zulutrade or in any other similar algorithmic ranking are going to consist mostly of traders that either are making money by luck, or who are pursuing strategies that are not robust and so will crash and burn eventually. Of course, there will be some genuine diamonds in the mix, but how will the trade copiers pick them out? It is even possible to make a good and meaningful selection of traders to copy with the data provided by Zulutrade? I don’t think so, because the statistics just show you the performance, but don’t really tell you anything about how the performance was achieved. You would have to look at a few hundred individual trades and see what was going on when each trade was made to really understand what that trader was doing. Their Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown is actually probably not going to tell you what you really need to know to decide whether to invest in them.
Zulutrade’s ranking formula is proprietary and secret, but is stated on their website to be based upon maturity, exposure, and draw-down. On every one of these criteria, with the possible exception of exposure, most trade providers that best satisfy these criteria are probably heading for a fall, because the promoted traders are the ones that have been skating on thin ice longer than anyone else.
I really don’t mean to insult Zulutrade or imply anything about them, as they are offering an honest and transparent service, plus a ranking system that will identify the diamonds that make money, but unfortunately a much larger amount of trash as well. Ironically, things are made even worse by the operations of the trade copiers themselves.
How Trade Copiers Mess It Up
In the context of the ranking system, most trade copiers will approach it in a way they consider to be intelligent: select high-performing traders, quickly fire any poor performers, and increase trade sizes on the winners just before they stop making money and start losing.The effect this will have is to make results even worse, as the copiers will be chasing yesterday instead of tomorrow, and will not be sitting through the losing streaks that the true long-term winners will usually generate. Market conditions change frequently and rapidly. In fact a typical day for any instrument will see it move in the opposite direction to yesterday, as the market ranges most of the time. The end result will be adding to losses and cutting winners short, effectively.
Many hedge fund managers will tell you about how they attract an influx of investment into their funds just after a period of very strong performance, and how they know that these “chasing” investors are often disappointed when, quite naturally, a period of worse or even negative performance follows.
Trade copiers are not traders, they are investors managing a fund of funds, and they usually do not have the research tools made available to them to have a real chance of picking out the diamonds, which is a hard enough task even for market professionals.
Source
Who Makes Money with Zulutrade? | Trading Forex
Zulutrade is an automated trading broker. It works quite simply: traders are exhibited as mirror signal providers, but Zulutrade can only be used with certain brokers. The brokers pay Zulutrade per trade executed through them. Signal providers get paid at the amount of half a pip per lot traded from the provider’s signals, when they are profitable.
So, what happens is the “user” signs up with Zulutrade, and looks for signal providing traders to mirror. Zulutrade maintain statistics that are honest and transparent on all of these traders, showing who is making money, allowing users to view the trading records of those traders before choosing. Overall, it is set out to enable a very transparent and logical process.
How are the Trade Copiers Doing?
Not all the trade copiers allow their results to be publicly viewed. However, examinations of a sizeable random sample of those that do show that over a typical Quarter, 90% are not making money but in fact are losing money. This seems surprising, as even with access to a large number of traders that have been performing statistically well, allowing for diversification and vetting, it would seem that the trade copiers are doing no better statistically then new traders that just open accounts and begin pushing buttons before they fully understand what is going on?Can this be explained? It certainly can, and even if you are not interested in mirror trading in general, or Zulutrade or another automated trading broker such as eToro in particular, please read on as you might learn something that comes in useful for your personal trading methodology and expectations. It has nothing to do with which Forex broker is used with Zulutrade.
Profitability vs Consistency
An old trading proverb says “You can take many small losses, or you can take one catastrophically huge loss.” What this saying is trying to get at, is that the most reliable ways to make money by trading the market do not necessarily deliver regular profits. Even the best trading methods do not work with a high level of individual predictability on individual trades, and can suffer from a strong of losses. In fact, the most profitable methods overall usually produce something like twice as many losing trades as winning trades, with the winners being so large that they more than make up for the losers.This is extremely hard for many retail traders to accept. They believe that a skilled trader is right most or even nearly all of the time, and when a trade does not make money they think that something necessarily went “wrong” in the analysis and/or execution.
This belief is compounded by algorithmic ranking of traders in league tables using formulas that punish losing streaks, such as the formula used by Zulutrade. This is logical mathematically, but it has the effect of promoting traders that have either been riding a lucky streak, or who have been trading in a non-robust way, i.e. by worrying more about consistency than overall results. The overall result, in the final analysis, is what makes money.
Fooled by Randomness?
In his book “Fooled by Randomness”, Nassim Taleb posits the case of a universe of 10,000 hedge fund managers, and shows how over a typical 10 year period in the market, just assuming pure randomness, there would be about 10 fund managers that would have recorded a positive return each year. Profiles would be written of these star managers, praising their incredible discretion and judgement, implicitly assuming conservatism and market savvy achieved this incredible result.By way of example, the image below shows how excel only needed about 2200 iterations to randomly produce a sequence of 11 consecutive positive numbers from a range from -0.5 to 0.5.
There is no doubt that at least some of the star traders shown in the Zulutrade signal provider rankings simply got very lucky. Needless to say, anyone who has been very lucky for a long time, has a luck that is likely to change!
So the top-ranked traders in Zulutrade or in any other similar algorithmic ranking are going to consist mostly of traders that either are making money by luck, or who are pursuing strategies that are not robust and so will crash and burn eventually. Of course, there will be some genuine diamonds in the mix, but how will the trade copiers pick them out? It is even possible to make a good and meaningful selection of traders to copy with the data provided by Zulutrade? I don’t think so, because the statistics just show you the performance, but don’t really tell you anything about how the performance was achieved. You would have to look at a few hundred individual trades and see what was going on when each trade was made to really understand what that trader was doing. Their Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown is actually probably not going to tell you what you really need to know to decide whether to invest in them.
Zulutrade’s ranking formula is proprietary and secret, but is stated on their website to be based upon maturity, exposure, and draw-down. On every one of these criteria, with the possible exception of exposure, most trade providers that best satisfy these criteria are probably heading for a fall, because the promoted traders are the ones that have been skating on thin ice longer than anyone else.
I really don’t mean to insult Zulutrade or imply anything about them, as they are offering an honest and transparent service, plus a ranking system that will identify the diamonds that make money, but unfortunately a much larger amount of trash as well. Ironically, things are made even worse by the operations of the trade copiers themselves.
How Trade Copiers Mess It Up
In the context of the ranking system, most trade copiers will approach it in a way they consider to be intelligent: select high-performing traders, quickly fire any poor performers, and increase trade sizes on the winners just before they stop making money and start losing.The effect this will have is to make results even worse, as the copiers will be chasing yesterday instead of tomorrow, and will not be sitting through the losing streaks that the true long-term winners will usually generate. Market conditions change frequently and rapidly. In fact a typical day for any instrument will see it move in the opposite direction to yesterday, as the market ranges most of the time. The end result will be adding to losses and cutting winners short, effectively.
Many hedge fund managers will tell you about how they attract an influx of investment into their funds just after a period of very strong performance, and how they know that these “chasing” investors are often disappointed when, quite naturally, a period of worse or even negative performance follows.
Trade copiers are not traders, they are investors managing a fund of funds, and they usually do not have the research tools made available to them to have a real chance of picking out the diamonds, which is a hard enough task even for market professionals.
Source
Who Makes Money with Zulutrade? | Trading Forex
Zulutrade is an automated trading broker. It works quite simply: traders are exhibited as mirror signal providers, but Zulutrade can only be used with certain brokers. The brokers pay Zulutrade per trade executed through them. Signal providers get paid at the amount of half a pip per lot traded from the provider’s signals, when they are profitable.
So, what happens is the “user” signs up with Zulutrade, and looks for signal providing traders to mirror. Zulutrade maintain statistics that are honest and transparent on all of these traders, showing who is making money, allowing users to view the trading records of those traders before choosing. Overall, it is set out to enable a very transparent and logical process.
How are the Trade Copiers Doing?
Not all the trade copiers allow their results to be publicly viewed. However, examinations of a sizeable random sample of those that do show that over a typical Quarter, 90% are not making money but in fact are losing money. This seems surprising, as even with access to a large number of traders that have been performing statistically well, allowing for diversification and vetting, it would seem that the trade copiers are doing no better statistically then new traders that just open accounts and begin pushing buttons before they fully understand what is going on?Can this be explained? It certainly can, and even if you are not interested in mirror trading in general, or Zulutrade or another automated trading broker such as eToro in particular, please read on as you might learn something that comes in useful for your personal trading methodology and expectations. It has nothing to do with which Forex broker is used with Zulutrade.
Profitability vs Consistency
An old trading proverb says “You can take many small losses, or you can take one catastrophically huge loss.” What this saying is trying to get at, is that the most reliable ways to make money by trading the market do not necessarily deliver regular profits. Even the best trading methods do not work with a high level of individual predictability on individual trades, and can suffer from a strong of losses. In fact, the most profitable methods overall usually produce something like twice as many losing trades as winning trades, with the winners being so large that they more than make up for the losers.This is extremely hard for many retail traders to accept. They believe that a skilled trader is right most or even nearly all of the time, and when a trade does not make money they think that something necessarily went “wrong” in the analysis and/or execution.
This belief is compounded by algorithmic ranking of traders in league tables using formulas that punish losing streaks, such as the formula used by Zulutrade. This is logical mathematically, but it has the effect of promoting traders that have either been riding a lucky streak, or who have been trading in a non-robust way, i.e. by worrying more about consistency than overall results. The overall result, in the final analysis, is what makes money.
Fooled by Randomness?
In his book “Fooled by Randomness”, Nassim Taleb posits the case of a universe of 10,000 hedge fund managers, and shows how over a typical 10 year period in the market, just assuming pure randomness, there would be about 10 fund managers that would have recorded a positive return each year. Profiles would be written of these star managers, praising their incredible discretion and judgement, implicitly assuming conservatism and market savvy achieved this incredible result.By way of example, the image below shows how excel only needed about 2200 iterations to randomly produce a sequence of 11 consecutive positive numbers from a range from -0.5 to 0.5.
There is no doubt that at least some of the star traders shown in the Zulutrade signal provider rankings simply got very lucky. Needless to say, anyone who has been very lucky for a long time, has a luck that is likely to change!
So the top-ranked traders in Zulutrade or in any other similar algorithmic ranking are going to consist mostly of traders that either are making money by luck, or who are pursuing strategies that are not robust and so will crash and burn eventually. Of course, there will be some genuine diamonds in the mix, but how will the trade copiers pick them out? It is even possible to make a good and meaningful selection of traders to copy with the data provided by Zulutrade? I don’t think so, because the statistics just show you the performance, but don’t really tell you anything about how the performance was achieved. You would have to look at a few hundred individual trades and see what was going on when each trade was made to really understand what that trader was doing. Their Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown is actually probably not going to tell you what you really need to know to decide whether to invest in them.
Zulutrade’s ranking formula is proprietary and secret, but is stated on their website to be based upon maturity, exposure, and draw-down. On every one of these criteria, with the possible exception of exposure, most trade providers that best satisfy these criteria are probably heading for a fall, because the promoted traders are the ones that have been skating on thin ice longer than anyone else.
I really don’t mean to insult Zulutrade or imply anything about them, as they are offering an honest and transparent service, plus a ranking system that will identify the diamonds that make money, but unfortunately a much larger amount of trash as well. Ironically, things are made even worse by the operations of the trade copiers themselves.
How Trade Copiers Mess It Up
In the context of the ranking system, most trade copiers will approach it in a way they consider to be intelligent: select high-performing traders, quickly fire any poor performers, and increase trade sizes on the winners just before they stop making money and start losing.The effect this will have is to make results even worse, as the copiers will be chasing yesterday instead of tomorrow, and will not be sitting through the losing streaks that the true long-term winners will usually generate. Market conditions change frequently and rapidly. In fact a typical day for any instrument will see it move in the opposite direction to yesterday, as the market ranges most of the time. The end result will be adding to losses and cutting winners short, effectively.
Many hedge fund managers will tell you about how they attract an influx of investment into their funds just after a period of very strong performance, and how they know that these “chasing” investors are often disappointed when, quite naturally, a period of worse or even negative performance follows.
Trade copiers are not traders, they are investors managing a fund of funds, and they usually do not have the research tools made available to them to have a real chance of picking out the diamonds, which is a hard enough task even for market professionals.
Source
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