The opinions expressed in these forums do not represent those of C2, and any discussion of profit/loss
is not indicative of future performance or success.
There is a substantial risk of loss in trading. You should therefore carefully consider
whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your financial condition. You should read,
understand, and consider the Risk Disclosure Statement that is provided by your broker
before you consider trading. Most people who trade lose money.
If that trade leader has a second brokerage account where he enters the same trades in opposite direction he has no skin in the game. But still a fancy TOS badge. He just needs enough money to play those games.
TOS is only meaningfull after a good period of time and a larger number of trades combined with a solid track record. At least in my book the likelyhood that someone hedges all his trades while he could earn good money from trading is rather small. So it comes down to a “good” track record and TOS is a nice addition. Whatever “good” means for you is of course up to you.
With all due respect to the trade leader of A Strategy for YM, this is not a trading plan. It is merely a go long approach. Any average trader could see that today was a selling opportunity. Anyone with a nose and eye to the markets could see this coming miles away. Or, one could just go long under the premise that markets always recover. Sometimes they dont. Or atleast not in time to rescue your account balance.
It is very sad… free fall from last week. from 26200 into 24800 (1400 points ) with 10 contracts at different entry price. We are in the big volatile market with huge concerns.
Any subs that started in late september 2018 would probably have freaked out by now considering the drawdown took out more than 50% of their account. This is a strategy that can cause a complete account loss if one is not diligent in watching over this strategy.
Guys, plain and simple, this is a trend following strategy. There is nothing wrong with the premise. It’s pretty simple. This guy’s problem is his risk management - he is massively oversized for the size of account that C2 recommends, and also that he adds to losing positions, which tends to work until it doesn’t. This strategy should be sized 25% of what it is, so, for the same capital, it should be returning 40% per year with max 16% DD. That would actually be a very investable strategy, if it maintained that performance.
Either way, he did a thing a trade leader should never do and that is broke his own, publicly-stated sizing rules in a Hail Mary-desperado situation. That was a huge red flag and enough to convince me to cancel my subscription.
Yes @PhilD1, you are absolutely correct. Over leveraging is the main issue with a lot of the strategies in C2. If they traded within their scope they would not have crashed and burned. But then to alot of new investors they mostly want 100%+ returns.
Its when they realize the risks for 100% returns means higher risks and possibly blown accounts it is then they realize they have to scale down.
Nope, this is typical mean-reversion system where trader is trying to buy a dip, and buy one more time, and buy one more time lowering the trade entry price and get from the trade as soon as it got the profit. High winner % ratio and the ratio of avg winner to avg loser confirm this. Typical trend-following system has low winner % ratio and high ratio of avg winner to avg loser.
Such systems worked really well before feb 2018. Now market changed. Simplicity Trading, this strategy, Antares - they all used mean-reversion approaches and all of them failed in that february.
PS for mean reversion systems there are no good means of risk management. Use of stops or small leverage just make the profits very low and comparable with the buy & hold approach.
It’s a trend following strategy. The high % winners results because for some reason he often exits in the evenings and re-enters the same position shortly after the re-open. Supposedly he does this because his system generates signals on a daily basis, but the end result is he’s just been permanently long for the past 18 months. In a long term uptrending market, that kind of in-and-out behavior will make it look like he has a lot of winners because C2 will consider each opening and closing as an individual trade, when in reality he’s just long all the time. He’s in the market probably 90%+ of the time.
He does exhibit some mean-reversion type behavior, where he would sometimes average down (like in the current DD). I subbed to this strategy for almost a year. Sometimes he’d be at max size and would just ride out drawdowns, and sometimes he wouldn’t be at max size and would use drawdowns as an opportunity to average down his cost basis.
99.9% of all future strategy on c2 is leverage. if you are under 100k account balance don’t trade more than 1 contract. or set a contract limit to 1 in c2 panel. if you set scale down too low it might not trade at all.
It blows my mind seeing strategies with 50k balance trading 10 ES/YM contracts. 1 bad trade you are done! remember, these guys are trading fake money. You and I are trading REAL money. (90% of the time they are not TOS) even tho this case he is TOS, but the leverage is still way too high.
Sorry for my dumb question, I’m not an expert on trading Futures.
How many YM-contracts or ES-contracts are appropriate for a 50k account?
(Let’s suppose with stop loss, which is not the case with this strategy)
I mean, how to calculate how many contracts to use?
For example. this other ES-strategy uses only 1 ES-contract on a 5K account.
(which is 10 ES-contracts on a 50K account)
But this other trader is more careful (no overnight trading)
reminds me what feedback I gave to my customers who asked for my opinion on this strategy for ym long time ago when strategy was at its peak…i guess some took note, some dint…
Customer radar was interesting…A Strategy for YM, Futures WealthBuider, and Average Expactancy27. All of them are/were time bombs. Myself I did trade all of them in past and run from them on the first warning of overleverage or irrational behavior.
C2 should do something in a direction to preserve the capital of strategy subscribers like a promotion of TOS strategies with longevity > 1 year, DD < 20% and real subscribers, creating a significant developer discount for these strategies (developer can lower subscription fee to attract more customers and preserve customer/C2 capital), etc. I did notice that a number of strategies is going down (grid, 610 at the moment, 1 year ago was above 700), customer capital is going down, C2 fees are going up. Somehow C2 choosing to spend money on developing new capabilities of reducing customer capital like cryptocurrencies instead do everything to preserve it. So far C2 business model is based on recycling of customer capital (new customers, new money). The next recession will prove that this model will not work alone, without the preservation of customer capital.
Really depends on your risk appetite. A rule of thumb for me would even in the worst case i should not get a margin call or nowhere near it!
On IB you will need around 4000 as intraday margin for ES. So if you have a stop of 5 points, 4 losing trades on trot would get you close to a margin call on ES if you start off at 5000 USD. If the strategy has positions outside cash market,its not even possible to trade with 1 contract for 5000 usd.
