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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.
It has been over a year since subscribers started trading ANTARES SP500 at Colllective2.
In my opinion C2 review system leaves something to be desired, as often subscribers being selected by C2 to write a strategy review complain about short time they started trading the strategy.
Furthermore, reviews are few compared to profitable strategies published at C2, considering their number of subscribers (estimated, at least for futures, from C2 auto trade real fill data).
Collective2 support team tell me they are upgrading the review system.
In the meantime, I am inviting ANTARES SP500 subscribers to write a public review of the strategy, based on their experience so far, profit or loss, pros / cons and customer service.
I think what you’re asking for is great. I to agree that C2 asking for a review in a few weeks after subscribing to a new strategy is crazy. If they do not want random reviews at all times they need to at least change to maybe periodic reviews maybe after 30 days, then 90 days, 6 months, and a year to help people like myself. Overall the review section is worthless to me because it is written by people with very little experience with the strategy. Ok those or my thoughts for C2 review policy. As for Antares SP500 and Paolo they are great. I have been with him a lot of 2017. I first subscribed earlier this year with great results. However I saw another strategy that I wanted to try out that trades the same so I stopped Antares SP 500 while I tried this other strategy out. After a month or so I went back to Antares SP500. The reason I went back are to many to list. First great communication by Paolo for the entire time I have subscribed. When I left to try out the other strategy he personally reached out to me to ask why I left and was there any way he could improve. That to this day has been the only strategy to ever reach out to me upon leaving. Also originally me being new to futures he took the time to answer all my dumb questions. When it comes to risk/reward I think he does great. Losses do happened but the wins do come soon after and he knows when to get back into a new position. If you’re looking for a good futures strategy that has a proven track record, does not add to losing positions, has an acceptable draw down, and good communications then this is it. Keep up the good trading Paolo.
I am new to Collective2. I poked around for a year or two but never really looked at results in any detail. I started looking seriously about 6 weeks ago and came across Antares SP500. I am very hands on and like going into the details so after looking at Paolo’s description and backtesting, I had a number of questions. He responded a few hours later with a very detailed response. We went back and forth for a few days and i became more and more impressed with his backtested and live C2 results, not to mention the care he takes in responding to my questions. I also asked some questions of another model developer. He got back to me a few days later and his first line was “You’re not a subscriber right” and then he gave a short answer. OK. thanks. That turned me off. Anyway, i had no idea about the C2 review process - when i went to leave a review i found there was no way to do it. I agree with the subscriber above - the reviews section is pretty useless. I certainly don’t want it becoming like Amazon with many fake reviews but there has to be a happy medium. I have left very few reviews of anything in my life (I can count them on my fingers). The service has to be horrendous or amazing. Paolo from what i have seen so far is in the latter category. His backtested results and equity curve seemed so consistent with so little drawdown and he told me that this model is pretty consistent at generating about 30k per year (largely on 1 ES contract). I have only been a subscriber for 6 weeks but in that time I have been tracking his trades vs his annual return and it has been very consistent… amazingly consistent. Not sure yet if that is a fluke but i suspect not. Here is what i have seen so far - 9 trades (7 wins and 2 losses - right in line with his long term averages). He has captured 84 ES points (14 points a week - a pretty close to 30k per year). I have been tracking how much the ES has moved in that time as well. ES is up 82 points. OK you might say… he has benefited from the bull market. Not so. As most people know the market is quite lofty and many have been trying to short (and losing). Paolo’s model has made 44 points going long and 40 points going short. He truly is a master of picking ranges and playing the reversion to the mean game. He has truly developed a great model. I have been trading CFD’s and increasing my size as i become familiar with his style (my version of paper trading with a little real money) and on average have traded only 1/10 of an emini contract. Despite trading only 1/10 of a contract, i have already earned more than enough to cover 2 months subscription. I’m itching to start trading a half dozen contracts… but i will be patient. I add a CFD contract (multiplier of 1) every time he has a successful trade and it is kind of fun watching how quickly my contract size grows (even though it is still tiny). Thanks Paolo for sharing this system and every day i become more confident it will continue to grow as consistently as it has in the past. Key point for people - beware of the denominator model developers are using when giving returns… it has to be understood to truly understand the model returns and why for instance Paolo’s 2017 results look worse than 2016. They are not as different as you might think.
Paola is running the system as a professional should. Exits are set soon after positions are opened. He will take smaller gains on occasion rather than watching them disappear. He is a disciplined trader that has been making consistent returns. Wish I had been with him longer than the 3 months I have traded Antares SP500. Keep up the good work!
Every trade has stop loss and target.
A global pre-defined maximum daily loss check is coded into the strategy and will exit all positions when hit.
In case of high price volatility, all positions will be closed at market open by an automatic protective exit.
Profit target and stop loss are self-adapting using custom functions.
From C2 strategy description:
ANTARES SP500 is a fully mechanical strategy operating End-Of-Day on Mini-SP500 Futures.
It is composed of five different long/short strategies:
Strategy operates long/short with limit and market orders ;
Orders for next trading day (if generated) are sent to subscribers around 17:30 ET (23:30 CET).
Orders are valid from next day Globex Future market open (18:00ET/00:00 CET) until the end of next day trading session (17:00 ET, 23:00 CET). Stops and price targets are always given the day after trade is initiated.
ANTARES SP500 opens up to 5 long positions (usually 1-2) or 1 to 3 short positions in the same direction (long/short) and manages independent adaptive stops and targets for each positions. A global pre-defined maximum daily loss check is coded into the strategy and will exit all positions when hit. In case of high price volatility, all positions will be closed at market open by an automatic protective exit. Profit target and stop loss are self-adapting using custom functions.
Recently we have introduced new tested set-ups, in an effort to increase diversification through different strategy logic, even though the system operates on a single market. As capital increased, new set-ups aim also at maintaining past and actual profitability, without increasing number of contracts per signal that otherwise will create issues for actual and new subscribers.
Backtesting data is hypothetical and it has not been verified by C2.
I am always available for question and additional information.
I am confident to follow Paolo’s Antares SP500 system because you can always see there are stop and target order in your broker’s account. The advantage for hold the orders in broker account is you can clearly see what the maximum risk is. So this give you peace of mind. And as Paolo assured his algorithm have the maximum daily loss stop coded in his algo. This give you another level of protection.
Regarding the communications, Paolo provided the backtest report and also provides monthly updates. If you have question, Paolo also respond very quickly.
@Hardyfarmer, how large an account do you need to trade Antares? Interactive Brokers Initial Overnight Margin on ES contracts is list at $8052 per contract on their web site. If 5 contracts can be open simultaneously, as mentioned above, that would be > $40k unless I have misunderstood something, which is certainly possible.
Yes. Your calculation is correct. I believe I saw it somewhere that Paolo said the required minimum to trade this strategy on the strategy’s page is set by C2’s calculation not by him. The strategy normally takes 1-3 positions. However it can go maximum to 5.
There is another way to limit the maximum trade contracts. You can set the maximum contract the strategy can take in C2 account management page. If you set that, obviously you may miss some of the trades. So the performance will be different. And if you have less initial capital and the same drawdown, so you drawdown percentage will be higher.
Thank you for your question.
You are correct, starting account size as indicated in C2 strategy page is $35K, however with current ES initial margin, in the rare event strategy enters all five set-ups, capital needed would be 40,260$. I will update minimum capital required in strategy page.
Normally, strategy trades 1-3 contracts. Positions are often held overnight.
As noted by @Hardyfarmer, you can set the maximum number of contracts strategy can take in C2 account management page. With current market low volatility, setting max total contract strategy can open to 3, will give you almost the same trades that the full 5 set-up version.
With 3 contracts, margin will tie up $24156, using a 40K account will leave room for drawdown. For full five set-up strategy max drawdown in last three years was $6600, while in last 16 years it was 12100, . According to my backtest, trading only 3 contract will decrease max drawdown by about 15%.
Antares is a great system. Paolo is a professional and is dedicated to his system. One can tell he spent a great deal of time designing and refining this system. He is also very friendly and is very responsive and open to questions. After having had a great deal of ups and downs with various systems on C2, I narrowed down my number of strategies and selected only a handful with the goal that they should sustain the test of time whilst ideally also providing attractive returns. Antares is such a strategy, and in fact the one I feel the safest with in my portfolio. Well done Mr Paolo !
Before everyone gets too excited about Antares, I would just caution you to look at Paolo’s track record, dig a bit more “under the hood” as they say. He seems to have thrown in the towel on Regulus after only four months (I would call this a failure), and he had two earlier systems that are now private and doubtless met a similar fate as Regulus.
People should also note when digging though that the equity curve from deleted strategies keeps going per my post yesterday. Deleted Strategies Still Racking Up Some Stats For example Regulus had its last trade in April was deleted in May.
However, the strategy curve is still continuing to today. I think C2 should fix this and make it more clear that the strategies that have been killed have been killed. Still keep them on our records so no one can game the system, but there is no reason to continue the equity curves etc. The curve looks way worse than what actually happened. Matter of fact if someone stumbles on a killed strategy that happened to be killed with some winning long term trades people may even try to subscribe or give the manager undue props just as they can give them undue negatives.
CharlesTines, but the statistics show 9 total trades, and you can count 7 of them closed. So it seems 2 of them are still open, hence the descending equity curve? I’m not sure if we should consider this system “deleted”. Anyway, I am always concerned when the developer has multiple systems in his/her history, but only the recent “good” one is showing. I went through the same learning curve as a developer years ago, but never covered up my history: instead I just realized that I was a subscriber, not a developer, and so I just left my three systems open and walked away.
The strategy number though was killed per the “Strategies Activity Details Page” I personally feel his pain because when I first found C2 I got so excited and kept switching what strategy was linked to which brokerage accounts and tried to figure out what subscribers would like etc. I even once deleted a strategy because of the name, not realizing I could change it. With enough digging anyone can see my killed strategies, but I don’t leave them in the obvious spots because they are actually misleading. I have one that I deleted after a short drawdown and now the equity curve shows tremendous growth because I killed it while holding XIV. I just think that once a strategy is killed the curve should stop accumulating time. His definitely was killed per the screen shot.
