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There is a substantial risk of loss in trading. You should therefore carefully consider
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Yes, he has a long track record but are you even looking at it? If you did look at the details you’d see that he has massive intraday drawdowns regularly–multiple times a year (so you’re sure to hit one). And the drawdowns are so massive there is no way he recovers from them in real life. Go look at the trade on 2/6/15, it has a 204% intraday drawdown. That’s over 100% so the account not only blows out but goes negative by-$400,000 (which C2 shows you in the details if you hover over the figure). There is no recovery from that, your broker forcibly closes your positions long before that (if you’re lucky–if you’re not lucky the broker halts you when you go negative and starts calling you demanding you pay up on the negative loss). Look at the trade on 2/12/14, account goes negative again with a 117% intraday drawdown. The trade on 12/30/15 only has a 96.7% intraday drawdown, but again that’s enough to get shut down–no recovery happening. You can also see from the details how the autotraders vanish around these periods which is not surprising. But don’t worry, new ones come back again later to pay more subscription fees because they don’t look at anything but the big return number. So go look at the details… and ask yourself is he really making these trades? Or is he only collecting subscriptions from people that don’t do their research?
But yes, as you say, if you get in at just the right time you might double your money before the next collapse hits. And if you do, you’d better take your money out quick because it will soon be gone.
How do you look at long term trade data? I assume there must be some way to download to a spreadsheet? Or is the interactive chart the best way to analyze this?
I am new to C2 and the learning curve has been steep. I wish there were more FAQs and documentation about these issues, what scaling is, how to find data, etc. From the questions I read in the forum I am not the only one searching for answers…
Not ready to pull the trigger on a live account yet. Thanks to everyone who contributed to a very educational discussion.
There is a CSV download icon (as you discovered). Also if you look at the bottom of the list of trades there is a little “>>” icon that lets you page through the entire trade history. On each page of trades the “DD” column shows the worst intraday drawdown for each trade. If you click on a DD value it gives you more details including the worst price seen and the lowest equity level that was hit (that’s where you can see the system went down to -$400k on one trade).
I recommend you page through every trade in a system and look at the per trade DD numbers. There are a number of systems on C2 that have good looking equity curves but high DD numbers in the trades. Another red flag to watch for is systems with a very high successful trades percentage (>90%). Extremely high successful trade rates are usually paid for by large hidden risks somewhere (e.g. Martingale strategy or something). Good systems with reasonable risk profiles don’t try to win every trade.
Just make sure, you do not over trade. You have to realize, you are using margin in this market. What is the max contract you can use.
Before you enter any market, make sure you have plans what will you do if there is high DD, what is your back up plans?
Another critical step, use only small contract like 1 or 2 contracts for the first n scd position.
Since you are new, try to stick in 1 market until finish before jump to another market.
Psychology is very important , dont let high DD, over trade and have to many position in different markets influence you to make bad decision. Just give you hint, if the developer use 1000 in c2, are you ready to handle this? I am ready but of course I don’t have that capital but I can manage my size, that’s just only give you extreme example.
Hey, folks. Don’t want to create a new topic so will ask here.
How does c2 account for leverage?
for example, if model account buys 100 eur/usd. doesn’t it matter for c2 what leverage was used
(he could’ve bought 1 x 100 or 5 x 20)?
Another question is how exactly Minimum Capital Required is calculated?
And does MCR of 100 000$ mean that I need 100 000$ to trade succesfully or that I need, for example, 1000$ with 100x leverage?
So, the size of the trade should scale with the account size, right? So if the system started with $5K some time ago, and is now at $35K, 100% scaling would require an account with $35K? Or would 100% scaling mean your account should be $5K?
Yes, usually your first idea is the case (35k for 100%). But it depends on the money management of the system developer. If he doesn´t scale the position size proportionally to the account value it can be different. Asking the developer of the system in question is generally a good idea.
I think that is a poor way to implement it; it’s confusing. So most of these (good-looking) strategies are at some weird, high number like $153,498, so I have to go take whatever I’m investing, say $10K, do the math $10K/153498 and arrive at a % that way. It would be easier and way more intuitive to just input the amount you’re investing instead of a %.
Such approach doesn’t work for futures, and sometimes for options. C2 approach is really flexible if number of systems is used or for margin broker account or when position size is not constant relative to capital size.
