Hello everyone,
I´m happy to end the 4th month of trading with my discretional trading strategy. This thread is meant for subscribers to give their feedback and to build a small Q&A. But of course everyone is invited to contribute anything of value.
Questions from subscribers:
- Do you have any backtest or other historical information available on your Portfolio Trader IRA system?
Answer: I don´t trade like a robot so there is no backtest possible. Instead I adapt as good as I can to the current market conditions and manage the positions accordingly. This includes fundamentals, news, COT reports and of course technical analysis.
- I’d be curious to learn more about your performance targets and max drawdown expectations.
Answer: I´m quite conservative when it comes to risk. I´m ok with up to 10-15% drawdown if things go really bad but as my results show I´m caring much about my individual positions. I feel responsible for subscribers money so I don´t want to risk much just to gain stellar returns. I´m fine with 2-3% gain per month on average.
- Can Portfolio Trader IRA be traded with 50% scaling?
Answer: Yes, 50% scaling is ok if you want to replicate all trades including the option trades. I always trade at least 2 options and mutliples of 2 so you can follow at 50%/100%/150% and so on.
Stock trades can be replicated at any multiple of 10%.
- Are any of your Options positions hedges against the ETFs?
Answer: Either I have a signal for a certain direction or I don´t trade. However, some trades take longer than expected and the market could give a short term reversal signal against my position. In this case I have a number of options to react. Depending on the actual market situation I either close the profitable trade or I enter a countertrade. The latter can be done either by using options or by taking a position in the contrary ETF. (For example SPXL -> SPXS) So you can call it hedging or taking a countertrade but in the end that´s just semantics.
- Are you usually using all of your account size for positions and also I assume you don’t use margin right?
Answer: I rarely apply all of the capital but it can happen. In fact the highest capital allocation to date was around 93%. I don´t use margin but I use leveraged ETFs and options to have more profit potential. Normal allocation is 30-70%.
- When do you plan on start charging for your service? I think your results to date warrant some fees, to be honest. I am always nervous about free C2 systems and would like to understand your motivation going forward.
Answer: My endgoal is to get and keep 50 subscribers at a decent fee. So my motivation to give signals for free is to grow a happy community first. Of course I hope that most subs can profit and therefore stick with me when I start to charge a reasonable fee.
For new subscribers I start to charge a small fee from today so the subscriber base doesn´t increase too fast. Sub fees will incrementally increase until a fair price is reached.
Thank you all and have a great weekend,
Alex
