TOS to be or not to be

How much do you think it matters if you are TOS or not?

As I see it its not impotent.

Interesting to hear what your thought ?

Assuming you’ve made an obvious typo there (although impotent is spelled correctly, but I think you meant to say important) TOS is a good indication that the system developer indeed believes in his/her system and is putting their money where their mouth is, rather than just hawking systems for subscription income and hoping they can show short term results good enough to keep people interested. So I think it is useful, but just one of several criteria to consider when evaluating systems.

Expecting everyone to be TOS certified shows a true lack of currency management skills. The fact that the minimum contract size in FX is 10k makes it IMPOSSIBLE to diversify variable account balances across multiple pairs.
My personal opinion is if C2 really wants to offer the highest quality of FX management, they need to get Oanda on board so traders can position account down to the dollar amount. Either that or there needs to be no limit on account balances -in order to make 10k insignificant. On a 10k or 20k account, trying to diversify by adding or subtracting 10k contracts is a HUGE percentage change in relation to 10,000 versus say 1,000,000.
Add in the fact that someone managing 5 systems with starting balances of 250k each can’t be expected to have 1.25 Mil or else they wouldn’t be on here, they’d be trading there own account.
TOS somewhat important, more important is level of experience, screen time, amount of trades made, years trading.

Cool thanks but seems to me that for subscribers it’s not one of the main
criteria

Required margin for Forex is around 1:30 with IB, and much lower with other brokers. To trade 1 minilot, or 10K units, you need around $300. On a 10K account, that’s 3% of your capital. Didn’t manage to understand the problem you describe.

Try evenly diversifying a $10,000 account across 2 fx pairs one week, then 20 fx pairs the next. Impossible. This would be possible if minimum unit size was $1.
Leverage doesn’t matter in my example.

Even if I were to flip my strategy to Public, I wouldn’t be TOS certified. I’m just not trusting enough to give that much access to my trading account. Risk/Reward of being TOS just isn’t there for me. To each his/her own.

Now try the same with a $1,000,000 account. 1 Mil divided by 2 pairs is 50 contracts, divided by 20 pairs is 5.
With a $10,000 account you’re holding $20k or $200k.
I’m not talking about whether a position can be opened, I am talking about proper account management.

That’s a good exercise for imagination maybe. No serious trader will trade 20 pairs simultaneously. The correlation between the trades will be very high, meaning you are better off concentrating on those with lower spreads. There is little need in reality to trade more than 3 pairs simultaneously.

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And what exactly do you expect to gain from a $1 position? or $10? or $100? Or $1,000?

My smallest trades are $25,000 / trade - and that’s when I just try to trade a new system. For it to be meaningful, 1 full lot ($100,000) is really the minimum.

You seem to know everything, maybe I should close my current Oanda position of about $100,000 that I have spread across 24 pairs. Should I close my Gbp/nzd trade with 4.2 pip spread, even though on average it’s going to move over 300 pips?
GalBarak, what 3 pairs do you recommend focusing on?

:slight_smile: No need to get so excited. I don’t know everything, just expressing my views.

If you’re spreading $100,000 over 24 pairs in my opinion it is very probable this is inefficient and unnecessary, of course to analyze to what extent more data is required.

Should you close your GBPNZD position if you believe it’s going to move 300 pips? no. But you can look into which of the other 23 positions are highly correlated.

Personally I am satisfied with focusing on EURUSD and USDJPY, and occasionally GBPUSD, this is not to say that you shouldn’t trade other pairs.

By the way I don’t see how Oanda is going to assist you with C2 limitations - also with IB you can set positions to the dollar (for example, to trade $1,524 or even $1). You do get better executions when you are over $25,000.

I agree 100 percent with getting Oanda on board