The ‘Trading Leaders’ sidebar is a complete joke.
First of all, the ‘Leaders’ are based on dollar profit with no normalization of account balances. How can you compare a Sim Trader with a 100% allocation to a system with a $275k equity balance against one with a 100% allocation to a system with $20k of equity? Worse yet, a Sim Trader can subscribe to many such large notional systems, gaining access to fictional equity in excess of $1 million. Comparing results based on dollar profits obviously makes no sense.
Second, and probably more importantly, the leader board trivializes the seriousness of investing a makes it a horse race to see who can win the most without regard for the risks taken or the amount of time it took to achieve them.
I believe the ‘Trading Leaders’ sidebar in its current form degrades the image of your website.
What would be an interesting addition to your site would be the ability to backtest multiple strategies (with user specified weightings, rebalancing periods and initial capital) to see how they would have performed as portfolio.
I agree with all points raised in this post.
Another suggestion: Why not not have a similar list for live trading accounts? Of course the results should be reported as percentage profits and not dollar profits to respect privacy and to make a fair comparison as mentioned. Users should probably need to be able to opt-out (or have to opt-in to participate).
Gary
All Simulated Trading Accounts start with exactly the same balance: $100,000.
Everyone can try to maximize his or her Simulated Broker Account, however he or she wants - trying to balance risk and reward.
The fact that different systems on C2 have different notional Model Account Balances is not relevant.
Take this example: one sim trader wants to trade a system with $50,000 in its notional Model Account, and another who wants to trade a system with $100,000 in its notional account.
Assume both people are constrained by the $100,000 Sim account, and that they want to allocate all their capital to their one favorite system (a bad idea, probably, but let’s assume it for the sake of explanation.)
The first user can AutoTrade his chosen system at 200% scaling, and the second can AutoTrade with 100% scaling.
Again: the fact that different C2 systems have different notional account values doesn’t really matter: C2’s AutoTrade Scaling % lets users allocate capital in their Simulated Broker Account (or real broker account, for that matter), however they like. What matters is, given that everyone starts with $100K in their Sim Account, how much do they end up with?
Now, as to your other point. Well, of course I don’t necessarily agree with your comment that this feature is a “complete joke.”
Rather, I think it might be a useful mechanism for system discovery and community-wide learning. If you see someone trading well - even in Simulated account - you might want to discover exactly which systems he’s trading (we let you see what each Sim trader is trading). Conversely, it might be useful to understand what Sim Losers did wrong, so as to avoid it… particularly in a real account.
Anyway, I do appreciate that you took the time to offer an opinion. One of our near-term plans is to allow customization of the widgets that appear on your Dashboard page. Once we do this, you won’t need to subject yourself to the Trading Leaders area anymore. Until then, just try to hang in there.
Gary - Yes, that is the ultimate plan: to also show live accounts as well as Sim accounts (of course members will need to specifically opt in to this; we would never show account results unless a person specifically agreed.) We want to test the feature using Sim accounts first.
Sometimes big risk equals big rewards…it’s just sim accounts. If you run a system at say 200%…well when there is a drawdown you get beat up. If the system is good well then so will the sim results. Are you crying for the guys that are big in the negative?
Looks like you are running 1000%. Could the issue be the performance of your systems rather than the way Matthew is running the board? I’m just having fun with running the accounts. No reason to get all uptight.
