Meta-Trader - 2010 Wrap-up

Welcome back Meta-Traders and Happy New Year!

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I've learned so much in the past year. Many thanks to my readers for your support and your comments!

Let's take a quick look back at how I did this past year and see what conclusions we can draw. Based on that, we'll see how we can use that knowledge to better position ourselves for 2011.

Let's start with equities since that was real bright spot, particularly versus the prior 2 years. I manage the bulk of my assets in a pair of brokerage accounts setup at my favorite web-based discount broker. I have one account for taxable funds and another for tax-deferred 401K rollover funds. I make basically the same trades in each account which explains why they perform basically the same.

It was a great year to be a trend follower and my 2 equity accounts earned approximately 19% versus about 13% in the S&P 500. That's about 6% alpha and i'm proud of that given the fact that I had about 20-25% in cash most of the time. Most of the gains came from big moves in AAPL, NFLX, HMSY, NEOG and recently APC. Equity Index ETF's SPY, DIA, EEM, EFA, VO, and XLB had solid contributions as well. I took about 3% of the gains off the table so I have some large unrealized gains that I will have to watch carefully to make sure I don't give too much back.

I find it much easier to make money in stocks in a bull market than making money in Forex. Forex is currently less than 2% of my assets, but I spend a disproportionate amount of time on Forex. I decided to balance that out a bit more and spend some time and effort improving my game in equities so I joined Chartpattern.com which is a newsletter, web-site and chat room run by champion stock trader Dan Zanger. Its relatively expensive, but i've already made one month's fees from trading from just a few days in the chat room.

As for Forex, the years winner was Megadroid Demo which pulled in an incredible 50.1%. Meanwhile Megadroid Live lost -4.6% for the year! The demo traded on FXDD while the live account traded on Forex.com. At one point Megadroid live was up about 30% for the year but ended up giving it back toward the end of the year with few large losses. In most cases, the losses suffered by the live account did not appear in the demo account since the demo escaped at scratch or a 1 pip profit while in the live account the trades ran to the maximum loss.

Another thing about Megadroid is that at 10% risk, it can still trade up to 40% of the account in one trade. And if both of those trades go to their stop-loss values, the account can lose up to 24% in one short day which I saw first hand. I'm going to continue trading Megadroid Live, but i'm not going to add any more money to it. If I lose the original $1000 goes bust, so be it. But at least I want to give it a chance to recover.

Atinalla #1 had a solid year earning 10% with about only 5 months of trading. Atinalla #1 Live did well also and pulled in 3.5% with only about 1.5 months of live trading.

Atinalla #3 earned about 9.1% for the year with about 3 months of trading. Atinalla #1 and #3 will be key parts of my robot's portfolio starting in 2011.

God's Gift Duo live at one point was up about 3%, but has been losing consistently lately, and is now down nearly 3%. Now that I have the profit/drawdown analysis tool working, I realize this is a lousy combination and need to pick a different robot's combination.

Finally FXDD Live Twin Scalpers also went into drawdown with the recent Megadroid losses and is down -4.66% for the year. I don't like this combination and i'm going to need to replace it with a different portfolio, probably with robots from Asirikuy.

I've added $5000 to Forex.com and I now have $11,000 setup and ready to trade for 2011. Once I clear up some issues regarding the deposit bonus, i'll get the funds transferred to some new accounts and ready to trade.

Check back throughout the week and next weekend for an update on the robot's portfolio and my first week of live trading in 2011.

Happy New Year to all!