Meta-Trader - Bernanke Speaks

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

It was a historic week with everything from deadly and destructive storms in the southern US to a royal wedding.

The highlight for me was the first-ever press-conference held by US Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. By all measures it was a resounding success and its was great to get insight into the mind of the most powerful man in global markets. Even better, he gave complete and careful attention to every question and came off as the honest, hardworking guy that I believe he is. Good job Mr Bernanke, and hopefully the Fed-bashers will now give the Fed a break.

Global Markets were basically in lock-down until the Fed call, but moved narrowly higher in advance. Once the call was over, and with the idea the rate increases or further tightening were at least "a few meetings" off, the prevailing trends continued. The S&P-500 advanced 2% for the week to nearly a 3-year high. Oil, Gold, Silver and major commodities continued their upward advance to multi-year highs. EUR/USD followed suit and pushed out to a nearly a 2 year high with the dollar tanking nearly across the board.

You can almost feel the balloon-action in the economy here. Fed injecting capital into the system, taking up financial assets in a desperate effort to get the real economy moving again. But the housing market remains depressed and you can't have a full recovery without housing and real estate.

My equity portfolio was nearly flat on the week as I scaled out of positions in AAPL, NFLX, VMW, OPEN and LULU with decent short-terms gains. I went into the weekend with nearly 31% in cash and feeling a under-invested. But overall, its been a great run off the lows of 2008 and psychologically, I felt better taking the profits. From a trend-following perspective, these were probably not smart moves, but time will tell. Nothing has been able to stop this market, not earthquake, nor Tsunami, nor smoldering nuclear plant.

On the Forex side the screaming winner on the week was COATL EUR Centered Portfolio. This thing picked up about 18% on the week and is now up a stunning 48% since I started this demo back on February 27, 2011! Taking a look over at Asirikuy, there is one other live account running this system which started at about the same time. Unfortunately, my demo performance is not duplicated and the other account is up only about 1.2% over the same period. As this point, I can't tell if my account is wrong and i'm just lucky, or the other guys implementation is wrong. I suppose it could be broker dependency as well, but I hate to think a broker could make all that much difference. I think its going to take a review of Coatl, followed by a review of the settings and some back-testing before I get to the bottom of this one.

I have to admit I have picked up the pace on Asirikuy system reviews lately because I want to get to Coatl. Perhaps I can get to it later today and have a review posted tomorrow, so check back on Sunday for that.

As for live accounts, let's do the numbers.

Atinalla #1 dropped about 1% for the week. This account is slowly drawing down from an equity high at +31% hit back on February 23rd.

Atipaq Full Portfolio dropped about 2% in similar fashion, but went out with about 2.9% in unrealized gains.

Megadroid Live had its first loss of the year and dropped nearly 9% on the week.

FX-Regression had a rough week as well, moving out to a new equity low, then recovering somewhat. This system is a case study in what works and doesn't work in a trading system. I'm starting to realize that perhaps DF is correct in that system that win less often, but with larger Take Profits come out on top versus this system which does the exact opposite. But 4 months is too short a period for real conclusions, so let's give it a full year.

Atinalla FE also gave back about 5.5% on the week and ended up down -3% even on the year.

Atinalla #3 showed some signs of life and picked up about 2 and change percent on the week.

Atinalla #4 SM edged up a fraction of a percent on the week. It's interesting to note that the God's Gift instances, kicked out of this portfolio earlier in the year showed some signs of life this past week. The GBP/USD instance took a big winner, while the EUR/USD instance took a series of small profits. Lets keep and eye on these for possible re-inclusion in the portfolio.

Check back later for a review of Coatl, Asirikuy's first genetically-based multi-strategy expert with portfolio-based deployment. Sounds cool and it is. Enjoy your Saturday.