Meta-Trader - Freedom Tower Rising

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

For the first time in a few months, I made into downtown Manhattan. It was great to see the steel structure of the new Freedom Tower rising from the ashes of the World Trade Center site.

As for financial markets, it was pretty much an inside week with price action well off the recent highs and lows. EUR/USD was a good example, flirting with recent highs for a few days in the week, but mostly throwing back the gains and in the just moving sideways.

Equities also moved sideways under the pressure of an option expiration week. As for forex, it was a quiet week with most systems moving up or down less than 1% with a few exceptions as follows.

The week's winner was Atinalla Full Portfolio which closed a series of USD/NZD trades and gained a healthy 5.38% for the week and is now up an impressive 34.53% for the year!

Other interesting action was in FX-Regression which started with week diving to a new equity low, then climbing all the way back just above even.

This past week my referring broker over at Trader's Choice FX started (for first time) to deposit the broker bonus directly into my account. Details are sketchy, but I believe that resulted in a deposit of $5.51 into my account running FX-Regression back on 4/11/2011. If that continues every month for a year, that could result in a 6.5% gain for the account over a year's time. That factor alone could tip the scales in favor of this account making money.

Back on April 5th, Daniel Fernandez ran a post on his blog Trade More or Trade Less in which he made the argument that given 2 systems which have the same statistical properties, he would rather choose the system which trades less, versus the system which trades more. The post got a record number of comments, most of which took the counter argument that systems which trade more are preferred over systems which trade less.

I would argue that systems that trade more are better because they produce a broker bonus which can turn a losing or break-even account into a winning account. I'm not advocating trading for broker bonus alone, but you can't argue with its effect on the bottom line. FX-Regression is a real-life experiment on this point. Check back next week, next month and next year to see how it turns out.

Other action of interest this week was in Coatl EUR Centered Portfolio which picked up a solid 3% on the week and is now up an impressive 29.28% since starting it back on February 27th. I will review this system and the other Coatl based portfolios in an upcoming post.

As for development items, I need to get back to my core mission of reviewing trading systems versus just reviewing results. Next up with be a review of Atinalla FE trading systems. Check back later for that and enjoy your Saturday.