Welcome back Meta-Traders.The first quarter 2011 came to a close this week. On the weather front, the spring lamb still hasn't arrived and the winter lion still remains well in charge. With pool season a mere 6 weeks away, spring and summer better get a get a move on!
Global equity markets continued their gravity defying climb. With a healthy dose of end-of-month and end-of-quarter window dressing, many stocks recovered nicely from their March 16th lows and ralled back nicely. As is stands now, the S&P 500 is just about 1% off the highs set back on Feb 18th.
The fly in the ointment of the global economic recovery continues to be risking energy prices. Crude oil prices got out to a 30-month high and was up nearly 2.5% for the week and up 27% from a year ago. I'm holding a small amount of ETF USO as an energy price hedge but overall i'm underinvested in energy.
My week in currencies was less than spectacular. I reversed my short in USD/JPY and went long on Sunday evening. I took a small profit on the long rather than letting it run which was clearly a mistake since I could have picked up abou 250 pips had I just stuck with it. Also, I manually closed out some losing trades in Sunday gap trader DCT. So overall, I was not in good trading form with this account and as a result Megadroid Live lost about on half of 1% on the week.
As for the robots, the week's winner was Atipaq Full Portfolio which picked up about 2.5% on the week. Even better, it went out with about 318 pips in open profits on a trio of NZD/USD long trades!
Every other live acount was down so let's get through them quickly.
Atinalla No1 Live lost about 1% for the week but went out long EUR/USD with an open profit of about 75 pips.
FX-Regression sliced through its recent profits losing about 4% for the week and went out down -1.77% year to date. Now that the quarter is over, I need to do a live / back-test consistency check. Perhaps I can get that out tomorrow.
Atinalla FE was idle for the week.
Atinalla No3 lost about 1.8% on the week, but went into the weekend with 74 pips in open profits.
Atinalla No4 lost about 0.8% for the week and seems doomed to continue to lose money.
Demo account COATL EUR Centered Portfolio but went out with about -451 pips in open losses.
Finally a quick note to my friend JT since his blog no longer accepts comments. The Zulu platform encourages unsound trading tactics and all the newbie users are drawn to these signal providers like bees to honey. Eventually, the provider goes off the cliff and takes down all the newbie users and takes away their money. I should know since I was once one of them.
That's it for now. Enjoy your weekend and get some rest.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteThank you for another great update :o) I just wanted to take the chance to remind you about the fact that Asirikuy portfolios will ALL go into draw down periods which will seem very deep and difficult to trade through. Many portfolios are within a "good run" up until now but their historical results suggest that they may have losing periods of many months before recovering and reaching new equity highs. In the past I have gone through draw downs of even years on some systems so the focus should be extremely rational when dealing with systems and their statistics.
Atinalla No.4 is within a long draw down period as predicted by its statistics. In your particular case you should also run simulations for your particular setup (since you have removed some systems) to see how this affects your long term profit, draw down and WC targets. Remember that there is a good reason for Monte Carlo worst case criteria :o) Keep up the great work Chris !
Best Regards,
Daniel
Daniel-
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and for the comments.
You are absolutely right in that we have had great runs in some of these acounts - up over 20% each for the quarter. These accounts could easily go into many months of drawdown before reaching new highs, and that's the plain reality of trading them.
Thanks for the reminder and hopefully i'll have some time this weekend to get off the performance treadmill and get some fresh perspective.
Thanks again for the comments,
Chris