Welcome back Meta-Traders and Happy New Year!As of today's post, this blog is now 2 years old so Happy Birthday wishes are in order as well. Blogging has allowed me to connect with like-minded people from around the world. Through blogging I was introduced to MetaTrader 4 and to Daniel Fernandez from Asirikuy whose work has produced the bulk of my results.
It was a wild year in financial markets and foreign exchange as well. The world economy is still struggling to recover from a financial crisis and despite an incredibly easy US Federal Reserve, equity markets struggled as well with the S&P 500 losing a fraction of 1% on the year. But with a dividend yield of about 2.4% and government bonds yielding almost nothing, equities continue to be the place to be versus bonds and cash. What about Forex, that's why you are reading this blog, right?
The table on the left shows my live results for the year. The numbers in the current column may not agree with current account balances because I have subtracted out recent deposits and deposit bonuses to reach a before and after number. As you can see, I made money in all but one account and my overall return was 16.94% which beat the S&P 500 by almost 14%, even considering dividends!
It is important to note a good part of the returns are due to deposit bonuses. For example with Atipaq Full Portfolio, I started with $2000, then put $2100 to work from deposit bonus, and the rest was the result of trading profits and pip rebates paid by the referring broker. It's important to note because deposit bonuses help in the account building stage, but will not help further once I am fully invested. Now let's go through each account.
Atinalla #1 had an excellent year returning about 27.6%. The bulk of the returns were made in January of 2011 and has since held onto its gains which says something for the robustness of the 3 embedded systems.
Atipaq Full Portfolio was the star performer of the year returning a stunning 59.5%. This portfolio had a rough period during August drawing down from being up almost 67% to almost 19%. I don't mind draw down so much when its giving back profits versus when it cuts into the initial investment. That's why its psychologically important to survive the initial account draw down since I would probably cut the loss on any account once its exceeds a 20% loss from the initial start up.
Megadroid Live had a pretty decent year, up about 9.62% for the year. I added FX-Regression USD/CAD and USD/CHF to the account in early December to goose the returns. While the account is still down slightly since opening, note that I started the year down about 10%, so it had a decent recovery off the lows.
FX-Regression Live returned about 4.7% for the year. Most of this profit was due to pip-rebates and profits from actual trading were close to nil. This account was up as much as 20% and down as much as 15%. Clearly this system needs additional work but has survived one year of live trading which is somewhat of an accomplishment.
Atinalla FE was another case where the bulk of the profits came from a deposit bonus and the actual system had a slightly negative return. I have stopped trading this system and will likely switch to Sunqu in 2012.
Atinalla #3 was another case where the profits came from the deposit bonus and the actual return for the system was slightly negative. I have made some adjustments to this account and will continue to trade it live in 2012.
Atinalla Custom was my only losing account. I started this account trading Atinalla #4 from Asirikuy, but had a number of problems due to an incorrectly high starting balance. Also, I had poor performance from Sapaq and God's Gift ATR. As of now, I am running a subset of the systems in Atinalla #4 and the account is already starting to recover.
Overall, it was an excellent year and its clear that the deposit bonus and pip rebates made the difference in many cases. My overall performance did not meet my 30% to 60% target, but its possible that my goal was not attainable. Of course, the best accounts made those targets, but you can never tell in advance which system will perform best. That's why its important to have a good mix of systems each with a positive expectation.
That's all for now, enjoy your New Year's celebration and i'll see you back in 2012.
One more thing I forgot to mention - I have never been paid any pip rebates on my FXDD accounts. I have followed up with Trader's Choice FX and sent them a nasty gram on Friday when the year came and went without a single penny in bonus payments. According to my calculations, I traded about 20 full-size lots over the year between my 2 accounts and at $5 per full-size lot, that's about $100 in pip rebates that I am due. I'm going to give them to the end of the 1st week of January to reply, then I might have to take my dispute to the blog. We'll see what happens ..
ReplyDeleteCorrection - I got an e-mail from Trader's Choice FX late Friday which I didn't read until late Saturday. I don't agree with all of their numbers, but it looks like I will be paid by the end of January which should help my 2012 returns. Take care all.
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