Meta-Trader - 2012 Wrap-up

Welcome Back, Meta-Traders and Happy New Year!

As of this post, this blog is almost 3 years old so Happy Birthday wishes are in order as well.  As promised, here is my year-end wrap-up for the year 2012.

In some ways, I'll be happy to see this year come to an end since it was somewhat of a disaster for my Automated Forex Trading experiment.  The table below shows the status of each account, opening balance, closing balance, and disposition.

In 2012, every Forex account lost money and overall I lost about -26% for the year or about $5200 on a $20,000 starting balance.  In some ways, it was the mirror image of last year where nearly every Forex account made money and I turned in a +16.94% profit for the year.  For a recap of last year's Automated Forex Results, click here

Even more disturbing is that this year's losses exceed last years gains in quantity and percentage terms.  We had some spectacular gains the prior year and in one case my Atipaq Full Portfolio account was up almost 100%!  But that was just before it went into a draw down spiral which took it down -46% year to date and about -17.8% from the start.  That means my entire 3+ years of Automated Forex Trading has been a money losing enterprise and that doesn't make me very happy considering the amount of time I've spent on it.

Based on all that, I came pretty close to throwing in the towel on my Automated Forex career this year. But in my years of trading, I have had flat to negative years, and I take that all in stride.  So I have decided to give it another year and see how it goes.  Another sweeping negative year might shake me out completely.

As for equities, it was an excellent year where I beat the SP-500 by about 4 basis points in my cash account, and lagged by about  213 basis points in my retirement account.  This may not seem like much of an accomplishment considering the positive year we saw in the SP-500.  But I was never fully invested and typically about 30% in cash.  So I achieved my objective which is to generate positive returns with maximum possible protection of capital.  Based on this year's results, I'm well on my way to financial independence.  Now I just need to get the kids through college without wiping out my wealth!

As for 2013,  I'm going to go forward with these accounts:

• Atinalla No 1
• Atipaq Full Portfolio
• Atinalla No 3
• Sunqu Live
• Paquarin Demo

Let's see if we can get some positive returns from these systems.

That's all for now and Happy New Year!