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Statements: Accounts: Forums: Brokers: Stuff: The
mini fund Disclosures: Forex
risk
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June 30, 2007 It's been a long haul for us. Automating forex is one of the most difficult things I've done. Saying that. We've been running live a year now, without to much trouble. The evidence that our systems are working is compelling. We're making a few final changes, and then we'll probably go live slowly for clients. I reckon
another two or three months and we'll open the doors. As soon as I come
back from Trinidad.
September 11, 2006 We're starting to move on the trading accounts. The first new minis are opening end of this month if all goes well. The EA's
at this point in time is rock solid, even if we are about 50% down on
target. The markets haven't been moving much, but we are constantly banking
money. The live statement will give you an idea of the performance. We're
on about 0.44% a day. Still enough to make very serious money over the
next decade or so. However I'm expecting to have a period of over performance
sometime in the future. February 25, 2006 I spent the week chasing electricity around. The local utility just can't supply enough, so they cut power to areas to prevent a total blackout. Luckily I have computers in different areas so I could always keep one running. Word is it's not going to get any better. It is probably time to leave South Africa. This is just the first symptoms of a collapsing infrastructure. The roads aren't so far behind. So if I suddenly
disappear, the chances are I've gone somewhere, but I'll have to do a
trip to a rig to fund it. That will take me out of the loop for six weeks.
Luckily everything is automated so it will keep going and Alan will chase
the electricty for us... January 22, 2006 I'm quite astounded to find the EA works on the mini account. Those we can trade with $1000. It's opened up the whole of South Africa to me. I've already been asked a few times if we're taking in more people. So far I've kept the brakes on, but it's getting close to the time to let this pick up speed. At $1000 there isn't much risk for people. Quite frankly in a few years the difference between $1000 start-up and $10 000 is completely academic. January 19, 2006 Two months later I guess…. Portfolios are cruising along. Oanda is up 150% since September. Whish I had more money in there. December was rough for the automated system, but what the heck. It's not like we lost money....well, little bit. Turnover was way down for December and most of Jan. I suppose that could be expected in thin markets. Couldn't really catch up on low turnover, but it seems ok. So now all we do is wait. Let the portfolio's build… Question
is, where to wait? Tropical island perhaps...? November 19, 2005 We had a rough week. Lost 4 hours of trading on power failures alone. Got flat footed badly on our direction, but a few whipsaws sorted that out eventually. I suppose if any this was a bad week, but we ended up 2.5%. Usually when this happens we can expect a quick recovery. I reckon we'll be back on track by Tuesday. But daily income is definitely down for some reason. Can be a specific market behavior and we have recovered a lot of that on Friday. Manual portfolio fared a lot better at 10% for the week. But what a pain to trade. I'll automate Oanda early next year I think. I've been getting flack on the Oanda forum for starting a forex business that fall's outside the broker/portfolio business model. It's fashionable to bash anybody that even remotely appears to be doing that. Alpari claims to have about 10 000 clients. Oanda's website is busier. By my calculations there are somewhere between 60 000 to 100 000 people trying to solve the forex problem. People who do figure out forex generally pay a very high price for it. You have to have to have the margin calls and make the mistakes to learn. That's how we learned to ride bikes. Grazed knees. You have to know what the mistakes are to avoid them. The people that don't get it are the one's that don't get back up. It is a really difficult problem to solve and takes years of mistakes to get it. So by the time you have forex figured it's a good bet your resources are strained. There is so much intellectual capital flowing into forex that somebody will automate forex. And he will offer his services to those that haven't been able to so he can get a good start. Its business waiting to happen because it solves a problem for both side of the fence. And it's going to happen. No question about it. People better get used to it. It's also for the first time become technologically possible for me to trade fully automated in an account or accounts that the owner has complete control off. I think investing as we know it is about to change. Sure, there will be failures along the way. People are going to get hurt, but somewhere someone will quietly gain a word of mouth client base despite all the forum noise. I reckon within 10 years the new wealthy elite of the world will emerge from this arena. What the pleb's who's been harassing me don't realise is their mindset excludes them from participating. They are doomed to poverty. Well, I suppose we need somebody to do the work that makes the world go round. My dustbin needs cleaning. So if you see somebody claim success in forex. Don't nuke him on principle. He might be the guy that can give you the lifestyle you're striving for. It's going to happen. All the elements are in place. Investigate every opportunity you can. A good starting
criterion is that if somebody's been on a forum for two year upwards you
can start taking them seriously. You don't struggle with a problem for
two years and not learn a thing or two. Don't fall for the one post wonders.
And don't lend you're ears out those making the most noise. It seems the
less people know about forex, the more vocal they are. November 6, 2005 The portfolios are doing so well at the moment. I'm still averaging 20% a month on both the automated and manual version. We're hardly using any margin and the draw down so far has been 0.03%. I'm going
to keep it at this pace for another six months and if I don't run into
a major problem I'll dial in more performance. Again a huge move on a Friday and another nice clean position. Let's see if this one sticks. October 15, 2005 Things are going well, despite a lack lustre market. We haven't had any serious market movement for over 30 days now. That's a bit unusual. When we finally do get direction it will arrive hard and fast. Both the manual and automated systems will love that. In the meantime my trading consists mainly out of trying to position for the next major move. I spent the entire week changing positions again and again and again with a net result of 5% on both manual and automated systems. It's frustrating, but at least I'm not losing money while I wait. My current exposure is long Eur/Usd and the speed of the move late Friday helped to build a nice clean position. October 8, 2005 We're in the final testing phases. With the new trade sizes from Interbankfx our last problem was solved. I'm up 10% on the manual portfolio for the week. |
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