Looking at the title of this blog you may be thinking that last week was meltdown, and to be honest it was! It pretty much wiped out any earnings I had.
I started with jumping back into Best Market Chances hopping that it stabilized. Bad mistake - $2500 gone in one day. I am so sad about this one - I really liked it and the developer - Helmut Fuchs. I forgave it two long strings of losses. I will back off for a while to see if performance gets back on track. I have stopped subscription in the mean while.
Have Fun is my other darling. However, I have missed a lot of trades with it because of International Brokers / Trade Bullet set up I have been using. However, for some reason lately the set up missing trades. I have been working with Francis - Trade Bullet's technical support to resolve the issues; however, I can not make it work. I do not know if it is me of software, but if you look at the log of the trades with have fun, you will see that lately most of the trades did not go through.
I have convinced myself that I can not make the client side solution work. It also does not help that there are too many parties involved and at every stage something can go wrong - the system vendor, c2, trade bullet, trade station, communication link, the international broker's server. The failure can occur at every stage and then you are left troubleshooting the entire chain. So, I have shut down Trade Bullet and Tradestation and opened OpenECry. This is one solution that reduces number of places where things go wrong. C2 should be sending data to OpenECry with no intermediaries. So now I am ready...
This brings me to the last point. Have Fun has suffered 3 consecutive losses. Normally, it would not be a problem; however, in this case it is. According to C2 stats, win/loss ratio for this system is 75%. Since the system is only trading 4 times per month we should not be seeing 3 consecutive losses very often (less then once every 16 months). In other words, this should be a very rare event. I also did not like the last trade was handled. System was profitable at least twice during this period however vendor went for extremely risky move of leaving the system open overnight. Since the system trades Russel index futures, large overnight moves are possible. Because this system is discretionary, I am afraid that the previous two losses clouded the vendors judgment wanting to bring home a big win, but instead resulting in the loss.
At this point I am set up to trade however, I do not have any system to trade!
Looking at the history I see a lot of systems that blew up. At this point I do not feel that by looking at a previous performance it is very likely to pick out a system that will not blow up.
Gold Survivor $10k portfolio, Ruby look like the blew up. DeltaHedge, Index Spreads are dying. The only one which is still ok is Dgmma and Gold Survivor Energy. This means that only 2 systems out of twelve did not blew up in the last 8 month of me using c2. This is very scary.
Past returns does not guaranty future success. I have found this to be true in simulated results (Beware of Fidelity / Wealth Lab - I lost a lot of money trying to make that work too). It is now turning out to be true in real life trading. If you playing with your only money please stop - this is not the place for you!
