I looked during the week, but could not find the Nadex Leaderboard anywhere. However, just today I found it on Twitter for the first three days. It looks like I was trading WAY to conservatively to have any hope of winning the Demo Trading Competition! Interesting, but as near as I can tell, no one who was in the Top Ten on Day 1 was still in the top Ten on Day 3 (or even Day 2). Also, the highest Net P&L on Day 3 was LESS than it was on either Day 1 OR Day 2, which I also find interesting. (My Net P&L grew every single day.) Valarie H. remained at the top on Day 2 and 3, even though she lost $86,115.75; Paul H. moved from 5th place to 2nd; Rudy N. moved from 7th place to 6th; and everyone else fell out of the top ten between the second and third days. With what I learned during this little escapade, I think I might have a chance of winning this thing if Nadex does it again next year. But, by that time, I might possibly be doing so well trading the live platform that I won’t care to participate in this kind of contest, God willing.
Again, I could not find the Nadex Demo Trading Challenge Leaderboard anywhere yesterday, so I emailed them today asking where I could access it, and they sent me the following information… Since I have yet to see where Nadex has publicized the names, I blocked them out, except that the first place finisher is the same person who was in third on Wednesday, and the individual who ranked second was in fourth (with the third place finisher being the same person who was previously tenth). I must therefore assume that the winners were traders who climbed steadily over the week via their skill set as opposed to all the others who dropped off Monday through Wednesday. Had I doubled my opening balance five times, from 10 to 20, to 40, to 80, to 160, to 320 thousand dollars, I could have won this competition. However, I do not like at-the-money or out-of-the-money contracts, because even if I have the direction right, the schizophrenic nature of currency rate price action and the frequency of trend reversals makes the statistical odds of being right 100% of the time too low for these types of trades. Consequently, it would have taken considerably more trades to pull it off. But, since there was a requirement of 25 trades minimum, making as many trades as necessary would not have been a problem. But unfortunately, since Nadex never provided a comprehensive leaderboard from one day to the next, I cannot access how my progress over the week compared to that of others.
The other day I wanted to purchase an EURUSD call contract with a 1.1980 strike price that would expire about five hours from the time of purchase, only to discover that the strike prices were spaced 40 pips apart! (See the image below on the right.) Why? In order to purchase contracts where the interval between the listed strike prices wasn’t so ridiculous, I had to go to contracts with expiry scheduled almost twice as far away—like around nine hours. (See the image above on the left.) That doesn't make any sense to me at all! Why not space them 20 pips apart in BOTH cases?
I don't have time to trade my NADEX live account right now (i.e., monitor positions) due to a new project I'm working on at the request of a loyal client from the past. So, I will continue to put NPP to the test by keeping track of its performance in my my virtual account until the project is completed.
This is getting boring and I think I've gotten a pretty good idea now how to optimize the selection process with respect to which Nadex binary option contracts I should purchase, so it will have to be something else that motivates me to add any more entries to this thread after this one...
Apparently, NADEX will be phasing out its old/original platform in about sixteen or seventeen days. Unfortunately, it looks like they just changed the new beta platform from what it was to all dark.
This is the third consecutive trade (if nothing goes horribly wrong in the next hour) where an out-of-the money contract purchased in accordance with the "Secret Sauce" Numerical Price Prediction methodology would have resulted in maybe a $70 reward on $30 of risk. So, after Christmas I'm going to start buying out-of-the money contracts to see what happens, and depending on the results, decide if I will continue this practice when I go back to trading my live account at the start of 2021.