They found a new System with this world Cups to avoid NFA Regulation. Because they say"it is just your Broker assisting you to follow" they do not Need to stick to NFA rules and they can advertise what ever they want. For example they can Close the old loosing accounts from last year and open a fresh new ones. The "winners" from Worldcup are all students from Larry Richard Williams who sends all his students to the world Cup. This again is an Advertising strategy from Larry Richard Williams to market his $5000+++ courses to the broader public (if you like to know how to trade like world Cup winners go to Larry). For this reason they all trade the "Larry Richard Williams seasonal spread System" in Worldcup. If you Google it you can find how the Systems works and you can easily find the link to the Worldcup trades ;-)
trade2live, I am not going to start a discussion here but look into the big CTA databases like Barkley hedge or others. If you find a "CTA" claiming to run a 50 K account ask for the DDocs and you will discover that the 50 K account is not a segregated CTA account because it is simply not possible to run a segregated account with only 50 k. What he will offer to you is a pooled CPO. Most real CTA start from 1 to 5 Mios. and it is absolutly unrealistic to find a segregated CTA for a 10 k account. Anyhow you will end up at collective2 or Worldcup advisors with such amounts of Money and you will discover that the Performance with which they advertise Looks better than the Performance on your account. Hope this could help you.
I am, of course, talking of pooled accounts or funds. No one can run a widely diversified futures program on $10,000. Saxon offer investment in a pooled fund for $50,000 minimum. Other well known and long lasting CTAs offer various different routes to invest in pooled funds with small amounts of money. Some, like Transtrend, eschew this route and have a minimum of $250,000.
OK maybe I am missing something, but I have read and seen on IASG etc that some CTA's have small min. I don't think all these are CPO's (i.e pooled money), actually they are often new emerging CTA's so I doubt they can go the CPO route, so it must be a managed account. And that means they are not a diversified program, I guess it's fair to say many CTA 's don't run a widely diversified program, those that do are generally trend followers and big macro funds, but there are CTA's focused on a few markets and who are short term traders, hence making the smaller min. possible.
when I started out as a stockbroker, I was not well connected. Never went to an Ivy League School, didn't belong to any good Country Clubs. But I found, if you got a Series 3, you could sell managed accounts run by CTA's to people that wanted to gamble a little. And that was more my style. When you got to drinking beer, eating pizza (or smoking pot) with these guys, watching the game, you found out just how unhappy they were with their life, their wife, and their job and family. We had a big guy that had a stable of CTA's. You went to the big guy and checked out the returns (and most importantly for a broker, because we got paid on the commissions, how often he traded.) And then went out and tried to sell managed accounts with 25k minimum (and nobody ever invested more than the minimum.) Not a single one of those managed accounts I ever sold (and some of them were managed by some big names who you might still remember) ever made money. The only relief I got was when one of my former older clients would die, and I could finally show up at one of his nephew's bar mitzvahs.
the CTA's were not frustrated, the customers were one customer closed his account after the CTA went all in on silver and silver went limiit up. He walked away with enough to pay off his big house. but everybody else closed out at a loss, or their account was auto closed when the fund hit a 50% drawdown, as was agreed upon before they got in one guy was a retired farmer who liked to fade the fund when it went long corn no, no CTA consistently made money. They would be up 70% and then go on a losing streak. Sometimes they would voluntarily close the fund before they hit the mandantory close at the 50% drawdown mark. please show me any CTA that has a winning record over the last ten years
pending the strategy, you can look at Barclays Hedge, some very reputable CTA have low draw downs and decent returns..
I am more concerned about how the clients performed rather than the CTA. That's oldtimers point also. surf