i could not find anything out here about this trading room / these systems so thought I would start this thread. I am starting this thread to talk specifically about a trading room that i have joined called simple automatic trading. i am planning to document sort of a day in the life journal here. first off, let me set some context: - i am not with or affiliated with the company. - they have a referal program, but that is not why i am doing this. i don't want any referals. - i currently lease the system from them on monthly basis and have been trading the strategies for a little while now. - since the folks who run the trading room don't have a forum for members to discuss ideas, i am hoping that other members of the room will join this forum to share ideas, etc. - the results on the website are not real (as you can probably tell just by looking at them). I realized that they were not real when I got started, but assumed that i coud achieve at least half of what they were achieving. however, at this point i also don't really believe that even half is a realistic goal for various reasons (which i will discuss in this thread). - i trade the strategies exactly as they are supposed to be traded, i don't mess around with any of the parameters, turn it off because I am not feeling well, never do anything but let he systems trade. As additional context setting, let me say something else about the results on the website. According to the guy who runs the trading room (Greg) & leases / sells the systems for use with tradestation, the definition of those results is essentially as follows: Those results are the strategy results, they are not based on realistic slippage / commission. And, he says that he will always post the results, no matter if they are good or bad. Most importantly, he said that the only exception to just posting the results straight from the strategy performance reports is if he announces that a paricular system is not going to be traded that day (for whatever reason) - if he makes that announcement, then the trades for that system or systems will not be included in the official results at the end of the day. However, after being in the trading room for a little while, I now realize that the definition of the results posted online is actually a bit more complicated than that. I won't go into the complication here, but will just say that things are not that simple. but i will give an example - an example from today: I went to the website tonight and it shows that all the systems combined for todays trading made $2,800 on 10 contracts ($280 for those trading one contract). It shows that several of the systems did not trade at all and so it just shows that those systems made $0 for the day. Without going into detail on each and every one of the results listed, I will just pick one example and that example is the YM Ultra. The results on the website are showing that the system made $0, which would have to mean that it was not traded, but this is not accurate. That system got hammered hard today, taking several 29 point stop losses, and the slippage was unusually bad. So the system was a very big loser. but this does not show on the website at all. hhhmmm? So I am not sure how it is those YM Ultra results did not make it onto the website. The strategy performance reports show that the system lost $400 on a 10 contract basis ($40 on 1 contract) and I can tell you that with the slippage it experienced today, my real money results were significantly worse. Now in terms of the rule above where the vendor said that if he said that he was not trading a given system today then he would report the results as $0 in the official results - well if that rule was going to apply to the YM Ultra system, then it should have applied equally to all systems today because he said that he was not planning to trade for the day because he was very tired from the easter weekend. But, it appears that he decided that he would go ahead and post the results from some systems, but not others. i am not meaning to criticize, i just want to make the point that the results are not very accurate and I will probably explain further in another post exactly what is going on with results not being posted correctly (because there is more to the story). the positive things about the room and the systems are that the 2 moderators are very nice people and they are open to taking phone calls from the traders and taking questions in the room. i have had many long conversations about the systems with the trader who runs the room and he seems very knowledgeable. the woman who codes the systems is also in the room for a good part of the day. also, i think you can make money with these signals / this room, but it requires you to manually adjust some of the trades, especially because the slippage has been worse than I have ever experienced with any other system or trading room (i don't know why it is so bad). I am planning to trade just one or two of the strategies going forward and I will post my results out here and show a comparison of my results and the results that they post on their website and give some info on the reasons for the vast differences (there is more going on here than just slippage / commission differences, but I can explain later because there a lot of different scenarios that are leading to the inflated results that they have on the website). however, i already gave the example of today....either all of the results for all the systems should have been posted or none of them should have been posted based on the vendors own rule around what drives the results on the website. weird.
OK, updates for the day: The YM Ultra did trade today and did max out with maximum profit ($60 per contract before slippage / commission). It will be interesting to see if the vendor will put those restults on the website, since with yesterdays big losing day for this same YM Ultra system he put the results up at $0 as if it did not trade (see my previous post). How much do you want to bet that todays results do make it up on the website for the YM Ultra? Also, the other system that I traded today was the ES Woodpecker. OK, the woodpecker system was supposed to start its trading at 10:55am, but the vendor announced in the room at 9:45 that he had actually turned his system on at market open and that it had maxed out within the first few minutes of the trading day. Huh??? However, he did not explain why he did this, and even when asked by one of the members in the room, he just said that he wanted to try it out and see what would happen. But the important thing here is that none of us where told in advance that he was going to do this (which is not a problem as long as he does not count those results as official). And, since the system is not designed to trade until 10:55am - 3:50pm (unless it reaches maximum profit or loss for day), no one in the room could have done the same as him. So his results obviously should not be counted as the official results based on his own definition of the results on the website. For the traders in the trading room, our trades in the woodpecker actually hit maximum LOSS for the day at around 12:45pm and thus the system stopped trading. So it will be interesting to see which results the vendor will post on the website....his results from trading the system outside the rules of the system, or the results that all other traders recieved. He should post a loss of -$1850 (maximum loss x 10 contracts). However, I have this strange feeling that he is going to post a gain of $1800 (maximum gain x 10 contracts) since he was able to achieve this through an experiment. Just FYI, he has also done this a few other times with a few other systems that he also says that he trades differently from the trading room or that he decided to trade differently for a particular day. The members are told these things in hindsight....once he has already maxed out (have never heard him say that he experimented and reached maximum loss for the day). The problem with this is that if he want to, he could do this every single day and with every single system....he can just make a slight change to one parameter or to the time that he starts or finishes the system and then if all of the traders in the group take a loss, he can say that he did something different and came out with a profit his way. But if his way is not profitable, he does not even have to mention it to the group. Well, I should not judge until I see what he actually post out on his website, but after what happened yesterday with cherry picking the systems that did well after he said that he was not planning to trade at all for the day, I am a bit curious. I am going to be very interested in what results he will post up on the site tonight. I will return here tonight or tomorrow to comment then. Oh, and just fyi, there were a couple other systems that also had max profits for the day today and also he announced today that one of the systems is no longer going to be traded because the profit has been too small to justify continuing it.
My strong hunch is that eventually you will get sick and tired of the cherry picking. How much is this trading room charging you? Just curious.