I will be distributing a client webinar later today about the considerations that must be addressed when taking a winter grain or soft trade when the contract spec physical deliverable is out of season.
I had a good conversation today with a client about taking a longer term viewpoint with respect to his performance metrics. He started out with 4 winners in a row, and after a few trades stopped out his W/L metric is currently about 65%. Which is much more what I would expect. It's easy to get too optimistic or too pessimistic about your trading performance. Think long haul.
During a webinar today, a newer client with two months of excellent paper trading metrics broached the topic of wanting to go live with his cocksure success. I laughed my ass off and he was left a bit speechless by my response. Words of wisdom ensued.
You shouldn't laugh at people who are paying you and then brag about it publicly. Words of wisdom I hope.
Webinar on intermarket correlation studies re: stock indices and precious metals due out later this week. Also chock full of words of wisdom which clients appear to appreciate.
I meant no disrespect to that client, and he certainly gets that. My point being that anyone who has either interviewed with me about becoming a client, or has been a client, knows full well how much I stress the direct positive correlation between a long term period of sustained commitment paper trading my system along with webinar interaction with me and that client's subsequent success with live capital. In fact, my strong feelings about this topic with some supporting notes are published in a white paper and distributed along with the other materials to a new client. Here's an excerpt from a note I received two days ago from a client who happens to be a successful CTA and who also became a client last year: "If anyone ever gives you crap about paper trading ad nasuem, just refer them to me. This is exactly why I do it and one of the things that I liked about our initial conversation."
Long term paper trading? Depends how you value your time. One of your selling points is that your spread trading strategies can be deployed with little capital and a retail account- you've mentioned clients with $25k clearing IB a few times. If I'm two months into something and it appears to be performing well, and I know why it should work then I'd risk part of $25k to find out whether it really works, and scale up from there... If there is a reason it won't work I'd rather find that out sooner rather than later. I can replace any money lost but not lost time.