Currensee

Lord Flasheart said:
at least with currensee the scalper has a chance.On zulu the eu spread is rarely less than 3 pips
Click to expand...

That may be a good thing in a way.
Scalping strats don't backtest well, even with high quality bid ask tick data (not cheap).
Even if the data is sound, the backtest platform may not actually resolve
tick level data properly anyway.

Thats what I mean about lack of info.
There is nothing mentioned at all about back or forwards testing,
previous track record, prior experience, zilch.
It would be a fair point to say they want to keep dev info to themselves
for obvious reasons, so its catch 22.

Thats why I say do it yourself.
Know and understand it inside out.
Even that is no guarantee, so why stack things against yourself with
the lack of detail these sites provide.
 
Hello Gentlemen. I am cautiously dipping a toe in the water. I'm here to answer any questions you may have regarding the Trade Leader Investment Program. To introduce myself, I am the VP of Client Services and Operations for Currensee. My primary job is to act as the advocate for our clients. I, along with the rest of the team, am keenly focused on client profitability. We're not looking to have clients for a month or two, we're hoping to be in this for the long haul as an alternative, but stable, investment for our clients. I'm happy to speak to some of the points I've seen in the thread so far.

The profile equity graphs do include open drawdown, however, keep in mind it's a relative open drawdown based on equity in the account. That said, I'll never say that there could not be a bug. Alphadude, if you wouldn't mind giving me some more data on who you were following and when I'd be happy to look into the specific Trade Leaders and incidents you're referring to. Ping me offline if you feel more comfortable. To be clear, I'm not here to prove anyone wrong or blindly defend our platform, if something is wrong I want to fix it.

Our system never allows backtesting of strategies for Trade Leaders. Every single Trade Leader does go through a vigorous vetting process prior to being placed in testing mode where we (Currensee) tests the strategy for profitability with real accounts and real money. If this testing mode goes well, it is only then that a Trade Leader is added to our Leader Board. This doesn't mean a Trade Leader will necessarily perform going forward, past performance is in no way an indication of what will happen in the future, but we want to make sure that 1 + 1 really does = 2 prior to offering a Trade Leader's strategy to our clients.

The last point that I want to talk through is the idea of underestimating followers. I think this is a great point. The #1 leading indicator of whether a follower makes money or not (and I'm *not* saying this is the case with any specific follower, this is a general comment based on all followers) is whether or not they exercise patience. All of our Trade Leaders are profitable, yet all of our Trade Leaders have losing days, weeks & even months. We find that upwards of 80% of relationships (Trade Leader to follower) that are over 60 days old are profitable. Clients who "jump" from one Trade Leader to another, however, will almost never win long-term. That said, I understand that patience can be a challenge. When I walk through client portfolios with them, however, and we look at the history of what a Trade Leader does in the days, weeks and months after a follower removes them, the client can often be seen kicking themselves. It's human nature to react and to often be emotional in our reactions, but we have to remember that this is business, and we can be our own worst enemies by not allowing an investment to play out.

OK, I think that's all for now, but I'm here and am happy to answer questions along the way as best I can.

Cheers,
mls
 
Marcie; first of all; we appreciate you coming here to clarify. will provide more details soon. (y)
 
http://www.currensee.com/files/docs/CurrenseeTradeLeaderSelection.pdf
Leader Selection - Top performance from top Forex traders | www.currensee.com
Currensee Trade Leader Profile - LIWWK.A

How long is your forward testing phase, sample size and so on?
The sticking point with me is still the lack of data.

All your signal providers surely have more than one years worth of data?
Even backtest results would be better than nothing.
I know backtesting is no guide to future performance, it will still give some idea
if the sample size and duration are large enough.
One year of data isn't enough to judge drawdown, potential curve fitting or robustness.

Fair enough the simplified version of stats may be enough for most.
Even if you don't make it a strict requirement of entry, I really do think you
should let your TL's give as much info as they can about their strategy
performance, even if its tucked away, example below.

Summary of the following:
Total Net Profit
Gross Profit
Gross Loss
Commission
Profit Factor
Cumulative Profit
Max. Drawdown
Sharpe Ratio
Start Date
End Date

Total # of Trades
Percent Profitable
# of Winning Trades
# of Losing Trades
Average Trade
Average Winning Trade
Average Losing Trade
Ratio avg. Win / avg. Loss

Max. conseq. Winners
Max. conseq. Losers
Largest Winning Trade
Largest Losing Trade
# of Trades per Day
Avg. Time in Market
Avg. Bars in Trade
Profit per Month
Max. Time to Recover
Average MAE
Average MFE
Average ETD

Breakdowns of following results:
Annual
Daily
Day of week
Hour of day
Monthly
Weekly

Throw in graph plots of :
Cumulative profit
Daily net profit
Distribution
Drawdown
Entry efficiency
Exit efficiency
MAE
MFE
Monthly net profit
Total efficiency
Trades profit / loss
Weekly net profit

For me, thats the kind of stuff that is missing.
A lot of it may not be essential.
It may even be overkill, if its avaiable, it does no harm though.
To be fair you do seem a lot more professional than other outfits of this type.

Credit where credit is due.
Thanks for posting.
 
Hi Marcie

looks like your going to be busy on here. I have a couple of questions.

Most of your top performers seem to have a hit rate of 98%,why is this? They cannot be traders if they are just waiting for the market to go right for them,sooner or later there will be a big drawdown.

How is the drawdown calculated, you say it is calculated as a % from the account of the signal provider.This can be extremely misleading if I read things correctly. If I have an account with £100,000 in it and use micro lots,then I would have to lose many 1000s of pips before I lose 1% of my account. on zulu it is calculated as a drawdown based on leverage of 100:1.

If I wanted to join you guys can I use my zulu account live or demo and for how long a period do you want to see?

Thanks and welcome
 
Lord Flasheart said:
How is the drawdown calculated, you say it is calculated as a % from the account of the signal provider.This can be extremely misleading if I read things correctly. If I have an account with £100,000 in it and use micro lots,then I would have to lose many 1000s of pips before I lose 1% of my account. on zulu it is calculated as a drawdown based on leverage of 100:1.
Click to expand...

Marcie can follow-up on this, but if you allocate say $5000 to a TL then the trades done by that TL will be scaled to your $5000. That means your performance on that allocation would closely match (given execution variance) the performance of the TL, even if they are trading $100k. As a result, you want to see how the TL is doing in their own account, no in some hypothetical maxed leverage situation.
 
Liquid validity said:
http://www.currensee.com/files/docs/CurrenseeTradeLeaderSelection.pdf
Leader Selection - Top performance from top Forex traders | www.currensee.com
Currensee Trade Leader Profile - LIWWK.A

How long is your forward testing phase, sample size and so on?
The sticking point with me is still the lack of data.

All your signal providers surely have more than one years worth of data?
Even backtest results would be better than nothing.
I know backtesting is no guide to future performance, it will still give some idea
if the sample size and duration are large enough.
One year of data isn't enough to judge drawdown, potential curve fitting or robustness.

Fair enough the simplified version of stats may be enough for most.
Even if you don't make it a strict requirement of entry, I really do think you
should let your TL's give as much info as they can about their strategy
performance, even if its tucked away, example below.

Summary of the following:
Total Net Profit
Gross Profit
Gross Loss
Commission
Profit Factor
Cumulative Profit
Max. Drawdown
Sharpe Ratio
Start Date
End Date

Total # of Trades
Percent Profitable
# of Winning Trades
# of Losing Trades
Average Trade
Average Winning Trade
Average Losing Trade
Ratio avg. Win / avg. Loss

Max. conseq. Winners
Max. conseq. Losers
Largest Winning Trade
Largest Losing Trade
# of Trades per Day
Avg. Time in Market
Avg. Bars in Trade
Profit per Month
Max. Time to Recover
Average MAE
Average MFE
Average ETD

Breakdowns of following results:
Annual
Daily
Day of week
Hour of day
Monthly
Weekly

Throw in graph plots of :
Cumulative profit
Daily net profit
Distribution
Drawdown
Entry efficiency
Exit efficiency
MAE
MFE
Monthly net profit
Total efficiency
Trades profit / loss
Weekly net profit

For me, thats the kind of stuff that is missing.
A lot of it may not be essential.
It may even be overkill, if its avaiable, it does no harm though.
To be fair you do seem a lot more professional than other outfits of this type.

Credit where credit is due.
Thanks for posting.
Click to expand...

Im really lost as to what you expect to see from these companies. They have not been in business that long and this is high risk trading we are talking about. Why on earth would knowing the entry efficiency help you make a decision on following or not. Forward testing?,you can see how long they have been live for.
any system that or ea that has been working for 5 years is just as likely to fail as one that has been working for 12 m Months. I could never see you following one of these guys. My father in law recently put his money into a hedge fund has has averaged 4% for the last 15 years. His initial investment is now 1/2 of what it was
when he started. He spent month analysis the figures before he went in. The top performer in zulu hits 20% a month. Risk can also be limited. For the last 6 months I have set up a demo account following some of zulus performers and made 5 out of 6 for about 50% overall.
I think the way you are thinking you will always find a reason not to invest and time may well prove you right,but IMHO the advantages may out weigh the risks.
just to add,I do no not have any funds following on either sight but have accounts with zulu
 
MarcieAtCurrensee said:
Hello Gentlemen. I am cautiously dipping a toe in the water. I'm here to answer any questions you may have regarding the Trade Leader Investment Program. To introduce myself, I am the VP of Client Services and Operations for Currensee. My primary job is to act as the advocate for our clients. I, along with the rest of the team, am keenly focused on client profitability. We're not looking to have clients for a month or two, we're hoping to be in this for the long haul as an alternative, but stable, investment for our clients. I'm happy to speak to some of the points I've seen in the thread so far.

The profile equity graphs do include open drawdown, however, keep in mind it's a relative open drawdown based on equity in the account. That said, I'll never say that there could not be a bug. Alphadude, if you wouldn't mind giving me some more data on who you were following and when I'd be happy to look into the specific Trade Leaders and incidents you're referring to. Ping me offline if you feel more comfortable. To be clear, I'm not here to prove anyone wrong or blindly defend our platform, if something is wrong I want to fix it.

Our system never allows backtesting of strategies for Trade Leaders. Every single Trade Leader does go through a vigorous vetting process prior to being placed in testing mode where we (Currensee) tests the strategy for profitability with real accounts and real money. If this testing mode goes well, it is only then that a Trade Leader is added to our Leader Board. This doesn't mean a Trade Leader will necessarily perform going forward, past performance is in no way an indication of what will happen in the future, but we want to make sure that 1 + 1 really does = 2 prior to offering a Trade Leader's strategy to our clients.

The last point that I want to talk through is the idea of underestimating followers. I think this is a great point. The #1 leading indicator of whether a follower makes money or not (and I'm *not* saying this is the case with any specific follower, this is a general comment based on all followers) is whether or not they exercise patience. All of our Trade Leaders are profitable, yet all of our Trade Leaders have losing days, weeks & even months. We find that upwards of 80% of relationships (Trade Leader to follower) that are over 60 days old are profitable. Clients who "jump" from one Trade Leader to another, however, will almost never win long-term. That said, I understand that patience can be a challenge. When I walk through client portfolios with them, however, and we look at the history of what a Trade Leader does in the days, weeks and months after a follower removes them, the client can often be seen kicking themselves. It's human nature to react and to often be emotional in our reactions, but we have to remember that this is business, and we can be our own worst enemies by not allowing an investment to play out.

OK, I think that's all for now, but I'm here and am happy to answer questions along the way as best I can.

Cheers,
mls
Click to expand...


It's a shame your rigorous vetting procedures didn't extend to your partners. You have been promoting Mike Baghdady and his fake claim of being world trading champion. Do you know the damage this will do to your credibility?

Webinar Tomorrow: Trade The New York Session Live with Mike Baghdady | Invest Together | Currensee's Investing Blog
 
Rhody Trader said:
Marcie can follow-up on this, but if you allocate say $5000 to a TL then the trades done by that TL will be scaled to your $5000. That means your performance on that allocation would closely match (given execution variance) the performance of the TL, even if they are trading $100k. As a result, you want to see how the TL is doing in their own account, no in some hypothetical maxed leverage situation.
Click to expand...

so my point is that if I am a trade leader and have £100,000 in my account and trade microlots,then the DD is based on my 100k which would leave the way for those wanting to have 98% hit rate free to do so as a 1000 pip dd would be nothing
 
Broketurtle said:
It's a shame your rigorous vetting procedures didn't extend to your partners. You have been promoting Mike Baghdady and his fake claim of being world trading champion. Do you know the damage this will do to your credibility?

Webinar Tomorrow: Trade The New York Session Live with Mike Baghdady | Invest Together | Currensee's Investing Blog
Click to expand...

judging from the webinar time (Sept 2010); it happened just after the phony turtle experiment started.

to be fair; Baghdady has fooled many people and institutions; including BBC, CNN and SkyNews, FX Street..etc.

he claimed to be millionaire trader, world champion, lord McDaddy, lord Sugar of trading, punched staff, called them coachroaches and morons, didn't pay bills.., even claimed to be *trading live* in the fx street webinars.... not a single trade in years... the list goes on.... I beleive his legacy has ended. If any institution partner with Baghdady in the foreseeable future; I will no doubt put them in the dumb list.
 
Broketurtle said:
It's a shame your rigorous vetting procedures didn't extend to your partners. You have been promoting Mike Baghdady and his fake claim of being world trading champion. Do you know the damage this will do to your credibility?

Webinar Tomorrow: Trade The New York Session Live with Mike Baghdady | Invest Together | Currensee's Investing Blog
Click to expand...


wow,is this the case Marcie, as the new poster has said,if you are promoting MB then you will hit resistance you wont believe. You need to publish an explanation for this quickly. I dont suppose you looked at his accounts or checked the world trading champion claim did you,etc,etc,etc
 
Lord Flasheart said:
Im really lost as to what you expect to see from these companies. They have not been in business that long and this is high risk trading we are talking about. Why on earth would knowing the entry efficiency help you make a decision on following or not. Forward testing?,you can see how long they have been live for.
any system that or ea that has been working for 5 years is just as likely to fail as one that has been working for 12 m Months. I could never see you following one of these guys. My father in law recently put his money into a hedge fund has has averaged 4% for the last 15 years. His initial investment is now 1/2 of what it was
when he started. He spent month analysis the figures before he went in. The top performer in zulu hits 20% a month. Risk can also be limited. For the last 6 months I have set up a demo account following some of zulus performers and made 5 out of 6 for about 50% overall.
I think the way you are thinking you will always find a reason not to invest and time may well prove you right,but IMHO the advantages may out weigh the risks.
just to add,I do no not have any funds following on either sight but have accounts with zulu
Click to expand...

:) Fair points.
Totally agree with the bold highlights :cheesy:
As for all the other performance stats, I did say they aren't essential and probably overkill.
They are also the closest you will ever get to looking under the hood of the
strategy you are putting your money into.

Otherwise, for me personally its just pin the tail on the donkey,
totally in the dark.
If thats the case, you would be better flipping a coin at each session open.

Anyway, I'm at risk of derailing this thread, and I have no genuine interest so no more from me.
 
Wow! Thanks for the warm welcome. Let's see what I can do to answer some questions..

To tackle the question of how long our testing lasts. This really depends on the amount of verifiable history we have on a potential Trade Leader. For starters, the history of each Trade Leader account/strategy is noted on the Leader Board. This is not necessarily the amount of time the particular trader has been trading, but is instead the live trade history available on the actual account/strategy that is available to follow. So, for instance, Joiny Jiang's has 3 years, 1 month; Adantia's account has 2 years 4 months, Janus Trading has 2 years 1 month, etc., In order to understand the trader we'll often look at older accounts in order to get a full view of drawdown, risk, etc., however, keep in mind that we're not integrated with a good deal of proprietary trading-system (read: non-MT4) brokers so we can't use those actual accounts for integration purposes. We're working on integrating with some new brokers using API's that have been developed, but we're not there yet, so we use the history that we have and let followers make their choices. We don't use backtesting because it's really something we don't believe in. We also don't believe in speculation. No two days in history have ever happened exactly the same way, let alone spans of time. We'd rather show real results on real account and call it a day. Now, that said, I'm not going to say we're perfect and that there is no opportunity for advancement or improvement. We are going to be releasing a new version of the website later this year, likely in late summer/early fall that will provide more data regarding Trade Leader. Some of the points that Liquid Validity is requesting will be included, however, not one to over-promise and under-deliver, many of these pieces of data will not. We do feel confident that the information available, with a few exceptions, is enough information to make an informed decision. Profile graphs and tables are fully interactive, so followers can choose to drill down to identify information regarding drawdowns over time, time to recover, etc., Trades per day, targets, etc., are typically part of each Trade Leader's bio, but we'll be making some of this information more table-based and easier to find in the future.

So let's talk about trade scaling. If a Trade Leader has an account of, say, $100K and the minimum to follow the Trade Leader is $10,000, then for each 0.10 lot trade that is taken by the Trade Leader the follower will receive a micro-lot sized trade - 0.01. The beauty of the Currensee platform is that we not only mirror trades, but also risk. The goal is that a Trade Leader's performance and risk will both be emulated in a follower's account. If there is a potential Trade Leader trading in a $100K account but only trading micro-lots, the reality is that they're probably not an ideal trader for Currensee because we'd have to set the minimum capital to follow so high that the investment would likely not be worthwhile for many investors. Similarly, leverage used is also emulated - if a Trade Leader trades at 10:1 then the trade is executed using 10:1 leverage in the follower account*. These are all factors that go into choosing whether Currensee is the right platform for a potential Trade Leader and whether a Trade Leader is right for us.

Someone did mention something about a 98% "hit rate".. can you clarify what you're referring to? Most of our Trade Leader have a Win% in the 70-70% range and a percent days losing in the 25-40% range. We do have Trade Leaders who manage risk extremely well and hold positions until the market comes back - often using hedging to recoup losses along the way. That said, I'm happy to speak to the "hit rate" point, I just don't understand it.

Now let's talk about Mike Baghdady and other partners that we've had along the way. This was an activity that was done via our Social Network before the Trade Leader program had even launched. This was a webinar that we co-hosted back in 2010, so I don't want to get too far down a rabbit hole on it. I will recommend to our Marketing team that the blog post be removed as to not cause confusion regarding current activities.

So, gentlemen, did I miss anything? If so please let me know, I'll do my best to answer what I can.

Cheers,
mls

* Trade Followers do have the opportunity to increase or decrease risk on the account at the Trade Leader level, so out-of-the-box leverage is the same, but can be higher or lower at the Trade Follower's discretion. If a follower decides he like a Trade Leader's overall style but thinks he's too risky he can choose to leaver down (changing leverage to, say, 50% of Trade Leader's leverage); if he decides he likes a Trade Leader but thinks he's too conservative he can increase leverage use to 200%, etc.,
 
You were still involved with Baghdady in 2011. What does this say about your vetting? If you couldn't spot him how are you going to spot a scam signal provider.
 
23 June 2011 to be precise if you search you own website for 'The end of QE2'. By that point he had filed for bankruptcy, been exposed on several forums and was about to begin his now infamous turtles program yet you were promoting him as a world leading expert. Are you not embarrassed about this?
 
hi Marcie,

i have a question regarding the equity curve of trade leaders.

does the equity curve reflect total equity (closed positions + open positions) marked to market; or just closed positions?

from my experience following some TL in the past; i have noticed that the equity curve does not reflect open positions.

in the next day i will pick a sample from Currensee TL and post the chart here for discussion.
 
Broketurtle said:
23 June 2011 to be precise if you search you own website for 'The end of QE2'. By that point he had filed for bankruptcy, been exposed on several forums and was about to begin his now infamous turtles program yet you were promoting him as a world leading expert. Are you not embarrassed about this?
Click to expand...

That was a panel discussion which I actually moderated - or tried to at least. The guys really got going at a couple of points. :LOL:
 
Rhody Trader said:
That was a panel discussion which I actually moderated - or tried to at least. The guys really got going at a couple of points. :LOL:
Click to expand...

You think that's bad? You should have been moderating his last webinar on Fxstreet, it was infiltrated by a bunch of small cockroaches who criticised the great man and even had the cheek to publish details of his bankruptcy filing.
 
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