Who do you choose as your Zulutrade Signal Provider?
Once you set in Zulutrade the search of the signal providers, it comes down to which of these you may be interested in. To do this, there are some useful analysis tools provided by Zulutrade.
Starting from the beginning (as I like to do), before even going into the details of the individual signal provider that offers his operativity through Zulutrade, we have a table that quickly gives you some important guidelines to help you eliminate immediately the Zulutrade signal providers who don’t respond to the characteristics you are looking for.
If you want to have good setting on your Zulutrade account, you better understand and follow each parameter that Zulutrade itself provides.
The interest data insert in this table are:
- 1st column: in this first column there are a lot on information: User and photo, placement in the Zulutrade ranking, symbol of the broker with whom is working, flag of the country of origin, and the symbol of a dollar (depending on the color of the dollar, we understand if the provider is working with real money on his own account, or with virtual money in a demo, or with a demo connected to a real account). You can find many of these info simply by positioning your cursor over the point of interest, and Zulutrade will bring up an explanatory box.
User and photo are used basically to make you identify the Zulutrade signal provider.
The placement in the Zulutrade ranking gives you an idea (sometimes to strongly deny) of the trader validity (as already mentioned, is not always true that the first signal providers in the ranking are better, in fact, sometimes the way they operate may put your account into unnecessary risk).
The symbol of the broker account the provider in working with, gives a useful indication of the ability to replicate the signals through Zulutrade without having problems, because is probable that, sharing the same broker with the signal provider, you will get the same identical prices, and will be more easier for Zulutrade to transfer the commands from one account to another. However, it’s not an essential parameter.
Then we have the flag of the country, so you understand where the signal provider comes from, in case you have geographical preferences.
Last information, from the last column given by Zulutrade, is the symbol of the dollar. It’s obvious that the more the supplier puts his own money the better. I tend to prefer signal providers that operate with their own real account, or with demo account to which are connected their real account, compared to those using only virtual money in demo account.
- Chart column: we have the graphical representation of the gain or loss curve realized by the signal provider, from the moment he began to operate connected to Zulutrade. Please note that the chart is in pips, not in money capital.
I believe that the representation in pips is very democratic and allows you to better evaluate the signal provider performance and how it can be replicated on your account (as the pips is the basic unit of measure).
Clicking on the box, Zulutrade will enlarge the chart imagine, so that you can see it better.
The chart is useful because it gives you the chance to at a glance the performance of the Zulutrade signal provider’s account, realizing immediately, how the winning and losing trades have gone.
This way you can understand if the Zulutrade signal provider has a profit trend linear and constant over time, or he suffers or had suffered some shocks you may not like.
- Pips column: it gives you the amount of win or lost pips by the signal provider from when he started operating with Zulutrade, if you find some values represented with “K”, then that value must be multiplied by 1000 (example: 4.4k = 4.4 x 1000 = 4400 pips).
- Transaction column: it indicates the amount of buying and selling operations made by the signal provider since is working with Zulutrade.
This information, confronted with the number of months of operations made by the signal provider on Zulutrade, will make you understand if you are in front of a signal provider that operate a lot, or little.
Confronted then with other Zulutrade analysis parameter, it can indicate whether the high number of operations are done to improve the money management, so to partialize the closures of the various positions, or because maybe is a scalper, but we’ll see these details later.
- Average pips column: this column shows the average number of pips made by the Zulutrade signal provider, and it’s really a simple average, just a calculation of the total of gained pips less the total of lost pips divided by the total operations number.
First of all, it’s important that this value is positive, because if not, that would mean that the Zulutrade signal provider is losing. Also, this value in relation with other factors, will give us an idea of what we should expect when this trader operate in the market.
- Win % column: here you can see a percentage value, concerning the winning provider’s operations since he started to operate with Zulutrade.
The value is compared to 100, which represent the total of the trades made. This is one of the element that you will have to analyze best and that will give you a real feel of the signal provider.
Contrary to what you may think, Zulutrade signal providers that have winning percentage close to 100 % are traders that are in market with a lot, too many operations actually, and usually they do it by using martingale strategy or mediating the price so to have more convenient price as the market goes against their direction and their market orders.
Doing so, don’t cutting the losses immediately, they put the account under serious drawdown that, especially for small accounts that are trying their luck with Zulutrade, could be lethal.
You have to be careful, because there are many of those kind of signal providers in Zulutrade, and you have to learn how to recognize them.
Average trade time column: in this column is made once again an average, in this case of the time of duration of a trade. The result is given by the sum of any single trade duration from the beginning of the operation on Zulutrade, divided by the number of executed trades.
This value can make you understand if you are in front of a scalper, that continuously enters and exit from the market, or if you are in presence of an intraday trader, that operates and closes his positions during the day, bringing few of these (usually just if they are winning) in overnight, or if he’s a position trader, that is a trader who opens positions and leave them open for several days.
The duration of the trades identifies at least three trading styles and consequently the sizing of the stop and weight of the leverage.
To be clear:
- A position trader will have much larger stop because his goal is to take all the movement of the trend, consequently he will maybe enter in the market less heavy on percentage of his total account, because he is looking for a lot of pips, so he can be lighter and still gain very well.
- On the contrary, the scalper has immediate goals with a few pips, and doesn’t need for large stop, so the positions can be much heavier.
- The day trader is an average of this two opposite.
- Weeks column: it shows very simply the number of weeks of operativity from the opening of his Zulutrade account.
It’s a significant information, because is a kind of amplifier of the results obtained on Zulutrade. If a provider has great results, those will be even greater if he has done this for many weeks, in a way this will testifies the robustness of his method.
- Max DD column: in this section is represented a drawdown in the Zulutrade style, which is conceptually different from the one will see later.
In this column is calculated, as a percentage, the max loss the account has suffered for a single open operation, that is, once open and becoming a losing one, how much it affected the total account of the Zulutrade signal provider. But this is a figure that is not useful by itself, and that can be misleading. Fortunately Zulutrade provides other elements that help us to better understand it and contextualize it.
To make an example:
If in that column I read a value of 7% (small value) and I don’t have other information, the only thing I can deduce is that that signal provider, assuming an account of 1000 usd, historically has lost a maximum of 7% with one operation, which means basically 70 usd.
This way, this drawdown, as Zulutrade is showing me, I would see it’s pretty good, but I’m not considering the size of the position. And if that signal provider has made that 70 usd loss using microlot?
Now we are talking of loss of 700 pips that, for a single operation, is maybe to much (if you don’t understand this calculations don’t worry, I dedicate a post only to this). This is an argument that you should always keep in mind in you want to be successful with the mirror trading with Zulutrade!!!
- Max trades column: this column highlights the max number of operations open simultaneously by the signal provider since he operates with Zulutrade.
It a very useful parameter because it makes you realize the amount of leverage to set on your Zulutrade account once you will evaluate the lot size.
This value will not just tell this, but also the operational style of the signal provider. Trader with a very high max trades value are probably using martingale system, which I personally don’t love so much, also because to be in the market with 30 positions, even with the smallest possible lot size, means to be in the market with at least 0.3 standard lots, which is like being exposed for 30.000,00 usd, and for small accounts it starts to be a significant exposure, especially if referring to a single provider.
Zulutrade Selecting a Signal Provider – data that shows the popularity
- Followers column: in this column is highlighted the number of live and demo users that are following the operativity of that signal provider on Zulutrade. It’s obviously a popularity index of the signal provider within the Zulutrade community, and shows you how many people consider him a valid provider and are trying him.
Be careful, in Zulutrade much popularity is not always synonymous of good signal provider’s skill.
- Amount following column: it reports the total amount in dollars of the followers real account that are following that specific signal provider.
Filippo
Ps: this is the first of a series of articles with which I want to describe you the tools that Zulutrade offers you for the analysis of the signal providers
Continue to the next article…