A look at Ukraine's top ZuluTrade trader

Article originally appears on forexbrokerz

Today we'll be setting our sight on the country that gave us the seascapes of Ivan Aivazovsky and the fiery drink gorilka, as we'll be exploring Stimul, the best Ukrainian signal provider (SP) on social Forex trading network ZuluTrade. For the 54 weeks during which he has been active on the network, this SP has managed to attract capital worth $38,556 from his 188 followers. And although that's a humble capitalization result, thanks to the solid performance of the system Stimul now ranks 4th in Zulu's comprehensive ranking.

Strategy: Slowly and Steadily

Stimul trades with seven currency pairs, with trading conducted most often with AUD/USD and NZD/USD. The SP tries to make the most out of trends, with positions opened in tune with the trends and kept open until some take-profit or stop-loss levels are hit. The take-profit level varies between 50 and 100 pips, while the stop-loss level is changing.

The problem for many traders stems from the fact that this SP keeps positions open for quite a long time – sometimes for more than a month, the average duration of the trades being “humbler” at one week. Given that the number of trades held open simultaneously sometimes reaches 10, ZuluGuard will most likely remove this SP from the list of traders one follows at a certain point. Hence, it's better to inactivate this protection in case you follow Stimul.

Performance: Significant Profits, Resilient System

Since the launch of Stimul's account on ZuluTrade about a year ago (on September 26, 2012), the profit has grown to 13,218 pips, a substantial achievement.


And you can see from the profit graph that after a problematic period in the start of May 2013, the trader managed to enjoy swift recovery which he himself attributes to changes in the strategy (levels of stop loss, in particular). The ratio of profitable trades is very high at 90%, adding to the positive characteristics of this system.

The maximum drawdown is currently a bit high at 3,920 pips, and this is likely due to the peculiarities of the strategy that we already discussed. The level of drawdown is what partially determines the relatively high amount of money you should prepare in order to copy Stimul's signals - $513.

A particularly distinctive characteristic of Stimul is the impressively high reading of the average pips per trade, which stands at 50. Given that we are happy to see any result above 5, you get our satisfaction with this result. It shows that the system is resilient to swift market changes and factors that may add to the cost of transaction like spreads and slippage. Still, if you're looking for the broker with the lowest slippage with this SP, statistics show that's HotForex with the slippage around zero.

Winners and Losers

This signal provider does not have plenty of live followers – only 25, with 11 of them making profits from following him and only two suffering losses. What we should note is that the size of both profits and losses is small, due to the recommended money management settings, which involve trading with micro lots: 1 pip = 10 cents. The size of the biggest profit is $97 and the size of the biggest loss is $26, so we can say that even in the worst case, the pain will not be so acute.

Verdict

I'd not hesitate to recommend Stimul as an SP to those of you who have a crush on slowly-threading strategies that result in slower accumulation of profits. If you follow the recommendations of the trader about risk and money management, you're supposed to reap gains and avoid hefty drawdown.