Adriano trader has been active in the platform for 19 weeks now. The Trader is using an automated strategy which is focused on the closing time of the New York session, opening small trades looking to minimize the drawdown and keep a good risk to reward ratio.
He has a wide diversified portfolio with many major and minor pairs. His current average trade time is approximately three hours.
The system has been successful until now with a total profit 2.156 in pips and a maximum drawdown of 144 pips. The overall NME is currently at 127$.
• Tell us about your trading background and how you started trading.
My first contact with the social trading world happened around 2016 after trying other forms of investments. I wanted to add some riskier strategies to my portfolio. After doing some simple research through blogs and YouTube, I discover the term “Social Trading”.
Right after I started my social trading experience, I found myself absolutely immerse in this world. Attempting to understand the positions of the traders followed made me more keen on learning different trading strategies. At the same time, the small copy trading community I joined helped me understand the basics and discover good trading strategies to follow.
After some time, I decided to do some more formal learning by doing some basic and intermediate courses. In these courses, I was able to test many manual strategies in demo and micro accounts. Unfortunately, the combination of the Crypto explosion in late 2017 and my excessive confidence from the profits I did, I started practicing some dangerous high risk strategies that any serious book or blog would condone. I had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Finally, over the past 2 years, I have slowly and steadily been entering the world of the quantitative and algorithm trading and learning how to automate my strategies. This is where I am today, and I am still learning every day.
• When did you first discover ZuluTrade? What was it about ZuluTrade that triggered your interest?
I have known about ZuluTrade ever since I started trading. I believe that ZuluTrade is a great platform to further ones skills both as an investor and a trader.
As an investor, you are able to approach this immense and intimidating world from a safe distance while still being able to be in contact with the strategies that the Traders execute.
As a Trader perspective you can capitalize on a strategy if this perform well and sharing strategies helps you to learn the principles of sharing strategies including the difficulties of this process (which generally vary from technical barriers to dealing with real investors).
• Give us the basic structure of your strategy
The pillar of my strategy is based on the mean reversion principle applied in the smaller time-frames. There are a large number of filters and optimization applies to each pair used in my strategy. These vary from trading hours, to confirmation signals and price levels in order to open every single trade.
• What’s your trade management approach – taking profit and exits, trade size and account- level risk management?
First thing first, my strategy uses a fix lot depending on the account size. All my trades are independent of each other and even if I buy and sell from the same trading pair at the same time, those trades are triggered by different parameters. There is no Martingale, Hedge or similar concepts applied.
All trades can be exited regardless of profit or loss either by a pre-set TP and SL or by a dynamic trade management which can also close the trade. This could be due to different parameters like the time of the trade and/or indicator filters or signals.
• How can your followers get the best by your strategy?
In order to have the right Risk management, followers should invest the minimum recommended amount money to follow. By doing this, they will keep a comfortable DD according to the backtests and the main account risk.
Additionally, the selection of the right broker to avoid slippage and reduce the signal delay will help to improve the performance. This will help to avoid rejected trades due to difference in spreads and prices.
Finally, being patient is key, this strategy trades only during certain hours of the day and for a short period of time.
• How do you feel when you have a good and a bad trade? How are you dealing with this?
Psychology is one of the most important topics when trading. When I first started trading, I used to feel happiness, euphoria, excess of confidence when I was winning trades. When I lost trades, this transformed into stress and anger. Much like tilting in poker, this led to less logical and more emotional trading which is similar to gambling with money. This is the reason why I am trying to delete all these feelings by using algorithms that allow me to open and close trades with a chosen strategy without the interference of how I’m feeling.
• Finally, if you could give some advice for the aspiring traders out there, what would it be?
Learn from my mistakes, I’ll give the same advice that I heard when I started. Sadly, I was only able to follow some of it as I didn’t value all of it at the time.
Trading is not a race but a marathon. Do not look for one trade with massive profits but look for many trades with smaller profits, always focusing in on the long-term future goals. As they say, Rome was not built in a day.
There is no need to be trading all day and night. At the beginning people often feel that they should be in the market 24/7. Remember that the more time you spend in the market the more risk you have.
Make risk management a key part of your strategy, everyone has to deal with losing trades, the difference between a winner or a loser is someone who knows how to deal with the latter.
That was all from Adriano trader. More Traders’ Interviews to follow…Stay Tuned!