Macross Island has been trading with ZuluTrade for 21 weeks with a consistently high profitability. The Return on Investment (ROI) is 304% annualized with only 5% worst drawdown. He is a Live and fully verified Trader as well as has a very sophisticated trading strategy. Let’s meet him and see what he has to say about his engagement with ZuluTrade.
Tell us about your trading background and how you got started trading.
I started trading forex since summer of 2010. It all began with a casual chat with a friend who happened to mention about someone made some money through trading forex. It did not catch much my attention until one later boring day I started to look on the web for some basic information, like brokers, forex ABC…
Through the years, I did manual trading for many years. Also, I followed and tested some EA. After losing over 50K along the way trying this and that, I became aware of that manual trading risking a big lot on single trade each time is dangerous and it is not reliable. Because, firstly, humanity is weak in this confrontation against the vast ocean of forex market, no matter how hard you try to keep rules and keep calm and secondly, markets keep changing rhythm that manual speculating certain pair/pairs based on a few hundred back-tested or even forward-tested samples is far insufficient to make sure that your rules/trading strategies’ can adapt to any future markets.
I have come up with an idea that I must find a way of trading that allows me to sleep well at night no matter what is going on, and can still earn a profit that meets my expectation for forex trading, namely at least 50%-100% yearly, also it must be robust in long run. So here we go, my current strategies are the results of all my work and experience.
When did you first discover ZuluTrade? What was it about ZuluTrade that got your interest?
I always knew ZuluTrade since 2010 when I first enter the forex trading world; I knew ZuluTrade has the largest trader/strategy inventory around the global and many followers, so I had to try it.
Give us the basic structure of your strategy
All my strategies have the same attributes:
1. Automatic rule based trading 2. Risk per trade is very limited under 1% 3. Primarily trend following 4. Multiple major pairs together to minimize the risk exposure and correlation of positions 5. Never hold on losing positions, 6. Highly scalable, no news trading, no martingale, no grid 7. DD kept within 10% 8. With strict backtest or real history of 10+ years 9. All back-test must be in line with the performance in real trading conditions.
As for the Macross Island system, basically, the system is a combination of multiple subsystems of price action-based or indicator-based that enter and exit trades by looking at a certain type of price movements for a certain period with consideration of indicator too.
Like all my other systems, I also set the system to trade multiple carefully tested and analyzed pairs, in total 13 major pairs for this system. The idea is to reduce the correlation of pairs and keep the DD as low as possible. Because through many years running it, I discovered that different pairs have different good and bad period for trading and by combining them, a more smooth equity curve can be achieved.
This system is not a scalper and is not slippage or broker sensitive at all. Instead, the system always tries to catch and follow the big trend and always risk less to earn big, always cut. It does not trade very big volume but to aim to earn a real profit by making 20-30pips/trade. Therefore, it will perform almost the same at any broker and hence followers with any brokers will have no slippage issues at all and results will be almost the same.
I have the full confidence of this system, it has a real record of more than 10 years, and it has brought me more than 30K profit over the years with different brokers/accounts. I will not talk about any single candlesticks, market movements, news or events; all I know is that this one survived the entire Elections/fat fingers/Earthquake/SNB/Terrorist attacks/EU crisis throughout the years with reasonable DD and decent performance.
The idea is that I will not compromise the essence of trend following and tight SL to implement systems I do not have full confidence in the long run, i.e. the martingale and other types etc. that work on corrections with big SL and adding on negative positions etc. I try to lower the DD of a good and reliable system by optimizing itself through different tools based on thorough analysis.
What’s your trade management approach – taking profit and exits, trade size and account- level risk management?
The system takes profit and exit, or cut losses when it senses that the trend is over or reversal is ongoing, it never ever holds negative position hoping for miracles, there are no miracles in life; it is a game of probability. Trade size is fixed by the system, 0.01/trade for all trades. At this trade size, the average annual return in the past seven years 2010-2016 (real history of the system at current settings) is around 5,500USD or 55,000 pips. The average annual max DD for 2010-2016 was around 200 USD or 2,000 pips. The absolute max DD for its history were 300 USD or 3,000 pips. People can choose their account size or lot size to trade it. It all depends on how much risk you are willing to take. Personally, I trade it with 2,000 USD since I like low DD and I have a similar account following all its trades at AAAfx. I have also several accounts doing the same system with other brokers with in total 30K+ USD equity.
I try to give confidence to people and being conservative in money management, but again, this is a game of probability, and the worst is always ahead of us, be prepared and survival is the key.
How can your followers get the best by your strategy?
I would recommend them to follow all trades and apply no extra settings; -5 to -9 offset can be set but still not necessary or won’t do much help. The strategy itself is already the result of a full optimization; everything is the best possible setup. In short, to get the best of it, follow all and stay, and be patient.
How do you feel when you have a good and a bad trade? How are you dealing with this?
All my systems always have multiple trades on-going at the same time, hard to say if any of them are good or bad at any certain point in time, markets change constantly and a bad one can turn good, vice versa. As all systems were analyzed fully and optimized based on 30,000-150,000 historical trades or backtested trades, so you never know what will happen to any single current trade. Just let it play out, again, this is a game of probability for thousands and tens of thousands of trades per year, not gambling with one single event. I will let the robot keep the rules and through time, history will repeat itself.
Finally, if you could give some advice for the aspiring traders out there, what would it be?
What I want to say to everyone who considers seriously succeeding in the forex, is to keep a long-term mentality. The high leveraged forex market provides us with a tool capable of making overnight millionaires. It is true that someone may, at a time, achieved it, but what makes me think that I am one of the few lucky people? I think no one, no matter trading an EA or doing manual, should not gamble at all times, like trying a high-risk EA and knowing, it is going to crash. However, hoping that it is not going to crash next month, trading big lots during news release etc., people should drop the idea entirely. We all pass through this.
To succeed in this market is not easy. It comes with hard working like any other jobs, and it does not come in one day. Always think about the opposite side when trading and make sure the survival of the account at all time.
More Traders’ Interviews to follow…Stay Tuned!