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[King Midas]

My Experience with Black Swan Trading.com

I had subscribed to this service when it was operating under a different name and was being pushed by Martin Weiss as FOREX options experts. My experience there was that it was generally okay. I took a few of the recommended option trades and I made approximately 20% on my money in 4-5- weeks. I left the service because it was overall too expensive and I got my fee reduction as promised. Overall it was an okay experience.

Now I have picked these people up again with their FOREX and Futures service. I subscribe to all three of their services. The Position Trader (Forex in-out in a couple of days and Futures), Swing Trader (Forex in-out in a few hours or a day), and Currency Investor (Long Term ETFs). I believe that they are 3-4 guys that work out of a house in Florida. That is fine with me. I work out of my house too. I am only interested in results. My experience with them has been mixed. Here is my experience:

With the FOREX (my main focus) they concentrate on 3-5 major pairs, sometimes more, and some exotics (in the Position Trader). They advise on trades by email and SMS. They place a 100 pip (sometimes greater) stop loss on a trade. Thus the losses can be great, but you can hang in there longer for a reversal if the trade went against you. Most trades close manually by a message from them. The swing trader averages 15-20 trades per week, sometimes more. The trades are sent with entry/stop loss/profit targets. They send updating messages during the day to adjust stops/close out positions/buy more, etc.

The cost is equivalent to using a signal service like Forex Apple, FXIce or Smart Forex Signal. The Swing trader costs approximately $100.00/month. The Position Trader costs approximately $100.00/month and the Currency Investor costs $39.00/year. They write an essay frequently known as Currency Currents with market/economic commentary. They produce a newsletter monthly with additional commentary/macro economic opinion, etc. All elevated stuff.

They project themselves as something bigger and more sophisticated than the signal services with the essays/newsletters and explanations of why a trade went bad. You don't need to use MT4 with them.They don't do the automatic transfer of their trades to your MT4 account, etc. This is good I believe. I want to evaluate advice and control executions personally. I may not listen to all of their advice. I can read a chart too.

Here is the most recent (February 2010) weekly summary that they sent to Subscribers for the Swing Trader picks:

This is for closed positions, the week ending:
2/05/10: +424 pips
2/12/10: +441 pips
2/19/10: -549 pips

I was in most or all of these trades and verify that this is correct. I think that the recent 2/19/10 was a bad week for a lot of people because of the adverse/contrary behavior of the EUR/USD and GBP/USD. So I cut them some slack. I did lose money during that week, but I still cut them some slack on the picks. No body is perfect.

In summary, my opinion of Black Swan Trading.com is positive to neutral. If you want to be able not to use MT4 (with automatic execution of 3rd party trades) and want some elevated reading material then they are a choice to consider over the signal services.

The FOREX market is huge and is moved by large forces. Small FOREX Traders like me, need to recognize that the facilities and services which are available to us will result in disappointment from time to time. All we can do is try and minimize those disappointments and maximize the successes.

I am going to give Black Swan a few more weeks to see how they do. I may cut them lose or stay with them based on performance.

It's all about the money, honey.