I have been using Tradency demos on FXCM, and after many failures I have figured out a system that has gone from $4,000 to $28,000 in a lttle less tha 4 months.
That is an increase of 695%. One of the big problems is starting with too low a starting amount. What happens is you might have 6 trades open, with 5 of them with substantial losses. 4 of them will eventually become winners, but these temporary losses and the too small initial balance, combine to make the account go to 100% margin. SEC rules say the broker MUST CLOSE ALL trades, and you get a big loss. I started with $4,000. With a larger balance you don't get closed out and probably go on to a gain. The second thing I learned was not to go where Tradency leads you, but rather take this huge database and twist it and churn it to extract the most relevant and successful information.
By that I mean you want as much diversity in your strategies as possible, so only allow 1 trade at a time for each strategy. This allows you to pick several diverse strategies. also as I pick them I do not use 2 stratergies with the same currency pair. The next problem is choosing the amount of K for each one and Tradency leads you in the wrong direction for this, because thay show you P/L for the strategy using all trades allowed, and we are interested in the P/L if the used only one trade at a time. I get that information by downloading an Excel spreadsheet of the 30 day record, renaming it and adding a column for one trade at a time, and by eye I see the P/L if the strategy traded one trade at a time. I then rerank the choices and use that info for determing K size.
I repeat this whole procedure every weekend. It takes me about one hour per week. Not too bad for these profits. Some of the cons I have seen about tradency are about the spread. It is no big deal with this amount of profit!!
