Creating Your First Setfile

Has anyone ever made money trading using forex signals or copy trading?

No. The idea in theory sounds great! Leverage the skills of profitable traders who are already making money and just do what they do. Diversify in terms of trading signals and allocate parts of your capital to different traders and make a net profit per month that is both sizeable and diversified and grow by compounding with rise in base capital. What could go wrong? These are verified traders with a verified track record on myfxbook.com and various other platforms, most forex brokerages today offer social trading and copy trading and stats related to performance are verified by broker.So a while back, probably a year or so ago, I don’t remember exactly but I started evaluating and diving a little deeper into signals offered on myfxbook.com and there was this one signal provider with great reviews, 638% net returns over a few months ( actually one of the top few on myfxbook ) and all other metrics looked great too but I have always been a skeptic at heart and instead decided to read the reviews to find out other traders experiences and it turned out that this Japanese trader kept depositing and withdrawing money to manipulate his numbers ( mainly his floating losses / drawdown figures ) so in fact he did not deliver returns but losses and a lot of subscribers fell prey to this scam. The source of income for most of these providers is not trading itself, subscription fees are not being added to supplement their trading income, because there isn’t any! Subscription fees is their whole business while everyone else loses part of their deposit or all of it. Most of these providers can also without notice, switch their strategy without a notice or indulge in risky trading such as martingale and end up blowing accounts. It kind of makes sense because trading is not one of those skills that are easy to acquire or maintain and trading talent across the world, the best traders, are meticulously honed and managed by teams and mentors. For retail traders to go out there and offer signals that are actually consistently profitable over the long term is rare and if there are some out there that actually do offer good signals their returns are too low for this industry where everyone in the retail space is targeting unrealistic returns and trying to hit it big. So it kind of makes sense that even if you have a legitimate trader offering their services, their signal would be undersubscribed and buried under a ton of crap. I have been a part of the famed subreddit wallstreetbets since 2016 when it used to be a small community and now they have millions of members and community members ended up targeting stocks and going against hedge funds during covid period. Absolute legend of a community and space and the sense of humor is top notch. There has been a long running joke in the meme culture and many of you might have come across such memes. If your trading strategy is not working, just opposite it! Very widely circulated jokes among this subreddit and still to this day are the inverse Cramer Index ( Sorry Jim Cramer, actually not sorry ). While it is a joke, this does give us an idea and I will tie it back with algorithmic trading. I have been trading using code ( EAs ) as that is the superior way to build a trading business. While running different EAs I made it a practice to run inverse accounts of a strategy during testing phase ( demo account ). Because if the opposite of scalping is profitable, let it be shown. So the idea of going opposite did make more sense to me as an algorithmic trader as I have practically developed strategies by looking at the 2 sides of the coin simultaneously and it does help you to emotionally be more at comfort as seeing a lot of red on one side ( open floating positions in losses ) vs seeing a lot of blue as well ( open floating positions in profit ) it led to more consistency for me personally and helped me digest the rollercoasters of trading better. I incorporate the ideas of opposites in my manual strategy development as well. I use a master account to feed into 2 slave accounts using trade copiers. Okay, we have digressed.Let’s get back to it. It makes more sense to go opposite these signal providers and that is an experiment I have really been meaning to do for a while but never got around to doing. Use these signals and use any copier software out there to inverse signals so when you would end up blowing an account is when you would actually double your account. Again consider the percentages to be in line with risk and allocate parts of your portfolio amongst different traders. Trading this way also makes sense as you are essentially betting against retail traders in a game which is stacked against them. If Prop Firms and brokerages can bet against retail traders and make millions while at it, then this is an entirely viable strategy to pursue in my opinion.