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Well - the more I am reading about these stringent combine rules the more I see clearly restrictions like:
a) the nearer you are at your DLL level the more you are forced to make "Revenge Trades" (you never thought of)
b) you are forced to leave your rules at the sidelines (money management / SL settings etc) to not touch the
throwout point by YOUR combine
c) the more you are near the crucial level the more you need to fight against -market, -philosophy, -own rules, - bad reps.. etc.
d) as FT71 speaks: DO NOT look at your PNL... in a combine you ARE madly forced to do so...
In other words - forget about that special combine game. BUT follow your own rules to succeed - You will
be rewarded by your OWN success and gains and win always in a pool filled with sharks.
I think the problem here is a combination of strict DLL and a time limit of Combine. In a real life if you get close to your DLL you go down on size dramatically, take a day or week of rest, come back fresh. You are not pressed on dead line of profit target. In a Combine you pressed on both. I guess the reason is Combine is not primarily to teach you but select best traders from the rest. It's a business for TST, so it's fair.
There has to be a time limit for both the profit target and to eventually end the combine. If there is no time limit, how do you measure profit, specially compared to others? By daily average? And the DLL does have a very good duty, it let's you survive another day to trade...
I think you misunderstood the max. DD. It would be true if you can't dip below it, but since now we know that we can, there is no reason to revenge trade. You just stop trading on the day when both your DLL and max. DD are getting close, and the next day you still can trade without much pressure, and keep your eyes mostly on the DLL. Of course the next day should be a winning day.
Technically, you can dip below even 5 days in a row. Of course eventually you should get away from the max. DD, but it is quite possible to getting stuck close to it, and still not blowing the Combine...
Oh I agree with TST business model and their metrics, they are smart! But it does not mean necessarily good metrics for traders, because some of them like time constraint and profit target can do more damage than good when you approaching borders (nearing MaxLoss or Time Limit). If trading for yourself, the best you would do is take a time off the markets, instead of swinging for the fences. This is why probably 20 days Combine is much better than 10 days, it gives you whole 2 months to operate and chose your days from (or trade all of them, around 40).
This thread has been an interesting read from the beginning.
So the max DD is only 5% of account value? If so, that's doable but very strict. I was reading over the weekend about some signal providers who have hundreds of people following them and their DD is around 18%, yet they are consistently very profitable doing somewhere around 19%/month. Some trades take time to work out. On Wednesday, I went 6% DD, but I made 100+ pips by sticking with those trades. Still, it's their company and their money! I woudn't do what they do. I would love to see some stats on who pays and is funded compared to the people who don't pass.
Pedro, if your good, why not just create a forex account and then hook it up to myfxbook, trade your own account, and let people follow you? I already have people who are wanting to follow me, but I'm not going to allow autotrading until I fund a new account and seperate the swing trades from the day trades. Because swing trades have wide stops and DD. Stops on a 5 min chart can be 10-20 pips/ticks while on a daily, it can be 100! Maybe you won't make as much money as a real prop trader with a multi-million dollar account, but at least it's a start :-)
Their account value is misleading. You can trade the 30K Combine with as little as 5K with your own money. So if we compare 1K max. DD to a 5K account and not 30K, that is a 20% DD....
Well, that is the question, right? But I agree, profitable traders don't have much incentive to stay with them in the long run, when they can just trade their own accounts...
This is crazy stats you have, one of the best I have seen. What type of strategy you have? I don't ask to reveal details but just in general terms. I can see a holding time is 1 day and you trade many currencies. It looks like an automatic strategy, but I can't remember any that is so good, including old hits like FGB, MDP, Lightning.
IMO the most important part of the combine is becoming familiar with the platform so as not to make any execution errors.
I did the 150K 10 day combine and early on I put myself in a hole because I mismanaged the buttons and got confused which contracts I was trading... Drew down about 4 K but finished the combine @ 159K after fixing my errors and qualified to redo it. Im starting on Sunday and Im confident Ill make my target.
Just my .02.... if you are going to use T4 make sure you are familiar with ALL aspects of it.
STRONGLY agree.... Go through the entire help file and make sure you know what all the settings are, and be sure you have them set the way you want. Otherwise, you're going to find some things you don't expect.
Once you've done that, it's like anything else, easy enough to use.
