They select their trading methods in accordance with their perception of the ranking techniques those sites use (especially Zulutrade), and those are somewhat “crooked parameters” for investors. They know that unless they’re very highly ranked, they won’t get (m)any “followers”. Zulutrade in particular rewards short-term, ultra-high-risk methods involving a huge amount of averaging down (i.e. adding to losing positions) and not closing trades with enormous running losses.
The rankings of traders at Zulutrade are almost terrifying.
I last looked at Zulutrade’s “performance table” 3 weeks ago. At that time, the maximum drawdowns of their top-ranked five traders at the moment were (in this order) 35%, 52%, 48%, 85% and 108%!
Also included in their “top ten” to follow were two traders with drawdowns of 2,000% and 4,000%!
If you input your own search parameters, using their search engine, to try to identify any traders who have been there for 6+ months, have real money accounts and maximum drawdowns under 15%, there’s only [B][U]one[/U][/B] listed (and he’s apparently done a grand total of 4 trades in over a year)!
It’s very much “[I]caveat emptor[/I]”, and that’s putting it mildly … :5:
The sites lend themselves to people with a “shortcut mentality”, I think, at least to some extent. If I’d listed there all the trades from which I’ve made my living over the last year, I wouldn’t really expect to attract any “followers” at all, and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in fiddling about with it. I imagine that I’m far from alone.
That and similar things, including typically a [U]lot[/U] of adding to losing positions. They can have quite a good run with it, sometimes, of course … but eventually they crash and burn.
Those are people trying to earn money from selling signals, not people earning a living from trading (the small proportion at Zulutrade using funded accounts, rather than demo, speaks for itself.)
You can’t draw any valid conclusions from looking at places like that.
With all forms of attempted self-employment/“own businesses” the great majority fail. Forex trading, in particular, because of the ease of access, trading hours, and huge availability of leverage, attracts huge numbers of people with a gambling mentality. They’d treat whatever sort of investing/trading they did as gambling. That’s about them; not about forex. They just happen to choose forex, partly because with forex there are so many scammy companies pretending to be brokers (but actually counterparty market-makers trading against their own clients) and they promote and advertise so heavily that they can find a constant throughput/turnover of victims. The good news is that none of this need be relevant to [B]your[/B] prospects with forex-trading, provided that you start by developing an understanding of the necessary statistical and probabilistic concepts and methods needed for all successful trading. ![:slight_smile: :slight_smile:](https://forums.babypips.com/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5)