[DARWIN] GFA by nilsstueben - meshulro

[IlIlIlIlI]

enough room for rumours and speculations ..
Their Darwin ZGW is the only one which is still active.

 

[Emanita]

 

[CavaliereVerde]

GFA made a trade in SPX last week with about 9.5 pips profit:

5 long SPX trades in one month
"Winning the easy way?"

 

[nilsstueben]

Hey guys,

I hadn't seen this thread before but thought it might be useful to answer a couple of the questions or comments that came up. I'm the manager of GFA, and unfortunately not a rich kid with inherited money. I have a group of loyal investors that stick with me even when the drawdown occurred which I am very grateful for. The fully automated system performed very well until COVID hit and volatility went crazy, which meant that i had to manually override the algorithms positions in order not to lose too much money. The period of inactivity after this drawdown was me making adjustments and refining the strategy so that another big loss like this shouldn't occur. During that time it did not make sense to take any positions.

The strategy is running again since the middle of this year. Having a few of the same positions in one month is not winning the easy way, its being on the right side of a trend when you see one.

Apologies if some of the commentary seemed arrogant, I guess there are certain formulations that don't sit well with everyone.

Feel free to reach out with any questions etc if any.

Have a great start to the new year!

Nils

 

[nilsstueben]

I don't think so. Probably a rich guy with some friends. If it was purely about boosting the numbers, surely could have made more sense spreading the money around across a few of the "Model Portfolio" Darwins?

Unfortunately not a rich guy.. just a normal guy trying to build a good strategy. Its my strategy so i would know!

 

[nilsstueben]

It is good that it is protected!
And yeah, i've seen the video and to be honest I liked it.
Seems like a real trader, hence the question if anyone has some information.

Despite his recent results he does not seem like the guy who would vanish cause of some downturn in performance

Hey, I didnt vanish, Darwins stop being shown after a certain period of inactivity which i had following the drawdown. Back up and running now!

 

[nilsstueben]

Had a rough 2020 but trying to bounce back.. here the stats from the last year on GFA:

 

[nilsstueben]

More of a general point than anything else.. i understand that everyone has their opinions on different topics, it just seems to be that a bit more constructive feedback would be great instead of people spending time bashing each other and their strategies. I would love to see people trying to help each other with feedback and offering to help in the event that they know the solution.

Its more fun when the whole team is winning... Thoughts?

 

[trilobite]

More of a general point than anything else.. i understand that everyone has their opinions on different topics, it just seems to be that a bit more constructive feedback would be great instead of people spending time bashing each other and their strategies. I would love to see people trying to help each other with feedback and offering to help in the event that they know the solution.

Its more fun when the whole team is winning... Thoughts?

I don't think much bashing goes on here, it's much more civilised than the original forum managed by Darwinex. I guess it may seem different if you are the Bashee!
Thanks for taking the time to post on here and update those interested in your progress.

 

[CavaliereVerde]

Hi @nilsstueben , welcome to our forum!
Sorry for my negative tone but when we lack info we have to guess.
This forum is exactly intended to help each other, as traders and investors.
Can you give us some explaination about GFA strategy?
Why have you left such a huge capital invested if trading was suspended?

 

[nilsstueben]

Hi @nilsstueben , welcome to our forum!
Sorry for my negative tone but when we lack info we have to guess.
This forum is exactly intended to help each other, as traders and investors.
Can you give us some explaination about GFA strategy?
Why have you left such a huge capital invested if trading was suspended?

Hi @CavaliereVerde!

No worries at all, I just thought maybe it makes sense to shed a bit of light on it and help clear up some questions that i see are being asked.

Sure, no initially the strategy that was running on GFA from 2018 onwards until the drawdown in Feb 2020 was a fully automated system that traded purely the EURUSD. I know to some people that may sound stupid, but the thesis was that given that the Eurozone and the USA are the two biggest economic blocks in the world, you could build a fairly solid strategy around this pair. Deep liquidity and relatively predictable trends were also a factor, as well as well signposted monetary policy from both CB's. So that all made sense for 2 years until covid hit and the EURUSD started doing insane intraday moves. Essentially my algo didn't realise that theres a global pandemic ramping up and treated the price action like any other price action in the EURUSD, which tends to normalise after a couple sessions when there are extreme moves. In Feb 2020 these moves became a lot bigger and more sustained than they ever had been before, and I kept being increasingly long EURUSD into that dip, until the point came where i chose to manually close the positions and live to fight another day. In hindsight if i hadn't touched the positions at all it would've turned out totally fine and made a lot of money, but at the time the extent of the drawdown was a bit of a guessing game.

Once the positions were closed, I wanted to reassess and see how i could avoid this happening in the future, and hence stopped trading so that i could focus on improving the strategy and do lots of testing. The version of the strategy that is running now is much more diversified, running 10 fx pairs as well as the indices, so when there are periods show trading in only one asset its more of a coincidence than me just trying to ride the SPX (although long term being long the indexes makes an enormous amount of sense in my view).

Following the drawdown in Feb 2020 i explained the situation to my investors and talked them through the plan for improving the system and then restarting, which they all agreed to, hence i didn't have any fluctuation in the investment volume during the time. Some of the other darwins are obviously a lot more sensitive to drawdowns and have money that isn't very sticky, whereas the guys in my Darwin are all long term oriented and happy to take ride out some short term choppiness.

During the period where trading was suspended i could've moved the funds to a different strategy or allocated to different darwins, but in this case i would have a realised loss on my investor account and hence have lower capital to reinvest (ie the drawdown created a floating p&l that i was unwilling to realise because of the impact on future investment volume). On top of this, my investors put the money into GFA because they liked that strategy, rather than wanting to give it to other third party darwin managers although in the interim i wouldn't have been against this.

I hope that helps a little bit! Let me know any further points you would like me to clarify, always happy to dicuss.

Best

Nils

 

[CavaliereVerde]

Thanx for the very detailed answer!

I think you should write about the flat period in your darwin description like you did about the first part before Feb 2018.
Even if you communicate privately with your selected investors it can be very useful for the other users of the site.

 

[nilsstueben]

Thanx for the very detailed answer!

I think you should write about the flat period in your darwin description like you did about the first part before Feb 2018.
Even if you communicate privately with your selected investors it can be very useful for the oteher users of the site.

Sure that’s not a bad idea actually I will add something there. Main reason I hadn’t done it tbh is because I don’t have any investors from Darwinex so I hadn’t paid much attention to it but definitely a good point.

 

[CavaliereVerde]

I missed it: -9 millions in May.

 

[AriaS]

I can see that the investor who invested close to $9M has lost around $1.2M.
I guess that their leverage was x3 (the largest back then), so they actually invested $3M. A loss of 40% of their own money.