My returns are made from a mixture of markets. I trade almost everything that moves with the exception of shares.
A word of warning though: don't pay too much attention to returns.
Percentage return is very easy to inflate. A friend of mine set up an account with a spreadbet broker that was offering a bonus of £150 free to those who opened accounts with them. He has never placed a trade before in his life and so we decided that I would trade it for him. This was just under five months ago and as of today the account is just shy of £2,350. This equates to a percentage return of 1,345%. It sounds very impressive but it masks a simple truth. The account had minimum margin requirements. For example, minimum trading in the Dax has to be at £3 a point. Therefore with a stop loss of say just 50 points, you are risking 100% of your account on the first trade. And in my opinion, although a system or methodology can give you a significant edge over time, the outcome of any one trade is 50/50 - along with your chance of getting wiped out in this example!
Remember, all you need to do is start with a small amount of money enough times and you can tout an incredible performance ratio. If you start a new account with just $100 each time and trade a full lot ($10 a tick) with a stop of just 10 ticks and go for a home run you will wipe out many times. But of course, if just once you make a 200 pip run (which is fairly likely on something like GBP/JPY) - you can, of course, very legitimately and truthfully say that your return on a new account is 2,000%. Once you then have your $2,100 you can start to trade a little safer but still boast what looks like an incredible return. I am sure many unscrupulous system sellers do this.
The principle is the same with my personal account but not the methodology. I started with a very small amount of money. I had actually wiped my account out at the time and couldn't bear to put much more money in so I started this new way of trading with what I had in my account which was just £63. I have built this up into £1,435 as of today. Since the broker I use lets me trade at small size though, I did not take excessive risk which could have wiped me out from the start.
So, as you can see these are small returns in terms of actual money made despite the fact that the percentage increase is phenomenal!
I have recently reviewed all the trades I have done in my account since starting to use this methodology. From this review I can see that my win/loss ratio is just under 80%.
Losses will be cut very quickly and winners will be left to run until it looks like the move is running out of steam. Naturally, some retracement will be necessary before this is realised. Nonetheless, some of the trades I will show you have incredible risk:reward ratios.
The latest trades I took were in the Bund (German Treasury market) and in Crude Oil. The last setup my methodology generated in the Bund returned a reward of 12 times the risk on the hourly timeframe. (180 ticks reward for a 15 tick risk). In Crude Oil, the method generated a reward of 5 times the risk (362 ticks for a 67 tick risk) This is without adding positions which was also possible.
