Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Welcome to Grailtrading!

Right, hello and welcome to grail trading.

if you wish to comment on any part of our postings on here then feel free.

what's this all about?

The Grail is a Forex investment strategy which we have found has almost no chance whatever of losing based on a month by month basis. Note here that I said 'almost' as there has been one losing month in the last 3 years.

Its important to note here that the quest for a holy grail trading system has been every traders pursuit since man began to trade the markets. The famous holy grail would be a 100% winning system with that analogy and as this does have losers then we cant add the tag 'holy' to it :)

We don't class this as a trading system - we class it as an investment strategy and mentally there is a difference. An investment is not something that you watch every 5 minutes on a chart and an investment is not something that you expect large returns from immediately , day by day or week by week as you would in a trading system.

This kind of strategy is not played by many in the Forex game as to be honest its boring and you have to have discipline of steel and determination to see it through to a conclusion. It's not 'get rich quick' its more 'get rich slow'

Grail returns can only be measured on a monthly and preferably 6 monthly basis.

Why this site?

Our aim with this blog is to open a real money account on 1st October 2005 with £10,000 of capital and turn it into £1,000,000 within 2 years using a method of compounding the equity throughout that time.

This site will be our yardstick to measure the effectiveness of the investment and to compare it with the best hedge funds and investment vehicles available on the market today.

Following the publishing of our initial targets below we will publish on here screenshots of the live account. Obviously account numbers and actual trade entry levels will be blanked out but you will be able to see the account rise and fall during any given month by watching the equity which will be shown in is entirety.

We feel that we may hit hurdles along the way - for example the burning desire to take out some profit before the account comes to it's fruition or maybe the temptation to add to the account if it falls short of it's monthly target. We don't want that to happen but it will be interesting to see how we handle that.

There are also other problems we may come across. For example, as we live in the UK we will be using spread betting companies to trade with and the one we have identified (capital spreads) currently have a limit of £100 per pip allowed to be traded. This could be a serious problem that hampers our progress in our compounding and we may find we have to open more accounts or even switch altogether to a 'peoper' Forex broker to continue (FYI £100 per pip is roughly equivalent to 18 standard lots with a single lot being $100k)

it will be very interesting to see the responses we get from our spread betting company and we will log our experiences here as we go through.

How do you know this will work?

The system has actually been traded for around 18 months with a different configuration to great success. Our new parameters have been only forward tested for 3 months but does concur with our 3 year backtest which was hand checked for accuracy and found to be within 3-4% of actual results.

The backtest revealed that £10,000 invested in May 2003 would today be worth more than £2 million. The drawdowns were acceptable and so we are confident in its pedigree.

However it is worth noting that past performance can never be relied on for future actions and this is why we are risking an initial pot of £10,000 and not loading it to the hilt with everything we have.

Who is 'we'

There are two of us doing this both at the same time and with the same entries. The other party will remain anon.

Will you be selling this system?

No, this system is such that every single entry is the same for every trader.

We feel that if this was traded on the same broker by even just a handful of people that the broker would start to recognise the pattern and do something to stop it being traded. you may think that this is crazy and that theywouldn't care - but when the account is at say £700,000 its quite possible that the system could take as much as £154,000 in a single day. How would your broker feel if he had say 20 traders doing that on a semi regular basis and all on the same day?

now then - updateI whilst i was thinking of this i just thought lets try and get this sorted so i rang the MD of the brokerage and had a good long chat. lets just say that it wont be a problem, ill cover this in more detail when we get to this point.

Anyhow, no, it wont be for sale this isnt a marketing blog.

Targets:

Obviously we cant measure the success if we dont have a yardstick. Below is our target map of milestones to reach. The targets are aggressive and are stretch targets. however if they arent met we will not deviate from the system.

Dec 31st 2005: £17,000
March 31st 2006: £32,000
June 31st 2006: £58,000
Sept 31st 2006: £104,000
Dec 31st 2006: £188,000
March 31st 2007: £340,000
June 31st 2007: £612,000
Sept 31st 2007: £1,000,000

That's it!

Well, thats the introduction over with. As from 1st October 2005 I will publish on the first of the month the account status and the movement in the month.

Wish us well :)

5 comments:

spahiu said...

let me be the first to congratulate you on this...hopefully you can stick to the plan and do this right..

how about a litlle more details on the money management you'll be implementing with this..

PS. think you just gave the boys something to talk about for years to come :), keep it up

Soultrader said...

thanks for your best wishes :)

im sorry spahiu, i wont be discussing any details whatsoever on the actual system as its commercially sensitive from past deals.

what i would say is that its money management is a basic system of compounding with a slight twist

rhyzka it trades over any major pair but our tests have shown that it trades to its best extent on cable so thats what we will use to get the most bang per buck so to speak.

the posts on here will be infrequent so im considering setting up a notification service of new posts so you dont have to look all time time - would that be useful?

Damian said...

It's called RSS - the best update system!

Soultrader said...

yes i can enable rss - but would you mind doing me a little write up on how users can use it?

in laymans terms if poss :)

Soultrader said...

sure sdf - ill do a posting on the blog about it