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What to look out for in a forex third-party signal provider?
When
choosing a third-party signal provider for your forex account you need to be careful.
Here are a few tips and things to look for when making your
decision.
With
the growing popularity and easy access to the foreign exchange market, more and
more people are drawn to it as their financial vehicle of choice. Along with
this popularity comes all the extras.
This includes all kinds
of software, trading systems for sale, books, videos, and third-party signal
party providers. Today this article is going to touch on a few points when
seeking out a third-party forex signal provider.
What is a third-party signal provider?
Before
we get into choosing a provider we need to have a good understanding of what a
third-party signal provider is. A signal provider is a trader or analyst that
generates trades that in turn get placed on your account. You can have several
signal providers trading your forex account or just one.
Like
anything else, all third-party signal providers are not created equal. At first glance a trader may look like a home
run. That same trader may well end up completely torpedoing your entire account
in one afternoon.
To
help make sure this doesn’t happen we’ll set down a few guidelines. These
guidelines will give us something to look for when choosing our third-party
signal provider.
1. The first thing to look at is weather the
trader is a winner or a loser. This may seem obvious to nearly everyone, but
often it’s normal to see losing signal providers with 50-100 people trading
their signals.
2. The next thing to look for is how long they
have been a winner. If a trader has been winning for a week that means nothing.
We recommend that you don’t trade any signal provider with less than a few
months of results to show you. Anyone can place a few good trades one week and
get lucky. If you are going to be trading this trader’s signals they need to be
established.
3. Look at the max draw down. This is the
largest peak to trough draw down in equity that the trader has historically
had. Some traders refuse to take a loss. This causes them to hold on to losing
trades forever or until they turn to a winner. Turning a loser into a winner
sounds great, but it will eat up a huge chunk of margin and may never turn
around. If it doesn’t turn in your direction, you will have your entire account
destroyed by a trader that could have taken a 30-pip loss but held on until it
was an 800-pip loss.
4. The first three are easy to look at. They
will be displayed right on the main screen of signal providers to choose from.
Once you get a few signal providers you are thinking of using, it’s time to
dive a bit deeper into their history.
a)
Look at their actual trades. Do they have a good win rate because they have opened
a ton of trades all at the same time on the same currency pair? They may have
20 winners in a row. This looks great,
but if you look a bit deeper you will see that its really only 1 winning trade
places 20 times. Not as impressive is it?
b)
Look at their draw down on individual trades. Do they let a trade go 300 pips
against them and then close it out when it hits 5 pips of profit? This is a
trader who lets their losses run out of control and cuts their winning trades
short. It’s not a trader that you want in control of your money.
c)
Do they add to losing positions? A trader who constantly adds to losing
positions hoping it will turn for them is not someone you want trading your
account.
5. Choose a signal provider that suits you. Some
traders may provide larger returns over time, but take bigger risks leading to
bigger draw downs. This might be OK with you. If you are more conservative and
cannot stomach large drops in equity you probably should choose a more
conservative trader.
These
are just a few things to look for when choosing a third-party signal provider
to trade your forex account. You should always trade a demo account before
opening a live account with real money. Remember it’s your account. In the end
you choose the signal providers, and you are responsible for what happens.
This article was submitted by UBCFX.