Armada Markets

Recently I reorganized all my trading accounts and moved all my money to Armada Markets. Out of many brokers I traded with (probably around 10 until know) Armada is beating all of them by a mile.

Just a few facts:

• Each order is executed in 220 ms - 280 ms, even during big spikes. This is outstanding for a retail broker. Armada is using PrimeXM technology and it works superbly well. On my end I am using a dedicated Windows Server with a 2-core I3 processor located in a data center in France. 
• Spreads on EURUSD are insane, average spread during London session is around 0.0 - 0.4 pip. But what is also important, spreads during Asian session are not exceeding 1 pip as well. Armada is using LMAX as the primary liquidity provided, but it is not the only one. 
• Spreads on exotic pairs (like GBP/CHF or AUD/NZD) are also very competetive. For example, Aussie pairs spreads are comparable to the ones offered by AxiTrader so an Australian broker. 
• Commision - it is only 0,04% per round lot. 

At the moment I see only two cons:

• during major news events it seems the liquidity is missing and spreads are widened a lot. But I believe all brokers are experiencing that, some are just hiding that fact and will put a massive slippage on orders placed during news events.
• Armada is licensed in Estonia and states that client funds are segregated. However there are not many more details available to make you feel safe about your money. However I withdrew my funds several times and money was sent to my bank account within 48 hours (and usually faster). 

I know this posts sounds like an advertisement, but honestly in my opinion Armada earned it. And to clearly note this: those are my personal observations, I am not connected with Armada in any way and this post is not intended to recommend Armada services to anyone. 

Hacked?

Remember my post about loss averaging / martingale systems? The system that I shown as one of the most popular among many traders on GBPUSD blew up the account in the recent days:

If you will find another, very promising martingale system, remember it will end in the same way. Unless you have really (!!) deep pockets (in that case it will end up like this later).

MyFxBook - Community Outlook

During the weekend I have moved all my trading strategies into the GO! Standard account. My broker have introduced commission cashback depending on the total volume of traded in one account. In order to do it I implemented a mechanism that allows multiple system to trade on one account. Each system tracks its own PnL and amount of money available. It was a rough start on Monday, but I am looking towards a much better performance during the year.

But I wanted to briefly write about a feature I have recently discovered on MyFxBook: Community Outlook. This is calculating the amount of positions in each directions on real, verified accounts monitored by MyFxBook. So it provides an insight into what thousands of traders are doing, updated every 60-seconds!! I even though about writing an application that would calculate this, but thanks to the Community Outlook it is free. Why it is so important? Ok, here is a sample screenshot:

Most of the retail traders are loosing money, this is a fact. So why not trade in the opposite direction than they do? What is the direction? Look at the Community Outlook. For example, a sharp up move on the GBPUSD (yellow line), during which the % of long vs. short fallen constantly until reaching new high. This picture also perfectly shows how many people are using counter trade loss averaging systems on GBPUSD, as you can see, during the first retracement most of the short positions were closed (blue ellipses). In my opinion, this at some point will cause the GBPUSD to break out from the consolidation in which it is for the past two, three years... Counter trend traders do not have unlimited amount of money in their pockets and eventually a move wiping all those counter trend positions will happen and again, this will strengthen the breakout and more margin calls which will strengthen the move again and again... 

But anyway, I have written a C# application what will store this community outlook statistics in a MS SQL database for all pairs on a 5, 15 minutes and 60 minutes basis. After a few months, once I it will build up some history I will build a trading system based on this.. This should be something, really looking forward to it :)