ZuluTrade Complete Guide (2023)

Let me guess. You are looking for information about ZuluTrade because:

• You have already tried ZuluTrade but it didn’t work out as hoped and you can’t figure out why
• You are eager to start but you also realize you need to pursue the matter a little more

In both cases, you ended up in the right place.

With this ZuluTrade guide you are about to discover step by step how to effectively use ZuluTrade: from the platform characteristics, to the best strategies to research and use the Signal Providers, to the account management, this guide is a mine of useful information, simple and easy to use.

The best part?

That you can follow all this guide with a up and working Demo Account, with the same features of a real one.

With the InvestinGoal journey you started from the first introductory Investing for Dummies guide, then you discovered what is Social Trading and Copy Trading, and you also passed through the guide which revealed the market that can let the magic happen, the Forex Market.

Basically, you have received everything you need to finally start investing in first person with Zulu Trade.

So, let’s begin.

ZuluTrade Tutorial – Complete ZuluTrade Guide for beginners

First, let’s discover here what is ZuluTrade and its main characteristics.

Do you want to discover other platforms like ZuluTrade, for example eToro, Naga Markets or Darwinex? Check out our Top 10 of the best Social Trading platforms.

What is ZuluTrade?

Zulu Trade is a financial services company. It operates the largest Copy Trading platform in the world (click here to open a Demo Account and see it in a few seconds). He was born in 2007 from an idea by Leon Yohai, a greek entrepreneur born in 1974, active for some time in various online and mobile successful businesses.

Leon Yohai is himself a trader since 2000. Due to the increasing work commitments, Leon realized he could not follow the markets as he wanted. The idea was to create a system in which other traders, which could instead follow it full-time, could trade in his place, while maintaining full control and full ownership of his account and his capital.

Thus was born the premise of ZuluTrade.com.

Founded in 2007, ZuluTrade is the world’s first and one of the most important online and mobile social trading platform. Over 50 Brokers worldwide utilize ZuluTrade’s cutting edge technology to provide their clients the ability of Social Trading.

ZuluTrade aims to connect Users (Followers) and Traders (Signal Providers) through innovative and Proprietary Technology using advanced performance tools.

ZuluTrade service is provided by Triple A Experts SA – EU Regulated, Licence # 2/540/17.2.2010.

In 2017, ZuluTrade has joined forces with Formax Group. Both ZuluTrade and Formax share a vision to become the world‘s largest one-stop financial community that can meet investment requirements by offering customer-focused solutions while also building the largest Social Trading Community in the globe!

ZuluTrade operated his HQ offices at Athens, Greece where the RnD and product team is located and also operates commercial offices at UK and Japan (source wikipedia).

Why Zulu Trade?

ZuluTrade has grown and it has expanded its business network so much that today it supports about 40 brokers worldwide. Among all, the “favorite” is certainly AAAFX, for the simple fact that this brokerage company is owned by Zulu Trade itself (read here our post about the best broker ZuluTrade).

Regarding Europe, the situation is a bit different, following the regulatory update to MiFID II.

“With what broker is more convenient to open a ZuluTrade account?”.

The answer is AAAFX. It’s the broker directly integrated into the Zulu Trade systems, and being also the broker used by the majority of Signal Providers, the replication process is even more instantaneous and precise. In addition, Zulu Trade has a refund policy for those very few trades in which the replication had some problems. With all the other brokers you can seek reimbursement only for transactions closed with a loss worse than the Signal Provider’s one, while with AAAFX you can ask it even for those with a smaller profit than the Signal Provider’s one.

The best ZuluTrade feature is surely the depth of analysis with which a user can study each Signal Provider performance. You can find a long series of precise data about his operational strategy, performance, and even the behavior of the Signal Provider. You can even go to study each trade executed by a Signal Provider, discovering all the evolution that operation had from opening to closing.

Another winning feature of this company is the advanced customization possibility of the replication settings. As we will see in the next lessons, the investor has the ability to manage and modify at will every detail of its portfolio of Signal Providers and of its strategy.

In this factors Zulu Trade has no equal.

If you want to dig deeper into the reasons about why chosing Zulu Trade, here’s our detailed review and opinion.

What do I replicate using ZuluTrade?

For several years this company has proposed only one type replication, before finally offering an alternative.

The first method, the principal, and the one on which is still based on the whole system of performance evaluation, is the fixed replication of the Signal Provider’s signals, choosing by yourself the market exposure you want to keep, regardless of the trader choices.

Let me explain. A trader may decide to open a trade with 10 lots, then another one with 20 lots, then another one with 5 lots. This will not affect you, because how many lots (or mini or micro lots) will be used on your account will be decided by you, and that value will be constant.

For example, if you have decided that the trader operations must be replicated in your account with an exposure of 1 minilot each, the trader may also vary with lot size, but in your account you will have one and only one minilot each operation.

In addition to lots and exposure a Signal Provider may use, in Forex we use PIPs to measure gains and losses, and precisely PIPs are the elements that Zulu Trade will show you to make you understand the Trader’s performance. How much these PIPs will be worth, you will decide it then.

Zulu Trade even provides an automatic Signal Providers ranking. Their performances are studied and analyzed using an algorithm of its property called Zulurank, which returns an automatic traders ranking, based on their performance.

The second method used by the investor is instead the “Pro-Rata” or proportional replication.

In this case, the follower must decide in what proportion he wants to follow the trading orders of the Signal Provider, with clear reference to the Lot Size he uses. By varying the Lot Size selected by the trader, the Lot Size by which the operation will be replicated on the investor’s account will vary proportionally.

With this feature it is now possible to precisely follow those traders who vary the Lot Size of their trade, fully respecting their strategy and their money management.

As we will see, however, this is still a new feature in ZuluTrade (even though fully functional). In fact, the performance shown on the Signal Providers’ personal profiles are based only on the number of PIPs gained or lost, and do not yet take into account their actual value, and the relative performance, according to the Lot Size used.

The only way is to personally view the details of the trades executed by the Signal Provider, to assess precisely the Lot Size used, making use also of Excel.

Why this course?

The first problem for the vast majority of new investors is the over-reliance on the information of the Zulurank ranking page.

Despite their efforts, this ranking is not reliable in order to make meaningful investment choices. The algorithm tends to favor too much those Signal Providers that have good performance only in the short term.

Those who have exaggerated performance in the short term are usually able to reach such numbers only by exaggerating, which means using very dangerous trading strategies, such as martingale, as we have seen.

Therefore, knowing how to analyze independently a Signal Provider’s performance and strategies is one of the most important factors for a good investment with Social Trading.

We talk more about this in our post How to make money with ZuluTrade. The truth, a post we really suggest you to read before proceeding.

Apart from this, Zulu Trade is a platform where the follower investor has really the ability to manage his own fund in a professional manner. The portfolio is fully customizable, and you can also customize the Signal Provider’s operation by setting specific parameters chosen by you.

The Social Trading side of ZuluTrade

In addition to the technical tools, Zulu Trade is composed of a Social part. Investors can vote and comment directly on the work of a Signal Provider, so that all other investors can see the opinions of others and have an idea. Also, you can see exactly what other follower investors like you are doing.

We have, however, warned you about the risk of basing decisions on others’ opinions. Assuming that the majority of people who vote and invests is experienced (or more likely NOT experienced) as you, what is the point to trust their opinion?

Better to have your own opinion, based on definite and professional information.

Comments can be useful in some cases, when they make you aware of some aspects perhaps you had not been paying attention, but Zulu Trade is really the most complete and professional platform for those who want to become proficient in the use and analysis of performance data.

To facilitate the understanding of the use of its platform, this company offers the opportunity to experience the full service with a demo account. In the first chapter we will deal precisely with this: how to best open a demo account with ZuluTrade.

ZuluTrade Demo account for practicing

Now, let’s starts from the first lesson on how to open and especially manage your practice account, because yes, with ZuluTrade you can even start demo.

We have created a whole separated tutorial for the opening and best practices.

You just need to go to that post, open you virtual account, set it up in a couple of clicks, and then come back here.

Go now and read our ZuluTrade demo account guide.

See you here in a couple of minutes.

How the Zulu Platform works and how to use it

Do you want to find out how the ZuluTrade platform works, and all its features?

No problem.

In this chapter, and all the related articles, you’ll find everything you need to use the ZuluTrade platform at its best.

Great, let’s begin.

In this post, we will examine the “My Account“ section, the page you access to when you open a ZuluTrade Demo Account.

PLEASE NOTE: The ZuluTrade platform isn’t the same across the whole world. European clients have a different one, in compliance with the new MiFID regulations on Copy Trading. This tutorial was written for the “universal” platform, i.e. the Non-European version, with all features active and available.

Support Access

Before we even begin, we’d like to point out the support that ZuluTrade itself offers its customers.

As we shall see, going forward with this tutorial, one of ZuluTrade’s strengths, is the support it provides, which can be defined as ready, refined and multilingual.

Inside the My Account section there are three very useful elements for beginners:

1. Quick Tour: to quickly see the essential elements you can use within the section;
2. Simplified Guide: to access a quick but very exhaustive and well translated guide, with all the features ZuluTrade has to offer;
3. Chat: multilingual and available within practically all areas of ZuluTrade; you can immediately contact specialized personnel in order to have clarifications.

“My account” Section Data

The first block of information we will analyse is at the top of the My Account section. This element is very important as it shows data relating to your account’s progress. Given its importance you will always find it at the top of the My Account area, regardless of the section you are in.

At the top left you can find your profile picture, taken from Facebook, if you registered through the Social Network. At the top right of the profile picture is your name, and the identification code of that specific account is under the name. You may have multiple accounts all registered to the same name, so in this drop-down window you can see a list of all your accounts and you can easily switch between them clicking on each one.

To the right of your photo you can find some important data on your capital:

• Capital: This item reports the value of your capital added to the value of the currently open market transactions.
  Let’s clarify this concept with an example: if your balance is 10,000 dollars, but there are two open market transactions that are losing 100 dollars each, the Capital value will be of $9,800. With this value, you are aware at a glance how much you would profit or lose by closing all positions at any given time.
• Balance: The amount of capital excluding the currently open positions. Basically, what you see in the Balance field is how much you still have on your account’s “card”, while what you see in the Capital field is what you would have if you had to close all open positions.
• Margin: Useful when there are open transactions, it reports the amount of margin blocked by the broker to allow opening those trades, as we already saw in the Forex course on trading margins. The capital blocked by the broker depends on the leverage you are working with. The higher the leverage, the lower the required margin.
• Free Margin: The amount of free and available capital to open new positions. This value is obtained by calculating the difference between the “Capital” value and the one in the “Margin” field.
• PnL (Profits and Losses): How much money you have actually earned in the last 30 days, considering only the closed transactions, which have already been accounted for. If you have earned $1,000 with closed and accounted transactions, but you currently have open positions for -2,000 dollars, this value would still return $1,000,000.
• Margin Call -o- Meter: This bar, which shows a percentage value, calculates the account’s risk of exposure to the Margin Call. A calculation is made assuming the worst case scenario, based on the historical data held by ZuluTrade of the traders you have decided to follow, replicating their operations within your portfolio. The formula for the calculation is a proprietary formula of ZuluTrade.
  ZuluTrade considers values ​​below 50% as safe. Values ​​ranging from 50% to 100% are still acceptable, and values above 100% are remarkably risky.

The Margin Call -o- Meter is a very interesting data point, even though it is a calculation of ZuluTrade based on, as we shall see, approximate performance details. However, it is useful to always look at it after having tweaked the settings, especially at the beginning.

If you are an inexperienced investor, you can use the suggestions provided by ZuluTrade as a reference. Honestly, all investors, over time, based on their risk propensity and the desired returns, should give these percentages the appropriate importance.

My Account Control Panel

WARNING! The Traders shown in this tutorial have been chosen randomly, they have not been studied or evaluated. The fact they are in this course does not mean that they should be followed or that we recommend following them.

To access the control panel, click on the icon on the far left of the screen, the one that looks like an odometer. This is the most important area for the performance analysis of your Social Trading account.

In the left section of the page, you can see the situation of the entire portfolio, under it, is the list of connected and enabled Traders (Signal Providers) within it.

Both for the entire portfolio and for each individual trader you can see the amount of money based on the open positions, how much you earned for positions which have already been closed at that moment (the same as the “PnL” data seen before), and the ROI value, or Return on Investment, i.e. how much the individual Signal Provider is making you profit in percentage, or how much the entire portfolio is profiting. For instance, a trader who has made you earn $100 on an account which started from $1,000 will have a ROI of 10%.

You can also find an indication of the Follow Mode, that is, if you are following them in “pro-rate” or “fixed” mode, and the gear icon to access the quick settings section.

The gear setting icon allows you to:

• Change the capital you wish to invest on the Trader;
• Change the compensation mode (pro-rate or fixed);
• Change the maximum number of open positions;
• Vary the function of ZuluGuard;
• Activate and customize the capital protection notification;
• Remove the trader.

In any case, clicking on the portfolio or on a single Signal Provider, the Equity Line chart will be shown on the right. This Equity Line only reports the account’s performance based on the closed and accounted transactions, without including the trend based on the currently open operations.

NOTE: all the graphs of this type on ZuluTrade provide the possibility to use the mouse to select areas of the graph to be enlarged. Simply click and drag the cursor identifying the area you want to enlarge.

With the time keys you can choose what data segment to observe, switching from all the available data, to last year only, or the last 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, or even the last 7 days, or day.

There are only two buttons left:

• Follow Trader, which takes you to the Traders page, where you can find the list of all Signal Providers,
• And the Simulate My Portfolio, which is a very interesting function.

We will cover both in other chapters.

TRADING Section

Now, let’s skip the Settings tab, and let’s open the Trade tab in the “My Account” section.

We must admit, this is the section we know the least. With Social Trading, there is no need to trade personally, because you choose the traders who will do it for you.

In any case, ZuluTrade allows you to open positions personally. Here, you will find all the available currency pairs on Forex and CFDs, with the relative values ​​of Money and Letter (Ask and Bid). Clicking on Buy or Sell, a pop up window will open, to insert the order’s details.

ZuluTrade offers you two types of visualizations, an advanced one, which is what you see in the above image, where each box contains a currency pair with the possibility to click on the sale and purchase price, with the spread in the centre, reported in pips between Money and Letter (the only cost for your trade).

Each box can be positioned wherever you want, thanks to the Drag & Drop technology, to obtain the most suitable configuration for your trades.

With the simple view, shown in the image below, you only have the complete list of tradable instruments on ZuluTrade. With this visualization too, clicking on money or letter will open the window to place the order.

Unless you are a professional trader, we highly recommend NOT trying to trade on your own. Trading is a very complex activity, which is why you can make a lot of money. It’s better to get the professionals to do it for you, replicating their orders.

POSITION Section

Let’s move to the Position Tab.

Within this section of the ZuluTrade “My account” area you are given a detail on open trades and pending orders, i.e. those already entered in the system that will go to market only if certain conditions, normally the price, are met.

– Open positions

Within the open positions section, you will find the list and details of the open and not yet closed transactions, divided by Signal Providers.

Here, you can find the following details:

• the currency pair of the trade
• if it’s a buy or sell
• the lot size of the operation
• the precise date on which it was opened
• the entry price
• the stop price set by the Signal Provider
• the profit price
• how much the asset is trading for at that moment
• The current profit or loss, both in pips and in money.

An important thing to point out, is that all operations can be sorted based on each of the above-listed parameters, in either ascending or descending order. You can indulge yourself in ordering all trades according to their opening date, or maybe by entry price, or by current profit. It only depends on the analysis you’re carrying out at any given moment.

Among the other important features within the Open Positions section, you can find:

• “Close All”: On the top right. Clicking it will automatically close all trades opened by that Signal Provider.
• “Lock Trade”: The lock icon shown next to each open trade: Using this feature, you will disconnect the trade from the trader who generated it. Any operation made by the Signal Provider on that trade will no longer be replicated on your account. This means you will have to manually manage the operation. Obviously, if Take Profits and Stop Losses have been set, those will be kept. Activating the lock blocks the trader’s control over the individual “locked” trade, but you will continue to replicate all his other operations, new and old. As already mentioned, if you wish to manually manage trades, be careful.
• X: Also next to open trade, it permanently closes, manually, only the single trade.

At the top of the box you will also find a summary of the overall situation of the open positions, and you can choose whether to view all operations or filter them by Signal Provider, or by Details, which lists the operations without dividing them by Signal Provider, or by Summary, which displays the operations grouped according to the currency pairs we are currently operating on.

In the Summary option, given a currency pair, such as EUR/USD, we can see how many transactions are currently opened, what are the lot sizes used on the total transactions, if the overall exposure is Long or Short (2 Long trades for one lot and 1 Short Trade for one lot give a net exposure of one Long Lot), what is the average price, and the total profit or loss in pips and money.

To finish with this section, there is also a “Close all open positions” button to close all the open trades made by all Signal Providers (this button is for critical situations), and the On-Off button for the sound effects played when opening and closing positions.

– Order

Checking the Order sub-section will display the list of pending orders entered by the Trader.

Pending orders are orders that will be automatically executed when certain price levels are met. In this sub-section you can see if there are any and what their parameters are. Like before, this section also allows to sort the orders according to the value of each column, both in ascending and descending order.

Just like the open trades section, you can also close all pending orders by clicking on the button at the top right “Close all pending orders”, or you can act on the individual operation by clicking on the lock icon or on the “X”, the functioning and the logics are the same as just described above.

Within these two macro areas, open positions and orders, you will find the Sound on-off lever. This function enables or disables the acoustic notifications triggered when something in the section changes, because new trades are added to the list.

My account HISTORY

Let’s see the last tab, and one of the most interesting ones, of this chapter dedicated to the “My account” section of ZuluTrade, the History tab.

This Tab is divided into several subsections: History, Trade History, Cancelled Orders Log. Thanks to this section you will be able to track and analyse the historical trend of your account.

– History

This section displays a chart and a list of operations. The chart in the History section is completely customizable.

You can decide the time intervals to be analysed, whether it should display all the available data, or just the data from last year, down to the data from the last day. By clicking on the calendar symbol and selecting the start and end date, you can also view a specific period.

In the drop-down menu on the right, above the chart, you can see the data trend of the entire account by clicking on Total Profit, or go to a histogram chart to see the profits or losses of each Trader who operated on your account.

By checking the name of the single trader in the drop-down menu, you can customize your analysis for a single Signal Provider or for multiple Traders, depending on the type of analysis you want to perform. By selecting traders like this, you will have a graphical representation of their performance, not a histogram, but an equity line, much more representative of the historical performance of their operations.

You can also select the “Active Traders” option, to only see the performances of traders you have copied on your account.

Using the Currency drop-down menu, positioned further to the right, you can further limit the analysis data, asking the system to only display data relating to one or more specific currency pairs.

Below the chart, on the left, are three buttons. Let’s analyse the first two:

• Profit in pips;
• Profit in (Euro, Dollars – the currency you have chosen for your account).

By selecting one of these two buttons you can see the evolution of the profits on your account, in Euro or in pips, and acting on the previous drop-down menu you can decide whether to see these values ​​directly as a total on your account, or by contribution from the various traders, each represented by their equity lines.

Selecting the pip profits and just one trader, we can see an interesting detail.

Two lines appear on the graph, a blue one and an orange one. The blue line represents the pips earned or lost from trader’s operations, the orange one is the Follower line, i.e. the pips you have earned or lost on your account. The difference may depend on slippage, or by many other factors, as we shall see later.

In any case, knowing how to view this data is very important.

If you click on the monthly button, the performance of the account or of the individual traders will be merged to a monthly basis and will be identified by a histogram. These are two very interesting ways to analyse equally interesting data.

Below the Equity chart you can find the list of operations performed on your account, grouped by all Signal Providers, or divided by each one. Clicking on the tab of a specific trader will flag it, as in the Moderator drop-down menu earlier.

Finally, as you can see, you can download the history data as an Excel file.

Settings Section – How to set up the platform

Do you want to figure out how to use ZuluTrade’s platform settings to setup your account, the Signal Providers and your trader portfolio?

We’ll go through it all in this lesson!

Let’s begin.

The “Settings” section of ZuluTrade is definitely the most important area in the “My Account” section, since this is where we’ll operate to setup our strategy and our portfolio.

PLEASE NOTE: The ZuluTrade platform isn’t the same across the whole world. European clients have a different one, in compliance with the new MiFID regulations on Copy Trading. This course was written using the “universal” platform, i.e. The Non-European one, which provides all the available features.

ZuluTrade Portfolio Settings

From the settings section, we can operate in Portfolio and Automator mode. Let’s start by taking a detailed look at the portfolio section, which is the one that opens by default when accessing the “My Account” settings.

As you can see from the image below, a specific box is dedicated to each Trader (Signal Provider) you have decided to include in your portfolio.

At the far left of this box is a check box, which allows you to select one or more Traders, to Enable/Disable or Remove Traders in bulk with the buttons below.

The Enable/Disable Trader feature allows you to enable or disable the automatic replication of a Trader’s operations, still keeping the Signal Provider within your portfolio. Selecting the Remove Trader buttons however, you will completely remove the Trader from your portfolio.

ZuluTrade Trader Box Settings

Now let’s take a good look at the settings bar for each individual trader:

– ZuluGuard Shield

First, we find the ZuluGuard shield, an interesting automatic defence system, which will be explained in the next post, along with other interesting tools.

– Calculation Method: Fixed or Pro-Rata

Next to the shield icon, you can choose the Calculation Method for each trader. You can decide between Fixed, where you set the lot size per operation, or Pro-Rata, which allows you to set the percentage to use to replicate the lot size of the trader you are following.

Immediately after is the Lot/Pro-Rata % box, where you can enter the Lot Size you wish to assign to that Signal Provider, if you’re using the Fixed method, or the percentage, if using the Pro-Rata replication method.

– Max Open Trades

The next element is the Max Open Trades, where you can set the maximum number of transactions opened simultaneously that the Signal Provider can maintain. If you don’ set any limits, the infinity symbol is displayed, which indicates that all the operations opened by the trader on his account will be replicated. This function can become quite useful when using the Fixed calculation method, but it loses effectiveness with the Pro-Rata replication method, as you have already set a percentage of lots.

– ZuluTrade Padlock

Further to the right is a padlock icon. The lock mechanism blocks the replication of the trader’s signals. By activating the lock, no operation from the trader will be replicated to your account. For the ones that are already opened, no further signals will be received from the trader, and will therefore be closed only when the stop loss or take profit is reached, or if you manually intervene to close them. It’s as if you have “suspended” the activity of the trader within your portfolio.

– Clock Feature

The clock icon (time filter), allows you to set times periods when you don’t want ZuluTrade to replicate the operations of that particular Trader (Signal Provider). Let’s say you do not want to copy operations at night, all you have to do is just filter out the night hours using the boxes in the following pop up window.

– Pencil Feature – Advanced Settings for Currencies

Finally, we have the Pencil icon (Advanced Settings for Currencies). Clicking on the icon will show a pop-up window allowing you to use all the options seen up until now, applying them to a specific currency pair traded by the Signal Provider.

Actually, accessing the advanced currencies filter, you’ll have many more filters that we’ll briefly describe below.

– Max Lot

Max Lot: You can set a replication limit for operations when a maximum lot size per specific currency is reached. If, for instance, you set the limit of 0.5 lots on EUR/USD, once the sum limit for the open transactions on the EUR/USD currency has been reached, only the trader’s activities for trades that do not concern the EUR/USD currency will be replicated.

– Limit and Stop

Limit and Stop: With these two boxes you can intervene to modify the replication of the Trader’s operations. By setting a value in the Limit box, such as 30, ZuluTrade will use that level every time to decide when to close a profiting trade, despite what the Trader (formerly Signal Provider) decides to do. Each of these trades will be closed when 30 pips are reached. The same happens for the Stop signal. Regardless of what the Trader will do and the stop levels he is using, his replicated trades will be stopped when reaching the pip level indicated in this setting. Obviously, as with the lot size setting, the limit and stop levels are to be considered for a single currency pair.

– ZuluTrade Safe Feature

Both boxes have a key next to them. This is the icon for the Safe feature. The Safe feature is one of the best protection techniques ZuluTrade has in store. By activating the Safe feature, ZuluTrade considers and compares, from time to time, the most secure value between those set by the Trader and those set by you here in the “My Account” section. For instance, if you set a Stop at -30 pip, activating the Safe function, and the Signal Provider decides to close the trade at -20 pips, ZuluTrade will use the stop level of the trader, as it is considered safer. If, on the other hand, the trader wants to close the trade at -50 pips, ZuluTrade will use your -30 pips as the stop level, as it is safer than -50 pips. The same logic works for the Limit level with the Safe function. The closest and therefore easier to reach and safer limit levels will be used by ZuluTrade to close trades, excluding the farthest levels, which are therefore at greater risk of not being reached.

– Trailing Stop, Pip Spacing, Compensation Pip

What follows are three features: The “Cogwheel” in the Stop column, represents the “Trailing Stop” feature, the “Offset pips” function, and finally the “Pip spacing” feature. These three functions have the ability to change the operating strategy set by the trader drastically and, if managed knowledgeably, they can give great satisfactions. This is why we decided to dedicate an entire chapter to them in the next lesson.

To conclude with the advanced currencies filters, we have to explain the utility of the “sheet” icon on the far right.

By clicking the icon, you can extend all the settings of the single currency pair to all the currencies on ZuluTrade used by the Trader. Basically, it turns the filter you’ve just set for a currency pair into a general settings filter for the trader. Which isn’t bad for an evolved operability!

At the top right of the sections we have just described there are two buttons that refer to two interesting sections, the “Forex Profit Simulator” and “My lists”. We’ll see these sections in detail later.

Below these settings boxes, the “Follow Trader” button forwards us to the Signal Provider classification page, which we shall see later on.

WARNING!

To save  the changes you have made to ZuluTrade, go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Save Advanced Settings” button. You wouldn’t want to work for several minutes and then lose everything just because you closed the page forgetting to save?

If, on the other hand, you aren’t satisfied with the work you’ve done, and you’d like to return to the original settings, just click on the “Reset Changes” button, to return to the last saved settings.

ZuluTrade Account Settings

Up until now, we have seen the settings you can work on as regards the portfolio in the “My Account” section. Now, let’s move on to see the Copy Trading account settings.

– Disable the Reception of New Signals

You can decide whether to “switch on” or “switch off” the account using the “Disable the reception of new signals” button. Suppose you’d like to stop replicating signals for a while, but you know you’d like to resume with the same settings whenever possible. Just disable the replication of all signals and reactivate it when you want to.

– Lot Format

“Lot format” is a very important setting. Remember when you set the Lot Size in the Trader settings box? There, you were entering the values ​​using standard lots as a unit of measurement. In case you prefer to use mini-lots or micro-lots as a unit of measurement, you just have to come here and change the selection from this drop-down menu. All the lot size values ​​in your settings will then be expressed according to that unit of measurement.

Be very careful! If you think you are using micro-lots, and assign 5 of them to a Signal Provider, while you’re actually using Standard Lots without noticing, it could hurt your capital badly.

– Maximum Open Lots

“Maximum Open Lots” is the same function we have already seen, with which you can set a maximum volume limit in the total transactions of the portfolio, after which ZuluTrade will stop replicating trades, but this time it will be applied to the entire account, not just to a single Trader or to a single currency pair. Suppose you set 5 standard lots to Maximum Open Lots, and you have three Signal Providers all operating with a standard lot size. The first trader opens 3 trades, the second Signal Provider opens 2, and the third one opens another 2. ZuluTrade will only replicate the operations of the first two Traders, because their trades will reach the maximum allowed volume.

– Indicative Leverage

“Indicative Leverage” is an indication of financial leverage, but be careful not to get confused. This parameter doesn’t indicate the Leverage of your trading account with your broker, it only indicates the leverage value that ZuluTrade will use to do some of its automatic calculations. Remember the Margin Call -o- Meter, which reports the possibility for your account to incur in a margin call based on your settings? One of the fundamental elements of that calculation depends on this leverage value.

Give it a try. Create a portfolio and check the percentage on the bar. Then, come back here and increase the leverage value, for instance from 100:1 to 200:1. Check the percentage again. It should certainly have decreased. This is because the higher the leverage, the less the broker asks for margin for each transaction, so the chances of not having enough margin (margin call) decrease. This being said, you might be tempted to select the maximum value of 1000:1 (yes, one thousand to one), but you should definitely avoid this. The leverage value ZuluTrade uses for its calculations is one thing, the leverage value that your broker actually provides you is another. Here, you should enter the actual leverage value the broker will provide you when opening a Live account. If you’ll be using AAAFX, the leverage they provide is 100:1, so you can enter this value even now you’re working with a demo account.

– Monitor My Account

“Monitor My Account” is another safety level promoted by ZuluTrade to try to reduce the risks of system malfunction as much as possible. Even though it’s an issue we personally never encountered recently, it still could happen. ZuluTrade lists one by one what these hitches could be.

Basically, a replication problem is when the Signal Provider does something with a trade in his account, but that action is not replicated on the open trade in “My account” (for example, the trader closes the trade but the one in the Investor account, stays open, or the trader changes the stop loss, or take profit, but the changes aren’t made on the investor’s account). Generally, the causes of these problems depend on temporary connectivity issues, or on the diversity of prices quoted by various brokers, which in some cases can create a conflict between the Signal Provider’s trade and the Follower Investor’s trade. Flagging this box, you allow ZuluTrade to try to close or restore the same situation of the Signal Provider every time the system realizes that something did not go as planned. In some cases, for some types of brokers, this function is mandatory.

– Avoid Hedging

The term Avoid Hedging, refers to the practice of opening two or more operations on the same account on the same instrument with opposite directions. Buying a lot of EUR/USD and simultaneously selling one is considered Hedging. Some brokers do not allow this, others do, but it depends on the broker and it is important that you know yours allows it ahead of time. For Social Trading, hedging is essential.

Suppose a Trader’s strategy does not provide for it, so he will open operations on a particular currency pair always in the same direction. The problem is that there could be another Trader who plans to open a trade on the same currency pair, but in the opposite direction. So your broker must be able to accept both orders, otherwise it will only replicate orders from the same direction (long or short) of the first trade that was opened. Suppose that, despite this warning, you still want to avoid hedging on your account, because your live account broker doesn’t allow it.

By flagging “Avoid Hedging” you ask ZuluTrade to treat your demo account exactly as if it were a real live account with a broker who doesn’t allow hedging. Now, you can test out your portfolio, understanding whether hedging is really essential for Social Trading.

– Favourite Time Zone

Finally, we can set our preferred time zone. The time zone we select here will be used to indicate every date on the site, particularly regarding the temporal details of the trades (opening date, closing date, etc). Personally, we have always been comfortable using the UTC time zone, which is the time zone that dictates the trading day throughout the world, which makes things easier to follow, but you can easily choose another setting, just remember what it is and make sure you can easily manage the data. Suppose you want to avoid Traders who operate at night. You have to be sure of the times and the time zones in use, or you could easily get confused when you see the details of their operations.

ZuluTrade Automator Settings

The Automator section of the ZuluTrade settings simply confirms that ZuluTrade is one of the best Copy Trading platforms in the world as regards the customization of the account.

In addition to the many settings we have just seen in the portfolio section, which can be defined somewhat “partially static” (like setting a lot size or a percentage of replication, editing stop losses or take profits), through the Automator function you can also create dynamic rules for portfolio management .

The incredible thing about this section is it provides the possibility to create a portfolio management only a programmer would be able to set up. As a matter of fact, ZuluTrade, through the Automator feature, provides users with a graphic interface which eliminates the barriers of programming.

You just have to know what you want to happen on your account when certain conditions occur and set it all up.

For instance, you can decide that, after a certain profit, the percentage of Pro-Rata assigned to the trader is automatically increased, or that other trades shouldn’t be opened if the total number of opened trades is higher than a certain value, etc.

Imagination is the only real limit here.

The management of the feature is very simple, we start by creating a rule which we must provide with a name and possibly a description.

The mechanism is quite traditional for computer routines. First, a condition is verified, which is set as an “IF” statement, among the conditions proposed by ZuluTrade. If the system verifies the set condition is true, which can be one or more, the consequence or action is called, identified with a “THEN” statement, which are also chosen among the available ones.

In the image below we have, trivially, set a profit condition reached on the account, in Euro, so that if 10,000 Euro are exceeded, will trigger the closure of all the trades in the account.

With these two lessons we have finished our tour through all the functions available in the “My account” section.

But, wait a moment. Dealing with all the features and tools, we have left some out, to deal with in another chapter.

Well, the next chapter. In the next chapter, we’ll find out how the new ZuluGuard, Trailing Stop and Offset Pip features work.

ZuluTrade special trading tools

In the previous lesson we looked at all the parameters on which we can intervene in the “Settings” section of our Zulutrade investment account.

We have, however, left behind four tools that are worth a separate discussion, and which are the last four Zulutrade creations.

We are talking about the ZuluGuard, Offset pips, Pips Spacing and Trailing Stop functions. Let’s start from the latter.

TRAILING STOP

The trailing stop is one of the latest additions made by Zulutrade to its already professional and very adaptable platform.

We need to start by explaining what a trailing stop is in the first place, and how it works.

The trailing stop is a dynamic and automatic stop which is used with the aim of leaving profits run and cutting losses.

When you set a normal stop loss you are deciding at what level the transaction will be closed, then what will be the potential loss.

With a trailing stop instead things get more interesting. For example, if you set a trailing stop at 50 pips, and your trade goes in the right direction and arrives at a profit of 50 pips, the system, at that point, should have automatically moved your stop at break even, by pulling it, while the price was rising, one pip at a time for 50 pips towards your market entry price. If the trade continues to increase profit, let’s say to 70 pips, the system would shift automatically stop at +20 pips profit.

In practice, when the trade is opened with the trailing stop order entered, as soon as the trade gains even one single pip the stop will be pulled of one pip, so at that point it would no longer stop at -50 pips, but at -49. And if the trade would earn another pip, the stop would move to -48, and so on.

The interesting thing is that the trailing stop follows the price every time it moves increasing our profit, but on the other hand, when it comes back against our direction, then the stop remains firm to the last price level touched. In our example, if after gaining 2 pips the price had gone back 10 pips, our stop would still have been at -48 pips from the entry price.

Trailing stop for helping profits

The trailing stop is a stop level that dynamically follows price in its progression. If the price goes in the right direction of the trade, consequently the stop will automatically move, with a distance level decided by you, as in the example 50 pips. If the price should go against the trade, the stop remains fixed and would be activated if the price would go in the opposite direction of the amount of pips decided by you. This is a classic example of what is meant by “Cut the losses and let the profits run.”

The trailing stop, if properly set, could potentially follow the development of the trade and properly close the operation when the trend movement would be actually finished. And the best thing is that it would do everything automatically, no need for you to manually change the stop loss level.

Zulutrade gives you the chance to use this interesting trading tool with the operations of your Signal Providers.

To use this function, you must obviously go in the “Settings” tab. In the Stop column you can find also a “T” symbol next to the “Safe” button. That is the Trailing Stop function.

How does this work? Let’s say you want all the operations of that Signal Provider to have a trailing stop at 50 pips. Just enter 50 in the appropriate box, and click on the “T”, so that it changes color. From that moment on, the Trailing Stop is activated, and each new trade will have this function.

The Trailing stop function can be also implemented per individual transaction. Of course, having to act on a single operation, you have to go to in the “Positions” tab of your account.

Once inside, you can access the trailing stop function for each transaction by clicking on the corresponding stop loss value. A window will pop up where you can interact in different ways with the stop loss.

With Stop Value you can enter the price level at which you want the trade to be stopped out.

With Stop Pips, instead of deciding the price level, you can decide the amount of pips you want the stop loss to be.

Finally, you can enable or disable Trailing Stop function with On/Off, and decide the number of pips.

Once you have made your decision, simply press “Set”, and Zulutrade will save and use your new settings.

To use with caution

To use a trailing stop is definitely a great opportunity to try to improve the performance and the risk protection, but keep in mind two things:

1) You have to know how to use logically and with informed basis. If used too much, and without judgment, is likely to cause more harm than good. Always remember that the strategy of a serious trader has been built according to the statistics. Often, it’s the statistics that says that the stop level should be that number of pips, and that it must remain fixed, because only this way you can get statistically the performance of high profit and low risk to which the strategy aims.

2) In addition to point 1, if you use a too tight trailing stop, you risks to block too early the trade’s life. On one hand you could save some pip of stop, and this could be a good thing. But on the other hand, almost certainly, you will also stop some of the operations that would have made a lot of pips in profit. Don’t underestimate this point. Doing this type of work involves changing strongly the risk/return parameters of a strategy. For many traders and many strategies the risk/return is everything, even more important than when, how and why to open a trade.

For these reasons, in order to properly use the trailing stop, you need a certain level of in-depth knowledge of the Signal Provider’s strategy. Without that it would be dangerous because of the above.

In the Investing Gold section we treat this topic in depth, in order to give way to reason in the right manner, and understand if and how it’s appropriate to use the trailing stop.

OFFSET PIPS

Let move to Offset Pips, by far the newest Zulutrade innovation.

With this function, you can choose to replicate the trades of a Signal Provider at a different price from the Signal Provider’s one, for a number of pips corresponding to the value you entered.

To explain it better, if you enter -10 of Offset Pips and the Signal Provider opens a trade, that trade will not be immediately replicated into your account, but Zulutrade will wait to see if the trade reaches -10 pips of drawdown, and then, only then, it will open the trade also in your account. Of course, your trade opening price at that point will not be the same as the Signal Provider’s one.

Conversely, with a positive value of +10, if the Signal Provider’s trade should reach +10 pips profit, Zulutrade will proceed with the replication by opening that trade on your account.

So, when you work negative, trades are opened at a better price than the Signal Provider’s one, vice versa, when you work positive, at a worse price.

To choose whether to work in positive or negative, and for how many pips, you must be familiar with the Signal Provider ‘s operation, so you can optimize it. If you don’t know it in detail, rather than optimize it you run the same risks discussed a little while ago about trailing stop.

Always remember that a serious trader has tested its strategy on long and complete historical data, so the strategy is already optimized to work on different scenarios. This does not mean that we cannot possibly improve it a little bit with our settings, but you definitely have to proceed with caution and after investigation.

PIPS SPACING

Accessible only from the custom settings for the currency pair, Pips Spacing is the absolute last tool implemented by ZuluTrade.

This new feature may serve to limit the actions of a Signal Provider, and it works especially well with all those traders who tend to open several trade all at the same or similar price level.

Sometimes it’s about strategy, which tells that once an entry setup is found, the trader should enter the market with multiple operations at the same level to close them later at different time or targets. Many other times instead, once a entry setup is found, the Signal Provider places several operations at the same level simply to increase the number of commissions earned through the replication of other investors, without a real strategic reason (we talked about it in this post on Social Trading risk factor).

The operation is simple. Given that there is already an open operation in the market, you just have to set the minimum number of pips of difference that the entry price of the new trade must have form the entry price of the position already in the market. Same story for a pending order.

Let’s say we have a trade open at 1.5000 and a Pip Spacing of 20 pips. If the Signal Provider should open any type of trade, whether it is Long or Short, spot or pending, with a price ranging between 1.4980 and 1.5020, those trades will not be replicated on your account. Should he open trades with price from 1.5021 upwards or 1.4979 downwards, those trades will be replicated on your account.

The ZULUGUARD tool

Zuluguard is one of the Zulutrade attempts to provide the inexperienced follower investor with an automatic risk management tool. The Zuluguard assumption is very good and its usefulness is that we can automate some actions, authorizing Zulutrade to do them for us.

To use the function just click on the orange shield, and it a pop-up window with the setup panel will open.

The parameters on which Zuluguard works are three: the Capital Protection, the Single Trade Protection, the Max Open Trade Protection.

For each of these three parameters you can choose a specific protection level identified by a number, at which you can tell Zulutrade to carry up to 3 programmed actions:

– Close all trader’s trade: when reaching the security level, Zuluguard will be activated and all the Signal Provider’s operations will be closed permanently.

– Disable the trader: the trader will be disabled and his signals will no longer be replicated. However, if you have not selected the first option too, his open trades will not be closed and you will need to handle them.

– Replace the trader with equal or better ZuluRanked trader: the senseless option. If, and only if, you have selected also the second option that disconnects the Signal Provider from your account, you can select the third and let ZuluTrade automatically propose a new Signal Provider for you, in your portfolio. If so, then you will have to enable him by choosing the lot size and the other possible settings. Obviously, it’s the Zuluguard option you never have to use if you want to become a professional and base your choices on your expertise.

The Zuluguard’s intervention parameters

Let’s see now one by one the three parameters on which ZuluGuard can be activated.

– Capital Protection

This tool works as a trailing stop, but used on all your capital, therefore on the balance of money earned through that Signal Provider. As seen earlier, the trailing stop is a preset dynamic stop, that moves following the increase in profits, but on the contrary, doesn’t ever go back in case of losses.

In practice, it’s the maximum amount of money you are willing to lose with the Signal Provider. Let’s make an example. You have set a $ 1,000 Capital Protection. The trader works and earns $ 2,000. But then he begins to lose, making you lose as well $ 1,500, therefore with a balance went from 2,000 to 5,00. Hold on! This is what would have happened without the Capital Protection. With the security level at $ 1,000 instead, Zulutrade would have acted (in this case it’s recommended making it close all positions) as soon as the amount of the fluctuating losses, ie opened, had reached -1,000 $. This means that you would not have found the balance to $ 500, but at $ 1,000 (2,000-1,000 = 1,000).

In addition, it’s a dynamic stop. Let’s assume the trader does not make you lose $ 1,000, but instead he makes you earn $ 2,000 more, bringing the total to $ 4,000. At this point, the worst-case scenario in which you may come across would be to find the account at 3,000 (4,000 reached – 1,000 of Capital Protection), because, should that threshold been reached, Zuluguard will intervene to protect your profits.

Should be noted that you have to consider not only how many pips the Signal Provider lose, but above all what is the lot size you have assigned, because the money you actually lose will depend on both factors.

But be careful, to use ​​too tight values could trigger ZuluGuard too early and unnecessarily. It’s a tool to be used with caution. You will definitely need to consider the classic Max Drawdown value (not the Zulutrade’s one) to use it wisely.

– Single trade protection

This type of ZuluGuard protection acts on each trade opened by the Signal Provider. The number of pips you choose as Single Trade Protection will be the maximum number of pips that ZuluGuard will tolerate before acting according to your choices.

In practice it’s something like the Safe Stop, the option we saw in the Settings chapter. In this case, however, not only you can close that operation, but even all of them, if not directly disconnecting the trader.

– Max Open Trades Protectio

We know that, in a Signal Provider’s strategy, the maximum number of transactions kept open simultaneously is a fundamental value in order to understand the level of risk.

If you have observed the data of at least one year, we’ll be entitled to think that statistically the Max Open Trades value should be that one, and that it should not change, provided that the Signal Provider doesn’t say differently. Or maybe there can be a Trader’s communication in which he declare precisely how many trades he opens simultaneously in his strategy.

In cases like this, why not use this ZuluGuard protection tool? If the Signal Provider should suddenly increase even of one of his Max Open Trade value, it would mean he’s no longer following his own strategy, or that something very unusual and potentially dangerous is happening, so why not begin with turning him off, and then run to see what’s going on?

ZuluGuard takes action, and also warns you

Among all the three security parameters on which ZuluGuard work, the only actions we use are the first two, “close all trader’s trade” or “disable the Trader.” The third definitely not.

The most interesting thing though, is that when ZuluGuard is activated, you can choose to be notified by email. In this way, even if you’re not the PC, you can quickly go from your smartphone to control what is happening. Especially if you use the “disable the trader” function, the operations will not be closed, but the trader will be temporarily disconnected, in order to prevent him maybe to open more trades, and you will be notified so you can assess the situation, and perhaps find that it has been merely a misunderstanding (it’s only an example, but indeed possible).

In any case, ZuluGuard is a tool that for sure can be useful, but that should be used with caution.

To conclude, for those who are not able to reason about what values should be appropriate, Zulutrade offers its own automatic calculations, to facilitate the choice, which in certain cases may also be an appropriate choice, since in this case is based on clear and simple data.

How the ZuluRank works and how to use it

Curious to know how the ZuluTrade Trader ranking, the ZuluRank and all the search tools work?

You’re in the right places.

The ZuluTrade Traders page collects all, and I do mean all, of the thousands of available Signal Providers on this platform.

In the following chapters of this course we will explore all the ways in which you can work with this long list, including all research methods, which are very important to find the traders with the features we are interested in.

In this chapter, we will do a roundup of all the values you see listed for each Signal Provider.

The trader’s personal details

Let’s start from the left.

First, there is the trader’s picture and his full name. Photos and names are not items to underestimate. Recognizing the trader’s photo is important, but what matters most is to identify precisely his name.

Some Signal Providers (who actually are not at all real Signal Providers) have created fake Signal Provider users with the same picture and a very similar name to that of popular and well followed Signal Providers. Their hope is that some naive investors will get confused when they will decide to follow those famous Signal Providers, linking mistakenly to the fake traders. You can copy the picture, but you cannot copy the name, so pay always close attention to the full name of the trader that interest you.

The number you find in the left of the picture is a simple reference, which once served only to identify the rank of the Signal Provider according to the Zulurank, the ZuluTrade algorithm that created an automatic classification. Today it is not so. The Zulurank ranking has not disappeared completely, but the way to access it has changed.

Directly on the photo there is the flag of the trader’s origin country, while under the name are reported the first words of the strategy description directly supplied by the trader himself.

Below that we have the space in which it’s shown with what broker the trader has opened his own trading account. It’s very common to see written “ZuluTrade” instead of a broker’s name. This doesn’t mean that ZuluTrade has also become a broker. This is the result of a new project implemented by the company, called ZuluTrade+, in which the Signal Providers have the ability to trade directly from the ZuluTrade platform, no need to have an account with another broker and a platform (for example an MT4). The securities and exchange rates prices are provided by AAAFX, the broker owned by ZuluTrade. So, in these cases, instead of the broker’s name you will find written “ZuluTrade,” instead of, for example, AAAFX.

Next to the broker’s name there’s a place where you can find up to 10 different symbols. Let’s see what they mean and what their value may be:

– Green dollar: Signal Provider is using a Live account. This means that the trader is committing his own money on his strategy, and it could be a reason for confidence. However, you should not give too much weight to this fact. Remember that now you can open live accounts with only a few tens of dollars. A Signal Provider may open an account with very little money just to get this symbol and gain confidence, despite his skills could not be that great.

– Blue dollar: Signal Provider is using a Demo account and he is following himself with a live account. The considerations of this option are the same as before.

– ZS (ZuluScripts): this trader is operating on ZuluTrade+, using Zuluscripts. This feature allows the trader to host his automatic EA trading strategy directly on the ZuluTrade’s server. In theory, this system should make the signals’ replication even more fluid and above all instantaneous.

– ZuluTrading API: the Signal Provider is sending and managing signals using his own trading program that communicates with ZuluTrade through its API. Basically, instead of accessing his own Signal Provider account at ZuluTrade and handling the task from there, the trader is using his own program (we do not know which one) that can communicate with ZuluTrade thanks to the API of the latter.

– FIFO Rule: the Signal Provider trades in accordance with the FIFO rule, which stands for First In First Out (The first one that comes in is the first that comes out). This rule is even mandatory at certain broker. In practice, if the trader opened two operations, he cannot close the second until he closed the first. Complying to the FIFO rule, from a certain point of view, can certainly be an indication of security of his strategy, although in some cases it becomes limiting. This symbol in each case identifies also a trader who does not apply hedging techniques, i.e. with operations of opposite sign on the same instrument at the same time (eg, long and short at the same time on EUR / USD)

– Star: as we will see in the chapters on the Signal Provider’s profile, follower investors with live accounts have the opportunity to vote on the trader’s performance on 3 parameters, with grades ranging from 1 to 5 stars. Who has an average of at least 4 stars is awarded with this “Star” recognition by ZuluTrade.

– Hedging: in trading there are different types of hedging, we have seen one a few lines above. Another way instead consists in trading taking advantage of the positive and negative correlations that various pairs may have between them. Using these techniques in an appropriate manner can lead to a good risk and drawdown management. ZuluTrade, thanks to its sophisticated system of performance analysis, is able to understand who uses (or maybe just try to use) this type of strategies.

– Medal: traders with this medal are the Zuluveteran. The award is given only to those traders who have traded associated with ZuluTrade for at least 2 years, and that, in their Signal Provider careers, have always maintained on average a high ranking position.

– Calendar release: to trade when the economic news are released by the news agencies can be very profitable, as well as very dangerous, because the volatility may also increase dramatically, and sometimes explode out of control. It all depends of course on the type of strategy employed by the trader. This symbol identifies those Signal Providers that have historically done a lot of operations in conjunction with the release of this news.

– EA (Expert Advisor): the trader has an account with a broker, we don’t know if demo or live. What we do know is that he uses the MetaTrader Trading platform 4 (MT4), and he works using an Expert Advisor loaded on his own platform.

Let’s move a little to the right to look at the box with a sort of stylized Equity Line inside. Click on one of them. This will open a pop-up window that will show you all the available chart. We will analyze this chart in the chapter on the Signal Provider’s profile.

The performance details

Now there are a series of specific values divided into columns. Let’s see them one by one.

– PIPS: The number of pips gained by the Signal Provider based on closed transactions only. This value doesn’t show all those who are winning or losing at that time.

– TRADES: The number of positions opened so far throughout his career.

– ROI: Return on Investment. This is one of the values ​​you want to pay more attention to, since it’s NOT what you think. The one shown by ZuluTrade is an annualized ROI, not the percentage of profit earned up to that point on the total starting balance. This ZuluTrade ROI is a very different value, and knowing what really expresses can make a difference.

The ZuluTrade ROI is calculated by annualizing the classic ROI, but only of the last three recorded months. For example, if in the last 3 months, the trader has made ​​a real ROI of 25% (but again, in just the last 3 months), ZuluTrade will report an annualized ROI of 100%, as he suppose the Signal Provider will obtain the same performance for the next 9 months to follow.

By assumption, a trader that for 9 consecutive months has racked up only losses, losing 90% of the capital, but that in the last three months has been able to recover something, creating an increase of 25% (but from the lowest drawdown point, not from the starting capital), it will show a ROI of 100% according to the ZuluTrade parameters. This means you don’t have to trust to much this value, for both the reasons mentioned above.

– AVG PIPS: average pips. The average of pips earned for each trade. This is another value that can give us a first indication of the general trading strategy type implemented by the trader. As we know from the lesson on the Signal Provider’s characteristics, traders who have a low average value is because they use short-term strategies, therefore the aim is to collect quickly a few pips, while, on the other hand, if they have high average values ​​is because the strategy is long-term and the trades last long in order to obtain many pips for each operation (but for both cases is not always true).

– WIN%: the percentage of transactions closed with profit by the Signal Providers, which of course includes the transactions closed only and not those that are still open.

– MAX DD%: Maximum Drawdown percentage. They take the Max Drawdown value of the Signal Provider performance, then they divide it by the total number of pips gained so far, they multiply it by 100, and finally you get this Max Drawdown% value.

Pay close attention. It might seem as the most important and the most reliable data to understand the safety degree of a trader, but in reality it is not, for one main reasons: the Max Drawdown value considered by ZuluTrade is not the classical one, but another which in some cases could be confusing and show a situation far from reality.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything at once. We will explain everything in detail in the lesson dedicated to the ZuluTrade drawdown.

– MAX DD PIPS: the Max DD value but reported this time in pips, as we said just a moment ago.

– MAX OPEN TRADES: The maximum number of operations the Signal Provider has kept open at the same time on his account. As we will see, this is for sure one of the most important data, because it can give us an important help in understanding the risk degree the trader sustains in the course of his trading, and that therefore will be sustained also by us.

As a general rule, to have many open operations at the same time increases the risk, so traders who have high values ​​in this field should be analyzed more carefully. It’s not certain, however, that a high number is necessarily synonymous with high risk, because it depends on the type of strategy used by the Signal Provider. There are strategies where a high value for Max Open Trades don’t effect the risk degree, others instead where it’s almost synonymous with imminent failure.

– AVG TRADE TIME: Average Trade Time. How long usually does the trader keep open his operations before closing them? This is another value that can tell us a lot about the Signal Provider’s trading style. Do you remember the different traders’ categories? With this value you can definitely get a first idea of ​​the type of operating style of a Signal Provider.

Don’t think, however, that it’s a data that identifies with certainty a trading style, because this is a simple average of all values. A value of 3 hours could make you believe that you have found a day trader, but maybe the Signal Provider uses two strategies, a long-term trades that last more than one day, and another with trades that last only a few minutes. Or, the Signal Provider may use only short duration trades, but at the same time keep a few trades open for a very long time to raise the average. So, look at this data to get an idea, but then go to analyze in detail the reason for this value.

– WEEKS: here we find the Signal Provider’s age, that is since how many weeks this trader began operate with his account connected to ZuluTrade. As already said, in order to have a series of data sufficiently large to be able to implement a serious analysis, it’s recommended that the Signal Provider has at least one year of age, ie 52 weeks.

This doesn’t mean that anyone who is one year old is automatically a good Signal Provider to follow, but simply that now his performance history is long enough to be able to reason effectively about his strategy and his potential.

– FOLLOWERS: The last of this series are probably the most useless of all. It indicated the number of follower investors, both with demo and live account, that are following that Signal Provider.

If all of these followers were renowned experts in finance, investment and Forex trading, then surely I would give some weight to them, therefore if they follow that trader there may be some good reasons. But since this is not the case, and most follower investors are ordinary people, who not only don’t recognize the risks, but that don’t know them completely, I don’t see why I should follow the herd and stay in the flock.

As in life, even in Social Trading there’s the rule “If all do the same thing, do differently and most likely you will do better.” In any case, it doesn’t mean that the much-followed Signal Providers should be excluded immediately, absolutely not. The concept is that the number of follower must not conditionate you in your choices, that have to be based on your professional knowledge and objective analysis of the Signal Provider’s risks and potential.

Finally, what should preclude a Signal Provider from opening several demo accounts as a follower investor, and auto-follow his own Signal Provider profile in order to get his first followers?

– AMOUNT FOLLOWING: this value shows the total balance amount of all the Live accounts (only live this time) that are following the Signal Provider. It’s a data that, in a sense, leaves things as they are, because it doesn’t tell us how much money actually the trader moves when he opens a transaction. I can have a million dollars in the account, and thus resulting in the total Amount Following with my million, but maybe I’m just following the Signal Provider with a micro lot.

In principle, for this value also the concept is the same expressed little while ago for Followers. We don’t have to be interested in what others do.

– LIVE FOLLOWERS PROFIT: how much the followers investors who followed the Signal Provider have gained so far. A curious data, but certainly not very useful.

– The last two buttons remains at the bottom right in the box of each Signal Provider.

With the balloons icon you can open a pop-up window, where you can read the latest comments left on the personal trader profile from the follower investors who are following him with a Live account.

The Follow button, instead, is the one to begin to follow the operation of that particular trader, therefore to link your account to his. This button is not only in this section, but in different places in the ZuluTrade platform, so there is no need for you to return here every time you decide to follow someone.

Conclusion

This Trader page is the starting point of your research and analysis experience with the Signal Provider attractive for your portfolio. There are several features on this page, some interesting, some really useful, or rather fundamental, one among all the advanced search tool, which works by filtering the entire list according to the search parameters you entered.

To follow a logical and ordered order of the topics we will cover the rest of this important page in other sections of the course.

Now, since we have begun to see the data that describes the Signal Provider, let’s start to see their personal profile, where we can find everything we need, and something more too.

Guide to the analysis of ZuluTrade Signal Provider

Would you like to know how to discover all the secrets of a ZuluTrade Trader (or Signal Provider)?

You’re in the right place.

We have created for you the definitive guide to the ZuluTrade Signal Providers, with everything you need to know about them and how to find the truly professional and deserving ones.

Let’s suppose you are in the ZuluTrade Traders page we just saw, and that you have found a ZuluTrade Signal Provider that may interest you.

Click on the name or logo, and open his profile to discover every detail of his performances. You can find so much information in the ZuluTrade traders‘ personal profiles, that we had to divide this section into three chapters.

These three lessons are a ZuluTrade Signal Provider Guide, where you’ll have the chance to find everything you need to know to be able to choose the right Zulu Traders.

ZuluTrade Signal Provider – Profile

The upper part of a Signal Provider’s personal profile

We have already seen some data and values ​in the Traders page, but there are plenty of new ones for which we must pay great attention.

Let’s start with the top and left part of the ZuluTrade Signal Provider’s profile. Right on top we have a top size logo, the exact name of the Signal Provider, and the flag of the country from where is sending his signals.

Beside we have the current ranking position, the space for the 8 symbols seen in the retail in the ZuluTrade Traders page:

– Green dollar: Signal Provider is using a Live account.

– Blue dollar: Signal Provider is using a Demo account and has a Live account linked to his Signal Provider.

– ZS (ZuluScripts): this Signal Provider is operating on ZuluTrade+, using Zuluscripts. This feature allows the ZuluTrade Signal Provider to host his automatic EA trading strategy directly on the ZuluTrade’s server. In theory, this system should make the signals’ replication even more fluid and above all instantaneous.

– EA (Expert Advisor): the Signal Provider is trading with the MetaTrader Trading platform 4 (MT4), and he works using an Expert Advisor loaded on his own platform.

– ZuluTrading API: the Signal Provider is sending and managing signals using his own trading program that communicates with ZuluTrade through its API.

– FIFO Rule: the Signal Provider trades in accordance with the FIFO rule and also he does not use hedging techniques on the same instrument (eg, long and short at the same time on EUR / USD)

– Star: Signal Providers who received an average of 4 stars out of 5 in the voting made ​​by investors followers with live accounts.

– Hedging: the Signal Provider is using Hedging strategies with correlated currency pairs.

– Medal: Zulu traders who have traded associated with ZuluTrade for at least 2 years, and that, in their Signal Provider careers, have always maintained on average a high ranking position, are identified as Zuluveteran.

– Calendar release: it identify those Signal Providers who historically have done a lot of operations in conjunction with the release of economic news.

Always beside, in the upper part of the profile, you can find the symbol of the broker the Signal Provider is using to send his signals (or the “ZuluTrade” symbol as seen in the previous chapter), and, further to the right, two buttons to go directly to the prior or antecedent Signal Provider in the Zulurank ranking.

Below we have the panel that the Signal Provider may use for his direct communications from his personal profile, which can be of two types:

– The Strategy Description, where the Signal Provider, in his own words, describes the strategy used, and sometimes he also gives operational advice to best follow it to obtain the most;

– The Updates, in which, instead, he can respond to questions or comments from his follower investors, or simply give updates on his trading evolution. Even though it might be written in a language you don’t know, there’s the Google Translate feature of directly incorporated in the profile page, to help you understand. In addition, to the follower investors who follow him with live account is given the opportunity to ask the Signal Provider to provide an update, as you can see from the requests.

The lateral side with the performance details

Now you can pass to look at the whole left side of this page.

Under the Follow button, with which you can link the Signal Provider to your account, you can find a long list of values:

– Amount Following: The total balance amount of all the Live accounts (only live) that are following the Signal Provider. Already seen and commented in the Traders page chapter.

– Profit: The number of pips gained or lost by the Signal Provider considering the closed positions only. Missing in fact the situation of win and lost pips with the open positions.

– Open positions: in addition to the previous “Profit” value, from here you can see immediately if the Signal Provider have any open trades at the moment, and if they are losing or gaining.

– Weeks: the number of weeks in which the Zulu trader began to trade connected to ZuluTrade, recording his performance data.

– Followers: The number of follower investors, with both demo and live account, that are following the Signal Provider.

– ROI: Return On Investment (ROI). Analyzed in the Traders page chapter, it’s not the classic ROI value you could imagine. They consider the true ROI, but only of the last 3 months, and then they annualize it, in practice they multiply it by four. You don’t ever have to think that the more this number is big the more the Signal Provider’s strategy is good.

– Trades: The number of transactions closed so far from that Signal Provider. It’s a value which is useful to divide by the number of weeks, in order to find an average value of trades made ​​by this trader.

– Winning Trades: the actual number of trades closed with profit, and the relative percentage of the total operations. Moving the mouse over it there is another very useful indicator, that is the Signal Provider’s winning percentage for each specific currency pair.

– Average pips/trade: is the average value of pips earned for each trade. You saw it in the previous chapter, it can give us a great first overview of the type of strategy employed by the Signal Provider, but not necessarily revealing. Holding the mouse over the value you can observe other three. Average Drawdown shows the average of all the Drawdown accumulated by the Signal Provider. As we will see, ZuluTrade calculates the drawdown in a particular way, so it’s very important to understand the reasons of the calculation, otherwise you may confuse the information a data can give you. We also find an Average Best Trade Week, which indicates the average amount of pips of all the week best trades; it can be a useful data, but it’s more important to know how often certain types of profits are made. Same thing for Average Weekly Worst Trade, except that is considering the worst trade of each week.

– Average Trade Time: The average time duration of a trade, whether it’s closed with a profit or with a loss. Already seen, it’s an element that can give us a strong indication of the trading type carried out by the Signal Provider, but it should not stop us from continuing the analysis, since things could be different from what it seems.

– Maximum Drawdown: the most important value for portfolio construction, but the most controversial when considered in the version shown by ZuluTrade. We will see it in detail to understand exactly what this value displays, and for what it can be helpful. In any case, here is shown the maximum value, both in percentage terms and in absolute terms as number of pips, considering the entire Signal Provider’s life. Placing the mouse over the value, other 3 value will appear, which show the maximum drawdown always as a percentage, but considering three different time periods: the last year, the last 6 months last 3 months.

– Max Open Trades: an data already treated more than once. This is the maximum number of trades that the Signal Provider has kept open his account simultaneously. Moving the mouse over we find other 3 versions, reporting the last year, the last six months and the last 3 months.

– Worst Trade: the worst trade in the Signal Provider’s history. We must be careful though because this is not the worst value of a closed losing transaction, but the biggest loss a single open trade reached. In practice, it’s the worst drawdown that a ZuluTrade Signal Provider has suffered from a single operation.

– Best Trade: here instead it’s different. It doesn’t show the largest profit a Signal Provider reached with an open position, but the largest profit in pips achieved at position closed.

– Has Live Followers: Yes or No. Here ZuluTrade tells you if there are follower investors, but only among those with a real account, that are actually following the signals of the Signal Provider.

Necessary Minimum Equity: another of the ZuluTrade automatic calculations to try to help the follower investors in the management of their portfolios. This value attempts to answer the question: “How much should I have in the account if I want to follow this Signal Provider, assigning him a micro lot, to be sure I can replicate everything correctly?”. For beginners this could be a good starting point to avoid making disasters. It’s a value calculated taking into account the Signal Provider’s historical data, in particular the Max Open Trade number, and the Max Drawdown, for the simple reason that these two are the main values ​​that affect the amount of margin required to be able to replicate all of the Signal Provider’s trade based on his strategy. As already said, this can be a useful value for the beginners, but not for the more experienced ones, because in this calculation is always used the ZuluTrade Max Drawdown, in its particular way, not the classic one, and, as we will see, this involves the possibility of significant differences in the validity of this value.

– Viewed: like the video viewing on Youtube, it shows how many times this Signal Provider profile has been visited by the users.

Profit made from following this trader

At this point we can move to the block in his personal profile immediately below. There’s the “Profit Made From This Following Trader”.

This is one of those details that cannot be used for analysis purposes, but that it’s good to have a confirmation of the validity and strength of the Social Trading as an investment vehicle. In this box are shown the information about the major follower investors that are following that ZuluTrade Signal Provider, and that are gaining the most amount of money.

You have their logo with the nationality, their account’s code number, the name of the broker used, and in the middle the precise amount of money earned up to that point thanks to that Signal Provider. In addition, some of these follower investors have turn their profile public, and you can click on their name to explore it and find out more information about their history.

Also Known As & Video

Going further down in his personal profile, on the left there’s the “Also Known As” block. If the trader had opened other Signal Provider profiles with other names, they will be shown here in this block.

This factor can show you some interesting aspects about a Zulu trader (or presumed). Some Signal Providers use some other profiles, because they need legitimately to try some aspects regarding the replication on the investor’s profiles. Some may have started with a single profile, but since they didn’t know the application of the ZuluTrade rules for Signal Provider, they have found themselves in trouble so they decided to start over with a new and clean profile.

Cases may be several. What you need to be especially careful about are those Signal Providers who have dozens of different profiles. In those cases you have to be careful and perk up your ears, because most probably it’s only a trader in search of commissions. Some of these take the same risky strategy, and they replicate it with small variations on different profiles, so that periodically some accounts among all may do fine and attract naive investors. Obviously you have to be wary of such traders, for the simple fact that they are not trader at all.

Video

The ZuluTrade Signal Providers are encouraged to provide on their profile a video about their style, their strategy or that give advice. ZuluTrade rewards those who provide such a video giving them an higher position in the ZuluRank ranking. In any case, here is where you can find and view the ZuluTrade Signal Provider’s video.

Other information

At the bottom of the page there’s the last information block of a ZuluTrade Signal Provider profile. According to his characteristics, in this block you can find some references, but there are not necessarily all.

– Trader Status indicates if the Signal Provider at the moment is online, therefore connected to ZuluTrade.

– In case the Signal Provider does not use directly the ZuluTrade platform to trade, in Trader Platform will be indicated what type of platform the ZuluTrade Signal Provider is using, and if he use Expert Advisors.

– Correlated Pairs: ie the percentage of transactions that have been kept open simultaneously on correlated currency pairs. This can be interesting, because strategies based on currency pairs correlation can be very intelligent and mitigate the risk. Clearly, we need to understand if the Signal Provider use them consciously, with a knowledge of the correlations, or if he’s simply unaware of it because he opens up many trade on many exchanges.

– Hedging Strategy: When you hold open simultaneously a long trade and a short trade on the same currency exchange, that is called hedging strategy. This value indicates the percentage of trades that were opened with these characteristics. This is also a strategy that can be very wise if used with the right knowledge and the right strategy. But first, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a Signal Provider that follows this kind of practice is necessarily an expert. One should always consider the quality of his performances.

– Open Positions Duration: If a Signal Provider has a Long Term Strategy, and tends to keep open the operations for a long time to ride the trend, this value shows the longest time for which a trade has been left open on the Signal Provider’s account.

– Calendar Trader is the written version of the personal profile symbol “C” we have seen previously. It indicates a Signal Provider that has a tendency to open up his trade in proximity of major economic news released during the day and that can cause major changes in volatility.

– Important Disclaimer: ZuluTrade warns us of an important fact for the truthfulness of our analysis. That is, it tells us that all the data and the performance we can see on every profile, arise solely from operations that the Signal Provider has performed since it was connected to the ZuluTrade platform. In addition, the Signal Provider may not in any way alter his performance, or provide historical data to show different statistics. Everything you see here is the result only of what actually could be replicated across the ZuluTrade platform. Therefore, there is no tricks nor deceptions.

– Last Updated: How old is the data you are analyzing? Here you can see it, and we can say that ZuluTrade updates its data several times a day.

Well, We’ve already talked a lot, but we are only at the beginning of this section. Let’s continue with the next chapter about the charts analysis.

Signal provider guide – PART 2

In this second lesson about the ZuluTrade Signal Provider we will analyze one of the most important parts for graphical analysis of the Signal Providers’ performance in ZuluTrade.

We can find it in the “Check My Moves!” section, divided in different Tab. Let’s look at each one of them.

The Profit Tab

It begins, of course, from the graphical representation of what a Signal Provider gained in terms of PIP, that is his Equity Line. Let’s not jump to conclusions, however, because this Equity Line is not the classic one, as you might think.

First thing to say, the trend is considered day to day, so the values ​​are calculated as a summation of all the daily operations. Second, this equity does not show the pips balance evolution for the closed positions only each day.

This is an hybrid Equity Line. Every day the pips accumulated (or lost) with all the closed positions are summed together, and from that value is subtracted the worst drawdown of the entire account on that day, in terms of pips.

To give an example. Let’s suppose a Signal Provider in a day has 10 open trades, and he closes one of them with a profit of 30 pips, while the others remain open. However, during the day some trade went at a loss, and at some point all open trades have brought the account balance to reach a maximum total loss of -100 pips. Well, ZuluTrade will consider the trade closed with 30 pips in profit, and will subtracts the -100 pips value of drawdown that the trader’s account really had to suffer in its worst moment. So: 30 – 100 = -70 pips. For that day the trader’s Equity Line on his personal profile will show a decrease of -70 pips.

Below left you will find 2 buttons. By clicking on Open Trades some circles with a numbers inside will appear on the Equity. Those numbers represent the number of operations simultaneously kept open during those moments of his trading activities that ZuluTrade identified as salient. Critical Events instead will show what were the times when the Signal Provider has traded in conjunction with major world events. By passing over them with the mouse you will be able to know what these events were.

Below these two buttons you have the chance to view the Equity Line filtered only for one or more currency pairs on which the Signal Provider operated, so that you can see graphically the results of the operations for each foreign currency exchange rate, or for a combination of several.

Last point, the time bar on the right, which will remain in a fixed position for virtually all the other tabs in this profile section. By clicking on the different options you can display the data according to the selected period. Obviously, the selected period will be the last recorded, not from the beginning.

1y will be the last year of operations, 6m the last six months of operations, and so on until the last day. Note that, when passing to the next tab, if by chance you should change the time period of this bar, thus updating all the data, you will always be sent back to this Equity tab.

Performance Tab

This is for sure one of the more dense tab for what it concerns the level of information that can be found in this profile section.

– Monthly PnL

It starts with the Monthly PnL (Monthly profit and losses). It’s a histogram chart, divided per months, which shows the number of pips earned or lost each month. The orange bar shows the profit or loss for the positions closed only during the month, the blue one instead considers the transactions not yet closed, kept open across one month to the next one (unrealized PnL = profits and losses not materialized).

It means that, if at the stroke of the end of the month, the Signal Provider still had some open positions, the amount of pips of those positions will be shown in the blue column. For example, suppose a Signal Provider has gained 300 pips during the month, and at the stroke of the month he has closed all the operations, except for one, in loss of -300 pips. The chart will show an orange column of 300 pips and a blue instead of -300 pips.

This system has been designed by ZuluTrade to unmask immediately those Signal Provider who had the dangerous habit to never close operations in loss, but if and only they were back in profit. Without the blue column you would find only the always positive orange columns, because with the closed positions the trader was actually earning every month, but you would not see graphically the enormous amount of pips in loss that the Signal Provider is carrying with all the open positions never closed.

With the button below “Include Unrealized PnL” you have the chance to see the chart with two columns, orange and blue, and with the “Closed Trades Only” see only the orange closed trades.

– Trade Volume

Here’s another histogram. In the abscissa axis you always have time, divided by months, on the ordinate, on the other hand you have the number of transactions made ​​by the Signal Provider. With this chart you can not only see how many transactions this trader performs on average every month, if he is constant or not, or if he has changed over time, you can also see how many of these operations, month by month, went into profit, loss, or break-even point.

Each bar in fact is divided according to the three colors. Blue for losses, orange for profits, gray for transactions closed at break even. The amplitude of each color is proportional to the number of operations with respect to the total of the month. In addition, by passing over each columns’ sector you can see the actual number of operations.

– By Pair

Another histogram chart. Along the abscissa axis you can find the currency exchange rates upon which the Signal Provider has worked so far, on the ordinate instead of the amount of pips gained or lost for each currency pair.

Below you can find a pop-up menu that lets you select one or more of these pairs, to see with an Equity Line (this time a classic one) the actual Signal Provider’s profits and losses trend on a particular exchange. This is a great way to figure out where the Signal Provider do his best, and where it suffers a bit more.

– Best-Worst

This is one of the charts I always like to look very carefully when I visit a Signal Provider’s profile. Along the abscissa axis you can find the time, but this time divided by weeks, while in the ordinates you have the pips.

The chart shows, for each week, the amount of pips of the best closed operation and the amount of pips of the worst drawdown suffered from a transaction. All points of the best trades are joined by an orange line, all points of the worst drawdown are joine by a blue line. Usually the orange line will be completely above zero, but not necessarily, because if by chance a Signal Provider had opened, let’s say, only two operations in that week, and both were at a loss, then inevitably the best operation will still be a trade at a loss, the one that obviously has lost less. But the opposite it’s not the same way. There may be just two closings in one week, both in winning, but being the blue line a joining of the worst drawdown, not of worst closures, the line will still be below zero, always indicating the worst drawdown between the two.

We can say that, in principle, the conformations we prefer are those with constant and rather flat lines, where the blue is very tight and the orange very wide instead. This would be primarily an indication of solid and consistent strategy of the Signal Provider. Second and more importantly, it means that, in principle, the trader is inclined to cut losses early and let his profits run instead, one of the best characteristics you might find in trading.

– Ranking

In this chart you can see the evolution of the Signal Provider’s ranking position over time.

As already mentioned, the ZuluRank ranking, despite the ZuluTrade efforts, is definitely not a reliable model in order to support and strengthen your decisions. In addition, as you will see, there are often really exaggerated shocks in the Signal Provider’s positioning, which are usually recovered almost immediately in the short term.

Although of ranking, however, they are too exaggerated movements, thus demonstrating the unreliability of this tool. However, it may be a good item to satisfy your curiosity and see the history of the Signal Provider.

Trading Tab

In the Trading Tab we can analyze pie charts. There are two and can be selected by the 2 buttons at the bottom left.

The first “Pairs” graphically shows the amount of trade carried out by the Signal Provider for each currency pair compared to the total. The bigger the piece of cake, the greater the number of trades executed.

Moving the mouse over it, you can also see the actual number of transactions on that exchange rate. Here you can see graphically what is the preferred Signal Provider’s pairs, if he works homogeneously on different ones, or he’s specialized only on some.

The second one is even more interesting. Time “Trading Timezone” in fact shows when these trades were opened. The operations are grouped according to the four time phases of the market, also called market sessions.

You have the Asian session, involving mainly Japan, China, Australia and New Zealand, there’s the European morning session involving all the countries of the euro area, there’s the American session, which intersects with the afternoon European session, creating the period of maximum trading volume of the day, there is finally the American afternoon session, where volumes fall since in Europe is evening and the markets are closed.

These are the main segments where traders can trade on the basis of their strategy, and obviously based on the country in which they live. It’s interesting to understand how a trader also behave considering this schedule. Some Signal Provider use strategies that include the opening and closing of the transactions during the evening hours, of the European or American session, that is where the volatility and volumes are lower and the risks, in principle, can be minor, as minor of course will also be the pips for each operation. This chart is a great way to understand quickly and clearly where a Signal Provider concentrates his activities.

Drawdown Tab

Here we are at the most important personal profile tab, the tab in which you can start to understand the risk degree that a Signal Provider may have in your portfolio.

We have already seen in the previous Social Trading course what Drawdown is and what its versions and its meanings may be. We will see here only what ZuluTrade shows you in this tab, and in lesson 9 we will discuss in detail what Drawdown can reveal you for your analysis and strategy.

Speaking of the first “Profit” tab we have said that Equity Line was a hybrid between two lines, a classic equity line and a drawdown line. Here, in this tab, you can see the two lines completely separate.

The orange line is a classic Equity Line, which shows ie the balance trend of pips gained or lost for the closed operations only.

The blue line shows instead the pip balance evolution considering the real fluctuations the account has suffered basis on all the transactions kept open during the day, and reporting each day the worst moment of total loss of the account.

Let’s suppose a Signal Provider has accumulated so far a total of 1000 pips, and that in a trading day he closes one of his operations with a profit of 30 pips, while continuing to keep open all the others. Let’s suppose then that during that day, considering all the open transactions on the account, both winning and losing, at a certain point the trader has reached a maximum loss, ie a maximum drawdown, of -100 pips.

Well, on that day the orange line will show an increase of 30 pips, so a point at 1030 pips, while the blue line shows a point at 900 pips, which is the amount of pips the account has actually reached at some point.

The blue line therefore shows the real life of the account, because it considers where the balance really went according to the accumulated losses with open positions each day.

At first glance, with these assumptions, it seems the only interesting line to look at is the blue one. But actually, you will obtain a real benefit by looking at the two lines together and combining their analysis.

Slippage Tab

We have already seen briefly in the Social Trading course what slippage is.

Slippage is nothing more than the difference between the price at which the Signal Provider’s operation has been executed, and the price at which the investor’s one has been executed instead.

The reasons why this happens are usually two: one, the Signal Provider’s broker and the follower investor’s broker were quoting slightly different prices when the trade has been executed; two, in the passing of time, even if minimal, even if of a few hundredths of second, between the execution of the Signal Provider’s order, and the replica on the follower’s account, the price has changed, therefore the follower’s broker cannot guarantee the same price the trader had, but only the current one.

These differences may of course be positive or negative, and you will notice it when you’ll have to control whether your trades have been replicated well. To create this chart, ZuluTrade considers all the times when slippage has been to the disadvantage of the follower investor, and it shows the average of these values ​​for each broker.

You won’t always find all brokers for each Signal Provider, in fact, only if a user has replicated the signals with a real account, ZuluTrade can analyze the slippage level for that particular broker. Therefore, if a Signal Provider didn’t have live follower investors following him, you won’t find any slippage levels to analyze; if instead there had been or there are currently linked live accounts, you will find only the statistics for those broker who, let’s say, have been “in contact” with that Signal Provider.

Obviously, the lower the level of slippage, the better the quality of the signals replication for that trader, and the more uniform with his your performance will be.

As you may have the occasion to notice when you will control the slippage in a Signal Provider’s profile, among the first positions, if not always the first, there is the broker AAAFX, a company owned by ZuluTrade itself.

Signal Provider Guide – Part 3

We are left with the last part of a ZuluTrade Signal Provider’s personal profile, that is everything we can find under the “Check my Moves” section in ZuluTrade.

What others say about me

This is the section where the social aspect breaks into the Signal Provider’s profile page, or, better to say, in ZuluTrade itself. Here you can find out what actually the followers investors think about the Signal Providers they have or they are following.

First consideration to make: only the follower investors with live accounts have the opportunity to vote and comment, and we think this is fair. Only those who actually had real social trading experience with that Signal Provider has the right to comment.

In the block at the top you can find three statements with respect to the Signal Provider:

1) Overall, I gained some money from This SP’s trades

2) This SP’s strategy description corresponded to the strategy followed in my account

3) I would recommend This SP to other users

For each of these statements, the live follower investor has the option to answer with a number of stars, from 1 to 5. The more stars, the higher the level of appreciation according to that particular claim. One star means the follower investor, after his experience with that Signal Provider, agrees only for a 20% with the statement that is voting, 2 stars for a 40%, 3 for a 60%, 4 for a 80%, 5 for 100 %. The average ratings among each statement creates the specific vote for that specific claim, while the average of the votes among the final three form the overall score given by the users to that Signal Provider, which is the Trader Rating, located on the upper left in this part of the profile.

You already know what we think of other’s users vote, ie that they are not relevant for a concrete performance evaluation, both if positive or negative. However, we can say one thing. If you really want to consider them, check the upper right corner how many have voted. As in all things, if the votes are many, there is more chance that they return a likely situation.

The follower investors’ comments

Below you have the space for the comments left by the live follower investors. When a user votes, he has also the option of leaving a comment on his profile about the work of that Signal Provider, about his personal experience, maybe also to give advice or to ask direct questions. Everything that is written is reported here, along with an average of the star votes the user have left when he commented.

Let’s suppose you are analyzing a really good Signal Provider, most likely in the comments you’ll find someone who praises his talents, but for the most part you will find negative comments from follower investors who have left him criticizing his strategy. Usually this happens because a user thought he wasn’t earning enough, or because he started to follow him at the wrong time, maybe at the beginning of a drawdown, not considering on the other hand that probably he was risking very little thanks to that Signal Provider. So he left him, leaving a negative comment, going in search of some Signal Provider with who he can earn more money, but with who he will also risk more, very often with a negative ending.

I have a personal desire. I wish that all those users to whom something like this happened to come back on their steps and correct their votes and comments. I know, it’s impossible.

Many times, however, some follower investors are not entirely inexperienced, and once they realized they are following a risky Signal Provider, they abandoned him denouncing the bad strategy. At other times, instead, comments can be useful for considering things that perhaps you would had not think about or that you forgot to take into consideration.

You must first reason by yourself, do all your analysis based on professional studies, and then maybe, at the end, take a walk here in the comments, and see if something unusual or interesting shows up.

Trading History

Clicking on Trading History you can view a complete list of all the operations executed by that trader. Each column corresponds to a specific detail:

– Currency: the currency exchange on which the transaction was executed.

– Type: The type of operation performed, if Buy or Sell.

– Std Lots: Standard Lots. The amount of lots used by the Signal Provider when he opened the transaction on his account.

– Date Open: the exact date, comprised of minute and second, on which the trader opened the operation

– Date Closed: same thing but for the closure

– Open/Close: the price at which the transaction was opened and then closed

– High: the maximum amount of profit in pips achieved by the transaction

– Low: The maximum drawdown in pips achieved by the transaction

– Roll: The interest accrued from the operation remained open over one day (it can be positive or negative depending on which was the currency bought and which the sold one)

– Profit: the amount of pips of profit or loss realized, and the corresponding monetary value based on the lot size at which the trade was opened.

– Total: the total balance at the closure of the operation, both for pips and for money.

PLEASE NOTE: you may have noticed that also the lot size with which the Signal Provider opens his operation is showed. Very often you will find that the lot size is always the same, but sometimes not. You, however, will always be interested on the level of pips gained only, because the lot size with which you will replicate those Signal Provider’s trades will be decided by you, and it will be constant as long as you will keep the same settings.

We are left with “L” icon, the first on the left. By clicking it you can get a taste of the absolute professionalism with which ZuluTrade shows the data and performance. Here you can find the graphical story of each operation, with a chart that shows you where and when it was opened, when it reached its maximum (high) and where, as well as his minimum (low) and his closure. For the analysis addicted, this is definitely a unique opportunity.

This list of operations can be ordered at our own pace. Just click on the title of each column to arrange the trade according to that value, either in ascending or, clicking again, in descending order. You’ll see how from this possibility a lot of useful analysis and considerations can arise for the creation of your strategy.

With “Any Currency Pairs” you can filter the long list and display only the operations performed on a single currency exchange, or on a combination of several.

Open Position

In this tab you can see if there are and what are the details of the transactions that the Signal Provider has still open in the market at the time you’re analyzing.

Live Followers

The last tab in this profile section is dedicated to the follower investors who are replicating, or have replicated, the signals of that Signal Provider with a live accounts.

You can find various details, including the broker they use, their ID number, how many pips they have gained from that traders and how much money they earned.

By clicking on any of these then, you open another section to the left, where you can see a chart with two little equity, one of the trader’s performance in pips, one of the follower’s performance in pips, to see if they are homogeneous or not. If they are not, it may depend on both the slippage or on the settings chosen by the investor to modify the Signal Provider’s operation.

Below you have news related to the Margin Call -o- Meter of that follower investor, and even an accurate list of who else is following that moment, and those who have followed in the past. ZuluTrade really is a treasure of information, almost nothing is hidden, everything is in favor of transparency.

Export to Excel

Finally, we want to talk of Excel.

Probably the most useful ZuluTrade feature is this, ie the ability to download the entire Signal Provider’s transactions list with all the details that you’ve seen so far (and some other), but in an Excel format.

What does this mean?

If you know Excel just a little bit, you know that with this program you can make your analyzes and studies on a really professional manner. You just need to know what to look for and how to use the tool, in order to move from beginner to expert, and obtain from data the competitive advantage that only the professionals get.

Connecting a Signal Provider to your account

At this point, you have analyzed far and wide the performance of a ZuluTrade Signal Provider in his personal profile, you know every detail of the results that his strategy can produce, and above all the risks that you can expect.

Finally, you have decided what Signal Provider to choose, even if only in demo for the moment.

It’s time to click on the “Follow” button. Once clicked, a window pup up.

In this window you can select the “Follow mode”, whether fixed or Pro-Rata, as we discussed earlier, and the relative Lot Size or percentage.

If you came to this point, it should mean that you already know what this Signal Provider should manage in your account, so you should already have well clear the lot size or the percentage to insert. If not, or if you still want to add him to your portfolio and resume later, just enter the minimum possible lot size (0.01 standard lot, or 1 micro lot), confirm the operation by clicking the Follow button, but then immediately run in the your account settings to disable the signal Provider, otherwise you will start to replicate his signals.

However, before clicking on “Follow”, you must be careful with other three elements of this pop-up window.

You can already set the Max Open Trades limit, and ZuluTrade will suggest a value based on the all-time high that the Signal Provider has had up to that point. For now, it’s good to leave that number, not to allow the trader to do nothing more than what he has done until now. Then, you may consider whether to grant an operation more to the Max Open Trades, to let a little more room to maneuver, but only if you really trust him.

WARNING!!! Pay close attention to the Open Current Trades. Here you can see the Signal Provider’s open market operations at the time you are connecting him, with the main details, and with the amount of pips gained or lost. By leaving the flag on the operations, and then confirm by clicking “Follow”, ZuluTrade will open automatically those same trade in your account. Obviously, the opening price of your trade will never be the same as that of the Signal Provider, unless the operations of the traders would be at break even, and therefore the opening prices would be the same at that time. Otherwise, your broker will never open up an operations with a price that is not beaten at the time, it would go against any logic.

It could make sense, in some cases, to open the same operations already opened by a Signal Provider if they were at a loss, maybe very close to their stop. If the trader should close them with a stop loss, you would lose just a few pips. But if, by chance, they would be recovered, your profit will be much greater, because you would had opened them at a much better price. If you are not yet very well versed with this reasoning, the principle that it is always right is to start from scratch, ie without opening the operations already open. Remove then all the flags from thje operations before clicking “Follow”.

Final point, another flag you have to be sure NOT to have accidentally entered is “Reverse all trades”. With that option selected, ZuluTrade would say to your broker to open the trade already opened by the Signal Provider, but in reverse. One thing you definitely don’t want to do.

The Zulutrade Drawdown: how does it really work

During the lessons we have mentioned several times the ZuluTrade drawdown and its maximum value, and we have always said that the way this company shows it is different from what you might think.

In this lesson we will see in the first place what Classic Drawdown means, and we will explore also the version proposed by ZuluTrade, concluding with the consequences and the risks you might run not knowing the difference.

Why Drawdown is so important

However, before you begin, you must have very clear why the Maximum Drawdown of a ZuluTrade Signal Provider is a matter so important to your business as a follower investor. The reason is always linked to the fundamental risk management.

Considered on a trader with a sufficient period of time (minimum one year), the Max Drawdown is the worst moment of the Signal Provider’s history, the period in which the strategy has suffered the most, before recovering. To translate, it’s the worst period you would have suffered if you had followed the signals of that traders, therefore it’s a good starting point to begin with to think about what are the risks associated with that Signal Provider and his strategy.

It should be clarified, however, that past performances are never a guarantee of future performances. This means that if a trader had a Max Drawdown of 1000 pips for many years, it doesn’t mean that in the future he cannot worsen it.

Anyway, since you have the chance to reason only on certain data, and not on assumptions, the Max Drawdown value is definitely the cornerstone for planning risk management in your portfolio.

This is why it’s essential to be clear about what Drawdown means, and be aware if is meant something different, because on this detail you will build the calculation of your risk, which is the most important thing for the success of your investment.

Understanding drawdown is crucial for mastering ZuluTrade, but with many brokers now offering Zulutrade on demo you can still get the chance to ‘test the waters’ of specific signal providers before trading off their signals for real.

The Classic Drawdown

Let’s start from image 1.

This is an example of a traditional drawdown. The chart shown is a Pip Equity Line, and it could very well be that of a ZuluTrade Signal Provider.

Point A is the starting point, that is the first day on which the ZuluTrade Signal Provider has not earned anything yet. The trader starts to work and within a month he realize some profits, let’s say 1000 pips.

Point B is the new amount of the ZuluTrade Signal Provider’s account, after the month since that first day 1. Let’s suppose then that the Signal Provider continued to operate, but this time with less success. After another month of ZuluTrade this trader makes a loss, let’s say of 400 pips.

Point C represents the new balance of 600 pips, after the account on ZuluTrade has grossed the losses. The operations continue, and in the month to come the Signal Provider works well, and his profit are such that he both recovered all the losses of the previous month, and he generated new revenues, such that the account, passed another month, is positive for 1600 pips.

As before, the point D represents the new balance generated by the ZuluTrade Signal Provider, after the last month.

From the current situation, you can make your considerations. The point E is the point at which the account, on ZuluTrade, has returned to the maximum level, which is the point B, and also passed it.

Now the new maximum, the new highest point among all the previous in the ZuluTrade account balance is the point D.

Here is a prerequisite for there to be an analyzable Drawdown. The classic Drawdown is the measure of the balance losses before it has reached a new maximum.

In our example, the drawdown is the measurement between point B and point C, which is the number of pips lost from B to C, before arriving at the point E. We can say that in our case, the ZuluTrade Signal Provider’s account experienced a drawdown of 400 pips.

Of that Drawdown we can also say it had a duration of about one month, ie it took a month before the account came back to create a new profit high.

A very useful way to express it is as percentage. We can furthermore calculate it using two different references:

• Using the amount of pips before the drawdown began. In this case we would have:

400 / 1000 = 0.40

0,40 x 100 = 40 %

This view is very good to understand what happened when the Signal Provider encountered that Drawdown. In this case we can say that on that particular occasion, the trader has lost 40% of the profits accumulated up to that point. It’s a very useful information, but we must contextualize it, especially with the period in which it occurred.

• Using the total amount of pips gained so far from the Signal Provider. In this case instead we would have:

400 / 1600 = 0.25

0.25 x 100 = 25%

This view instead revisits the Drawdown on the total amount of profits, in practice it always assess the extent of the losses, but this time on the earning potential that the strategy has been able to generate. Surely this second way to calculate the DD percentage is the most used, but you must not underestimate the first type, because it can be really useful.

The ZuluTrade Drawdown

The drawdown expressed for a ZuluTrade Signal Provider is the total of the losses caused by the open losing positions only, at a given time.

This is the definition and, to make it more understandable, let’s take a simple example, or rather three.

– If a Signal Provider, at any given time, has 4 open positions, 3 in profit, one in loss of 10 pips, ZuluTrade will tell you that his drawdown is -10 pips at that time.

– If a Signal Provider, at a given time, has 6 open positions, 3 in profit, and 3, respectively, in loss of -10, -15 and -30 pips, ZuluTrade will tell you that his drawdown at that time is -55 pips , given by the sum of the three operations in loss only, at that time (10 + 15 + 30 = 55)

– If a Signal Provider, at a given time, has 4 operations, all 4 winning, ZuluTrade will tell you that, at that time, his Drawdown is 0 (zero) pips.

With these three examples we now have clear what ZuluTrade means for Drawdown and especially how it calculates it. The measurements are made only for the simultaneously open positions in loss, and they are made ​​moment by moment.

Therefore the ZuluTrade MAX Drawdown will simply be the negative amount of pip the instant in which the Signal Provider was losing the greatest number of pips from his open losing operations.

In addition, the ZuluTrade Max Drawdown in percentage is calculated only in the second way that we have seen before, i.e. considering only the total amount of pips accumulated by the Signal Provider.

This interpretation and indication modality, despite ZuluTrade show in its guide how his Drawdown is calculated, have led many novice investors to make errors that in some cases can be very costly.

Rest assured though, because finished this lesson, it won’t be your case. Indeed, not only you will erase the risk that I’m about to show you, but most of all you will start out with a serious competitive advantage when you will select the Signal Providers for your investment. You will understand why ZuluTrade shows this value in its own way, and not rather in a more traditional way.

The difference between the two Drawdown type revealed

Now, I’m about to reveal everything. Let’s take for example a Signal Provider and its data sheet. Here are the stats from the left column.

This is a Signal Provider that doesn’t have an excessive number of Max Open Trades, and he generally cuts his losses and lets his profits run. I have highlighted the Maximum Drawdown value. A 5%, which corresponds numerically to 207 pips. Rather than argue whether or not this is a good value, I would like to show you something else.

Imagine you are an investor who doesn’t know about Investingoal, and by the way that knows very little about Drawdown, and most of all that doesn’t know that the ZuluTrade’s one is expressed in a different way from the usual. A novice investor would be led to believe that this Signal Provider, until now, has lost a maximum of 207 pips before returning to generate a new profit in his equity line.

Let’s see it on the chart. We are in the drawdown tab, the section where we can see where the balance actually went with his losses and winnings. We have selected only the blue drawdown line.

The balance was at 2,198 pips on March 10th, and then it began to suffer a series of losses, not abrupt, but continuous, that within two months have instead led it to 1,358 pips on May 9th.

That’s what we’re talking about: the difference between 2,198 and 1,358 is 840 pips.

840 pips Maximum of real classic drawdown.

840 pips are not 207 pips, not even remotely. In this case the real Drawdown value is four times greater than the ZuluTrade’s one.

Now you understand why I say that if you know certain things, you cannot make certain mistakes, and you can start with great benefit when you will look for your trusted Signal Provider. Indeed, the fact that this Signal Provider has 840 pips of drawdown instead of 207 pips may not be a problem, because everything is relative and proportional.

Knowing that his Maximum Drawdown is 840 pips, you will simply adjust your calculations considering this value to find what assign him, how much leverage and lot size to give him.

The problem is to not base your calculations in the correct manner, as we show you instead.

Why does ZuluTrade shows this type of Drawdown?

For sure, there are two questions you want an answer for.

• Why is there so much difference between the two expressions of the Maximum Drawdown?

• Why did ZuluTrade decide to use this drawdown version?

Finding the Maximum Drawdown as ZuluTrade does doesn’t mean to have identified the moment when the Signal Provider began to recover his losses.

A little while ago I pointed out the main features of that Signal Provider, ie that he doesn’t exaggerate with the number of open trades at the same time for each currency pair, and above all, that he uses stop losses with​​ quite close values. So, he won’t find himself with many positions open at once and in loss, because if they lose too much he closes them, cashing the loss. Therefore the drawdown value reported in the ZuluTrade manner will be low.

But this doesn’t mean that the losses collected on the account by the closed and accounted transactions won’t continue to persist. On one hand this trader doesn’t keep them open, so he doesn’t risk they run too much in loss, but by keeping closing them with small losses, his account will suffer a decline in any case, and this decline will be indeed our classic Drawdown.

So, why ZuluTrade does not show this other value, the classic one?

Let’s answer the second question. ZuluTrade is well aware of the fact that many of the investors who land on its site does not have the right knowledge of the sector. Despite its efforts to explain certain things, it’s often the very people who don’t want to listen. Obviously, this is not your case because you arrived here on Investingoal and you’re interested in this topic.

However, ZuluTrade is well aware that many follower investors, having no experience (and not wanting to make it even) base their decisions on the vision of the Signal Providers’ equity line only, and on the number of pips that they make every day. Many don’t even check at all the risks that these traders take to get those equity and to make pips every day. And ZuluTrade knows that.

As you’ve already seen, the worst systems and strategies are the Martingale, those systems that are developed precisely on a large number of simultaneously open losing trades, those systems which the vast majority of novice investors unfortunately link to. These traders don’t close operations when they start losing, but they rather open others in the same direction to try to recover.

So, if on one hand the account does not suffer closed and accounted losses, on the other the “open” losses, if the market continues in the unfavorable direction, can be enormous.

Here is where ZuluTrade tries to intervene. In fact, with its own drawdown concept, ZuluTrade shows you how much a Signal Provider let his account (then potentially even yours) running in loss, with simultaneously open transactions (up to a maximum of 30), running huge risks, sometimes even burning the account.

In practice, it often tells how much “martingale” that Signal Provider has been.

If you look at the question from this point of view, then this ZuluTrade Drawdown takes on a different light. It’s obvious that they are trying to protect the majority of the new beginner clients, that statistically, as their first Signal Providers, choose those of this type we just seen, because they are more attractive.

On the other hand, inevitably, signal providers like the one of our example are poorly represented, even though they don’t use risky techniques such as the Martingale.

However, this for you is no longer a problem, now you know exactly how to juggle with the Drawdown indications, in all its forms.

Best ZuluTrade Traders and Signal Providers

Once you understand how to analyze a ZuluTrade trader to grasp its real potential, it is time to learn to find them.

There are thousands of traders on ZuluTrade, which is why learning to filter them and quickly find the most interesting ones can help us considerably in building our strategy and our investment portfolio.

From direct experience, relying on the traders suggested by ZuluTrade itself is absolutely not a good strategy. When a trader rises to the honors of the chronology (and of the ranking) for the great performances, most of the time also means that the risks incurred to obtain those performances have been high.

Given the beauty and also the complexity of the topic, we have created a very detailed tutorial apart that will guide you step by step to the research and discovery of the best ZuluTrade traders.

Here it is: the best ZuluTrade traders to copy.

How to use the Portfolio simulation

The portfolio simulation function of ZuluTrade, called “Simulate my portfolio”, is certainly one of the most useful tools ​​available on this platform.

To be able to do simulations has always been one of the most useful and interesting study tool for the construction of an efficient investment portfolio.

The accesses to simulation tool are a scattered throughout the entire site, for example in the trader ranking page, or in the main dashboard of your account.

ZuluTrade portfolio simulation – What is not

The first important thing I want you to understand is that this is not a simulation made ​​with complicated logarithms that hypothesize the future performance of your portfolio based on the current behavior of the Signal Providers present in it. There is no future prediction. There is none of that.

This “Simulate my portfolio” ZuluTrade tool simply use the past data of a Signal Provider, and combines them with those of other traders, according to your requirements.

This means that if you want to do a simulation of one year with two Signal Provider, ZuluTrade will retrieve the last year data of those two traders, and will combine them together showing you the output and the performance. In practice, it shows you what you would have earned if, in that last year, you would had followed those Signal Provider with those settings.

Don’t think, therefore, that it is not a useful tool. On the contrary, it’s an invaluable tool. With this portfolio simulation instrument you can play and experiment far and wide, and test all you want. Above all, you can evaluate in a professional manner where you can get the best results, both in terms of performance and risk, not only according to different portfolios of traders, but also on the basis of specific settings given to specific Signal Providers.

We need to start at the bottom, where you can find the box for the selection and management of the Signal Provider and of their settings. These are the same options you can use in the real management page of your personal account. You can, of course, set the lot size value, but also a whole range of interesting parameters.

Two situations (+ one) to use it with caution

Especially, we can find the “Slippage” parameter, and the new “Offset pips”.

With the first, knowing how much the average slippage with the broker with whom you have opened your account is, you can see very wisely if and how much the profit performance would be different. You may notice that, given the slippage, in some cases it would not worth the trouble.

With the second instead, the Offset Pips, you can simulate to change the Signal Provider operations by opening his orders only when the trader’s operation has reached a certain number of pips. For example, setting a negative number -5 pips means that every time you would wait for the trader’s operation to reach -5 pips of drawdown, before the same operation would be opened in your account. In practice, the operation would have opened at a better price of 5 pips than your own Signal Provider. On the contrary, instead, if you put a positive number.

Be very careful with this tool. While it can be very useful to improve the performance, on the other hand, if you don’t know how and especially in what conditions to use it, is likely to do more harm than good.

Opening a trade better than your Signal Provider does not mean avoiding the stop losses. Those are always there and the operations can still go wrong. In addition, if you overdo it, you run the risk of not replicating many of the trades that maybe would have finished into profit.

Another important feature is the possibility to enter fixed levels of stop loss or take profit determined by you, and also add the very useful function “Safe Stop”. Here, too, it’s like the above example. We are talking of changing the work of a professional trader (or supposed to be). If he works this way it’s assumed there should be a reason. This doesn’t mean we cannot try to protect ourselves more, or even better, but you have to do with knowledge of the facts, knowing exactly what you are doing and why. Otherwise you just risk more harm than good.

The ZuluTrade performance simulation

In any case, this portfolio simulation tool is here precisely to give you a way to do all the tests and experiments you want, without the minimum risk of being hurt.

Above all, on the top left, you can set the time period of simulation, and also change your imaginary balance and your account’s currency, including the leverage you would like to simulate.

When you set the data and launch the simulation, ZuluTrade will return the performance graphic. In addition, in the top right corner you can also find the performance figure, in percentage and monetary terms.

If you intervene with parameters that would change your orders compared to the trader’s one, ZuluTrade will let you see the equity line of your profits in green, and that of the trader in blue. That way, it’s very easy to see if and how you would have done better or worse.

As you can understand, there’s so much to say about this very useful simulation tool. It’s a chance to start working professionally and try to get the most from your Social Trading investment.

ZuluTrade Live Account tutorial

We’ve showed you pretty much everything we know about ZuluTrade.

Now it’s your turn.

The first piece of advice we feel we can give you, before starting to invest real money, is to reread all this tutorial and our other content on ZuluTrade a second time at least.

Make sure you really undrestood how this platform works. Your money is at stake.

When you feel confident, you can move on to the last step: opening your ZuluTrade live account.

But before you leave us, tell us: what do you think about this tutorial?

Let us know in the comments!