Greetings everyone. Some of you may remember my adventures with FXDD Auto a while back. Well it’s kid of funny how things work out but it seems I’ve found another similar tracker of Forex signal providers. This one goes by the odd name of ZuluTrade. I must thank “JOhn” form the NO BS Forum for bringing this website to my attention. Now let’s get into the meat of the review.
So what is ZuluTrade?
Well, put simply ZuluTrade is website that allows you to automatically (handled by trade robots) execute trade signals offered by various “Forex signal providers”, and best of all, you get this at no cost to you (that means “For Free” for those of you who love cliches). ZuluTrade acts sort of like a bridge between you and the Forex signal providers. You not only get detailed trade signal history data but a spiffy graph to dazzle your eyeballs too. My my, I bet some of you will start having wet dreams when you see those equity curves. Ok, joking aside, let the review continue.
So you’re telling me this service is completely free?
Do I hear an echo? Seriously, yes! ZuluTrade get compensated for their services through the spread between the bid/ask prices. The revenues are then shared with the signal providers who generate the trade signals.
Who is placing the trades on my account? Do the experts know about my account?
None of the experts that recommend trades will ever know your account’s existence. ZuluTrade receives their recommendations, and checks the experts you have subscribed with in your account profile, and decides whether or not to autotrade their advice in your live account using a secure direct connection with the broker’s backend. Zulutrade’s patented engine places trades automatically with no human intervention. ZuluTrade service is server based, in other words you don’t even need to have your computer on.
Are the results hypothetical? There are a lot of websites that claim all kinds of results.
Every signal received by ZuluTrade is executed on at least one live / demo broker account. The results contain final spread, swap rates, and profit or loss from current open positions, hence all possible costs by the broker. The spread is the standard spread advertised by the broker you’re trading with. Hence our performance always reflects real market conditions. Due to the volatility of the markets, sometimes results may vary between accounts. All signals and trades executed on a demo account are considered to be hypothetical
What is the minimum deposit to open a new account?
You can open up either a standard account or a mini account. For a standard account is $20,000+ USD and for a mini account is $1,000+ USD. You know what, make that $2500 USD for a mini account. I made the grave mistake of opening up a sub $1000 account with FXDD Auto and I got what I deserved, which was to have my account wiped out during account drawdowns. Anyways, personal bitterness aside, those of you who don’t know the difference between a standard or a mini account permit me to educate you my dear benighted friend. With a standard-account each lot you trade is worth $100,000, while with a min-account each lot is worth $10,000. A lot by the way is standard unit size of a transaction. It might help to think of a lot as sort of like a “share”. But that might be a bit misleading as you’re now owning a piece of a company but rather a big pile of money. I think that should do it for now as I don’t want to get into the basics of forex here. I’m simply assuming that you already graduated from Forex kindergarten and are ready to “play with the big boys”.
Who picks the signal providers?
Nobody. Any individual can become a ZuluTrade signal provider. It is not possible on ZuluTrade to misrepresent the performance of the signals generated. If ZuluTrade shows a profit or loss, it is accurate, because details are confirmed by the dealing broker’s statements. For each pip stated in the performance section, there is a trade registered in the broker’s backoffice. The results are not hypothetical, but actual.
I like to think of ZuluTrade as being a Forex freelance website.
So what kind of performance should I expect?
Well, of course that varies based on what signal provider you choose, but just taking a quick look at the “top dog” I can see that from the beginning of this year till today this signal provider managed to churn out a profit of $141,218.50, closing 17,520 pips with a total of 925 trades. The average pip per trade was 18.94 so you can tell this signal provider uses some sort of intra-day trading style. So far there are currently 267 subscribers to this signal provider. Good for them. I bet they’re making people a lot of money and in turns making quite a nice chunk of change for themselves too.
OK buddy, what’s the catch?!
There isn’t any. Well, I guess the only “catch” is that you have to open a forex brokerage account with ZuluTrade as your IB (Introducing Broker). Currently you can choose between FXCM and Man Financial. Both are reputable Forex brokers in my opinion. To be honest, I don’t know too much about Man Financial so I’m going to go with FXCM as I already have an account with them.
Ok, you’ve convinced me, where do I sign?
First of all, I don’t want to be the one doing the convincing. Instead you should investigate this opportunity in detail and after you’ve done your research, then and only then give the service a try.
In conclusion I think ZuluTrade is a good alternative to the FXDD Auto platform. It certaintly is a bit more open in the sense that anyone who fancies himself a hot-shot forex trader can sign-up to become a signal provider on ZuluTrade. One thing is for sure when I open up and account with FXCM to try ZuluTrade’s signal providers I will certainly not repeat the mistake I made with FXDD Auto where I opened a mini-account with just $500. I would STRONGLY advise you to not play around and at least make the account size $2000 for a mini account, and DO NOT OVERLOAD your account with too many signal providers. I’m sure you folks are smart enough to figure out the proper leveraging needed.
On that note I conclude my review. I hope this makes you a lot of money and I wish you the best. If you have any questions about ZuluTrade or you just want to harass me with questions like “what’s a pip?” please feel free to do so by firing off an e-mail (as a test of your skill I’ll leave it up to you to find my e-mail in the first place)
You can reach ZuluTrade’s website at:
October 21st, 2007 at 1:38 am
Hi Alan,
Man Financial are one of the largest (maybe the largest) forex and futures brokers in the world. They also so Spread BEtteing and have a big presence in London. The broker I used to trade with here in the UK, GNI, were taken over by them a few years back. They are a plc and their shares are quoted on the London Stock Exchange.
Regards,
Pete
October 21st, 2007 at 1:49 am
Sorry for the typo’s - I should be wearing my other glasses really :)
October 21st, 2007 at 2:06 am
lol..it’s okay Pete. Thanks for the info on Man Financial. Would you recommend Man Financial?
August 24th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
I was using Zulutrade service live with AVAFX account. I was using mini account, and at first I got very good results but I failed because I was using to high risk - I have traded using 2 signal providers allowing them to open 10 positions per signal provider..
I had slipped with one of the providers which lost about 55% of initial deposit, then I lowered my risk and gained back 30% and decided to move to FXCM micro account, because FXCM had better and faster execution.
But I had never funded FXCM account, really don’t know why now..
Maybe it seemed a bit too high risk to underly to unknown trader, who has 3 months or less past performance.
Also, I noticed that the best results with low risk reward ratio has the new traders - they start with little initial amount of money and carefully trades to get better past performance. And with every trade they become more and more gready - they open the same position 3 or 4 times in a half of minute. So you must be ready to check the provider how much trades he generates within one little period. As my selected provider was opening 2 or 3 trades and later on he moved to open 4 to 5 positions and if they goes wrong - 3 or 4 more. If user does not limits the opened positions, he soon can come lost..
The best way to use this service - open micro account, select few providers who has even graph of pips, not sudden spikes, analyze how many trades they open within the same minute and limit opened positions to max 5 per provider. With such settings you may enjoy steady slow growth, otherwise you will repeat my fate (oh I wish I had read such info before I had traded).
Besides, when I was trading I was looking for a rebate service for Zulutrade, and there were no at that time.. Now you can get rebates from me, just register at my site at ForexTradinChoice.com. As I was calculating, with $5000 account I should have got a rebate of $300-$400 hundreds, so it’s to everyone’s choice, to use or not to use Forex rebate service.
September 26th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Hmm, sorry to hear. You gotta be careful at managing risk!
Perhaps what some signal providers try to do is trade conservatively at first to gain the trust of zulutrade users, and then later on they decide to “cash in” by opening more and more positions with larger and larger lot sizes so their rebate from zulutrade’s brokers will be larger and larger - ie they make more money!
Sad, but yeah you have to keep an eye on your signal provider less they go haywire and blow your account.
October 31st, 2009 at 11:13 pm
If your choosing high multiple trades to be opened who is being greedy? you or the trader?
Money management can’t stressed enough. Asses individual trades then set up as you yourself would trade. For me 1 trade entry at a time and steady as you go. Think “The Way of the Turtle” whether trading yourself or allowing others to trade on your behalf.
For example I open 1 trade at a time so my ZuluTrade is set just the same. Start off with micro with micro lots multiplier set to 1 or 2 and max total open trades to 1 as well then adjust your max. open lots to your choice, mine is 10, naturally the more providers the more lots but again correct money management rules.
I found a handy money management calculator, try it yourself. : http://www.goforex.net/money-management-calculator.htm
There is no reason why ZuluTrade cannot work if managed correctly. Good Luck.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:14 am
Right on. Thanks for sharing your opinion, and I completely agree - if managed properly and done without greed ZuluTrade CAN work for you. There are some good traders on there, but you have to weed out the garbage first.
I suggest you guys follow my forex blog for more ZuluTrade related content. This is where I post nearly all my forex related content:
http://alansforexblog.com