Signal reviews... constructive advice from observations, lessons and personal results with the signal Safe Steady Growth

I'm now over a month into using Signals on live accounts.  I picked 8 signals and monitored their progress against each other and also to measure how effective the signal copying was compared to the published growth figures.  I use a London based ECN broker and VPS.

At the end of the first month I decided to replace one signal, Safe Steady Growth, with a new one, Magic Signals Two, that looked more promising.  Having unsubscribed from Safe Steady Growth and replaced it, I wanted to go back and add a constructive review, but the MQL5 system will not let me add a review unless I am currently subscribed to it.  This is a shame as I have some constructive comments to make for both the signal owner and also future subscribers. 

Signal review of the Safe Steady Growth :

To the signal owner: The signal logic works well.  According to the equity graph for the signal, the most draw-down was about $2000 (at the time 30-35% of the balance, a while ago).  So the signal owner's guidance of $4000 starting point makes sense.

However the lot size remains 0.01 for every trade, even though the balance has increased more than 3x from the signal's starting position ($2.4k rising to $8.9k).  This does not make sense to me as the potential for increased and proportional growth is not being taken.  My recommendation would be to either (a) increase the lot size proportionally with the balance so the percentage rate of growth remains steady, or (b) reduce the balance at defined intervals, say every $500 growth.  Withdraw the $500 profit to the starting level and continue with 0.01 lot sizes.  The signal draw-down seems well controlled and minimal and so there is room to improve the results for everyone. 

So for example:

(a) Balances between $4k and  $6k uses lot size 0.01.  Balances $6k to $8k uses lot uses lot size 0.02. Balances $8k to $10k uses 0.03 lot sizes and so on.  

or

(b) Balances between $4k and $4.5k uses lot sizes 0.01.  At balance $4.5k a withdrawal is made of $500 to bring the balance down to $4k starting point again.

With either of these approaches the subscribers get a better signal size ratio and thus better, more proportional results to their balance. With the current approach the subscriber's balance would need to be in the region of $18k just to get the system to apply 0.02 lots per trade on your copied signal broker account.  In my opinion, that is a lot of unused balance for a slow rate of growth.

To potential subscribers of Safe Steady Growth :

In my experience, even with a VPS the effective signal copying was relatively weak.  I think there are 2 keys issues which you can avoid to improve your results compared to my experience:

The deal sizes are for small amounts of pips / points which risks a proportionally high impact from slippage or broker differences in spreads.  So my advice would be to open your account on the same broker as the signal and use a local VPS to the broker to minimise spread issues and timing slippage issues.  In my experience the signal was sometimes closing deals at less than $1 profit and my copied trade would close at a loss due to these issues.  The net result was that I achieved less than half of the signal's progress in July 2015.

Overall:  I made money with this signal.  I could have made more money using the same broker as the signal and using a VPS.  The signal can make even more money for its subscribers if it improved the lot size to balance ratio.