XAU Conservative Alpha

I thought I'd write a review later (not today), but unfair review/ratings by another subscriber made me hurry up. As I recall, I was the first subscriber to this signal - so am following it for almost a month now, and I have just renewed the subscription.

This is one of the best signals we currently have on this platform.

The description looks correct to me. This is a professional trading strategy where the provider manages a non-trivial amount of their own funds, yet kindly offers it for copying affordably even for us with much smaller deposits. I appreciate this.

Regarding grid or not, there's subtle yet important distinction between dumb open-ended grids (like pending orders at equal price intervals, then all closed at the same time and necessarily in profit) and multiple concurrent positions opened by more complex criteria in preparation for a subsequent structured exit. Also, the size of trades here is conservative - in fact, it's this readiness for potentially needing to open many more positions concurrently that unfortunately keeps this strategy from using much larger trades initially.

It's true that today the price went against the trader's initial expectations, and more trades were opened in a grid-like fashion. As I type this, they're being gradually closed upon reaching their different TP levels or bumping into resistance, which reduces risk and gives new opportunities in case the adverse price movement repeats before all trades are closed. Something similar occurred during the previous sharp drop of gold price late last month. What's changed is the trader reduced trade sizes to adapt to the increased volatility and hasn't yet fully increased them back, so today's equity drawdown was smaller (on the signal account). In both cases, the drawdown was acceptably small relative to this signal's profitability.

Regarding this being dangerous, to some extent any trading is, and yes opening more trades adds risk. So let's see how much room for further adverse price movement there was. On the signal account, there were 8 positions of size 0.35 lots each. At the time of opening the last of these, the drawdown should have been: (5066+5052+4956*2+4948+4933*2+4922 - 4922*8)*35 = $13650 on a $267k balance (that's 5%). With no trades closed and no further ones opened, further adverse movement is 8*35 = $280 per dollar. Actual lowest price with these trades open today was around 4885, meaning a further 280*(4922-4885) = $10360 or a total peak drawdown of $24k. That's 9%. (MQL5 tends not to capture the worst brief peak for the statistics reported here. I think last month's peak was ~12%, but we see 9% reported from last month, and today's would have been reported as less than that.) The account balance would have allowed for a further price decline by over $800. Of course, more trades would likely be opened, reducing this greatly, and of course we wouldn't want to see huge drawdown even briefly, but it's still a lot of room.

The description recommends a minimum balance of $2000, at which all of these trades would be 0.01 lots. This is a 267000/2000/35 = ~3.8 times increase in both drawdown and profit resulting from a group of trades. For such a "worst-case" follower account, the equity drawdown today would be 9%*3.8 = ~34%. This number taken in isolation is uncomfortably large, but on a smaller account higher risk may be acceptable - and reward is also higher accordingly. Further room for adverse price movement would be more limited, at about (2000*(1-0.34)-5000*8/500)/8 = $155 on a 1:500 account if no further trades, and much less than that otherwise. So yes, there's significant risk for smaller accounts here, but it only applies early on before the account grows or if you're withdrawing profits.

The description says there are shadow stops for each trade, hiding this from brokers and unfortunately also from subscribers. In recent trades history, I see that sometimes individual trades or small groups of trades were closed at small losses, perhaps when the original idea was deemed invalidated (note: this is very different from a typical dangerous grid strategy, where a grid would be triggered unconditionally). So I see reasoned timely exits with a loss (which I appreciate), but not necessarily stops (some of them may be predefined tight stops). Those losses were so small and brief that I almost did not notice them by my account balance.

Regarding the star ratings here, MQL5 asks to rate 3 specific things: trade system reliability and description quality (4/5 because it does feel somewhat risky with multiple trades during those unexpected rapid moves and we actually do not know where it'd stop if the price continues to go against us), trade copying quality (5/5 since there are absolutely no issues for this moderate size of trades that are held for minutes to hours - unlike with scalping signals), and user support (no rating from me since I didn't need support yet, but the system didn't let me, so I set 5/5 based on the description's current suggestion to contact the provider before subscription, which implies willingness to communicate). There's no rating for performance, but I'd rate it 5/5 given the ratio of monthly growth vs. max drawdown seen so far.

Dangerous grid