Portfolio Review 12.11.2016

It has been six weeks since my last portfolio review and those weeks were exciting. We have seen quite some volatitly, mainly due to the elections of the 45th U.S. president. There was a lot of uncertainty and also some fear of what might happen. Finally Trump is the one to move into the white house and the markets didn't collapse as some traders might have expected. In addition to those interesting market surroundings, eToro - today the only platform I am trading on - introduced a new investment product: The CopyFunds (check eToro's website for more information). So it was about time to review my portfolio, so here we go:

CopyTrading: +2,54%
ManualTrading: -13,54%
Overall: -5,22%

The following graph shows the profit of my portfolio since I started trading in calendar week 36/2016. Good luck I copy successful traders, otherwise I had lost even more money:

CopyTrading

It has now been 10 weeks that I copy the same traders on eToro. In the beginning I planed to rearrange my portfolio every now and then (somewhere between 4-6 weeks). I intended to use the traders performance as main criterion, stop copying the least successful and invest in new ones. After only a few weeks I realized that the "traders value" are as volatile as stocks and indices. If you look at the following chart you will easily see what I mean. I would like to point out two examples:

• @TradeBetter was among the least performing traders until cw42. Then he started an incredible rally, leaving me this week with a 15% gain. When reading his posts it gets clear, that he holds positions very long and seldom if never uses stop loss. So he keeps trades open that are deeply red, when he believes they will recover. That is what happened now. The interesting question for me a copier is now: Will he continue to make profits or will his portfolio go down again?
• @berrau is quite different: He has small gains but also small losses. Looks like he is a safe investment but not likely to make huge profits. Nevertheless his strategy leaves me with a 3% gain and I feel safe to continue copying him.

So the main questions I ask myself is: What is a good strategy to rearrange my portfolio? Should I stop copying the successful traders and stick to the less successfull? What would you do in my situation? Let me know your thoughts - please leave a comment here or on eToro's open book!

ManualTrading

Despite my backtesting experience, ChartAnalysis and studies on indicators I couldn't get on a good track so far with my manual trades. I will not quit and will not give up that quickly. I will continue to read, observe and study. I even went back to school: On www.babypips.com I try to learn about successful forex trading in the "school of pipsology" (thanks @Kirex for the recommendation). Until I have learned more, I will be even more careful in the near future, only open low risk trades. Plus I will go back and analyze my trades that gave me so much losses in the last weeks.

CopyFunds - an option for me?

When I first read about eToro's latest investment product I was excited: CopyFunds. Different traders or stocks bundled in a fund, that I can easily invest in. There is only one - unfortunately an important - reason not to do that: The minimum investment is $5.000. In order to not compromise my own CopyTrading approach (although not finally defined) and to leave some money for ManualTrading I will not use CopyFunds at this point of time.