If you’re looking for insights and valuable tips for your live trading, then you’ll surely appreciate this video! Andrea Unger and Francesco Placci, our R&D Manager have prepared a video commenting on the trading performance of our best students (the winners of the 2022 Trader of the Month contest).

In it, you’ll discover numerous valuable tips, insights, and ideas drawn from the direct experience of these students, who have achieved excellent results by applying the systematic trading method we teach in the Academy.

Don't miss it! 😉

Transcription

Francesco
Hi guys! Welcome. Francesco Placci here with Andrea Unger.

Andrea
Hi guys! Ciao Francesco.

Francesco
Ciao Andrea. So we are here together for what I think could be a new appointment for the future. We are here to talk about the "Trader of the month" during 2022.

As you know, we have a contest, we have a lot of students that joined this contest with very amazing performance, as you can see, starting from 20%, 10% until more than 100%.

So, I think it could be useful for us and also for all the students to know something more about the real trading made by our students.

I know that Andrea talked about the performances with each of these students and maybe we can share with you some insights, correct, Andrea?

Andrea
Yes, I spoke to each of them because they got in touch with me for a coaching call. I deeply hate them all, because they did so better than I, I'm just kidding, of course. But I must admit that I discovered interesting things. Maybe if you share the list, I can go through it and just put some notes on most of them.

First of all, I want to say one thing. At the very beginning of this idea, of the "Trader of the Month", I was sort of skeptical, and not only me, also some students were skeptical, because I thought that we were praising somebody who got a very good month and then maybe disappeared for the rest of the year. Okay? So, is one month significant? This was the question.

I must admit that I was astonished and you were astonished too, because you analyzed all the reports with me during the year, astonished that in this list you see people who won that, most of these guys also submitted great performance reports in other months, not great enough to win. Apart from those 2 guys who won 2 months, we got 2 months for 2 different guys here.

But apart from this, they showed consistency during the year. I mean, not all of them, of course, but most of them. This is something that made me very happy. I was happy to be wrong in considering the "Trader of the Month" not that significant because these guys really demonstrated that they were consistent in approaching the markets.

And second part, I discovered that in most of the cases there are common traits among them. What are the common traits? Curiosity and passion. Well, I said everything, but a curiosity to discover the markets, to add new ideas, and passion because this curiosity was driven by passion.

Most of these guys had an incredible portfolio of trading systems to use in conjunction with our software Titan to get the list of the systems to work with every month. And this is what I found they had in common.

Not all of them, of course, for example, in March, you see Marco, he is working with Directa, this is a different broker and he had just 1 system. This does not mean that Marco was too lazy, no, Marco simply had a small account (small compared to the requirements of margins of the different instruments), and he decided to test the trading environment using 1 system he developed on the Italian index future and he did that very well because he got a great performance during this month.

And this is a sort of an exception, because all the others have mostly a very diversified portfolio. 3 exceptions, sorry Francesco. One is Thomas, who mainly focused on Bias systems, so his main focus was on bias systems, so he diversified in terms of underlyings, but he concentrated mostly on a specific approach to the markets. You know, we normally trade with Trend Following, Counter Trend and Bias. These are the 3 main families. He got his preference on Bias, having also some of the other approaches, but most of that was on Bias.

Then we have another exception, which is Piero in July, and as you can see, this is something that makes Francesco happy and angry. Happy because he sees that somebody is trading cryptos, angry because he sees that he was better than Francesco himself. Eh, Francesco?

Francesco
We have to admit it was a very tough year crypto and this is a very good performance just...

Andrea
It was a tough year. Yes, we spoke about that during our contribution about our 2022. And what's interesting in Piero's approach is that he approached cryptos in a very basic way. Let's say he took the essence of the Unger method, simply putting entries, simple filters and going live. This does not mean he didn't dare to discover something more complicated, but he just kept it simple. And keeping it simple, he was successful.

We have to add one thing, of course. Keep it simple is easier when a market is still not very efficient, such as cryptocurrencies in general. But of course he was smart doing so, because he understood that this was the right time to act in a simple and straight way. And this is what he did. Just a simple diversification on some underlyings, but mostly concentrated on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Some, I think BNB, if I don't remember bad, but very simple. The same you do Francesco, actually. But you also keep an eye on the most important cryptocurrencies, if I'm not wrong.

Francesco
You're right and also I use very simple trading systems on Cryptocurrencies.

Andrea
Exactly. This is the key. And this is really the essence of the Unger Method. It is very interesting. And last but not least, if we go to October, if I remember well, yes, Marco, with his astonishing 122%, he mostly concentrated, exclusively concentrated on Index futures. So actually he built a portfolio of approaches, but on a sector.

In some parts of the learning path I described the possible portfolios that you can build. Global portfolio or Sectors portfolio, Index future is a Sector of course. And doing so, he concentrated on this. It's such as we can find in funds. Some funds have just a specific line and they say this is US global Index future, or Asia or Emerging Countries, whatever. He did that on American Futures mostly, but also to be also the DAX, I think.

And he did incredibly well, incredibly well. Now, is this the right choice? Of course it is, because he demonstrated to have a great result and he did so also in other occasions which did not lead him to the win, but to interesting performance as well. Yet, what I can say here, just to find a good excuse, because he was so better than I am, his risk profile is really aggressive. He's younger than me, he's tougher, and he risks much more. He loves rollercoaster. I am much more conservative and if you look at the balances, you see that actually he has a pretty dangerous approach. But in any case, he's a great trader and this is what you can see here demonstrates that his approach was right.

All the others, on the contrary, tried to diversify as much as possible. Roberto, for example, here has a great variety of systems and also the others cover most of the sectors.

And in fact, if we go to the beginning of the year, Giuseppe and also Roberto, the 2 double month winners, they got really interesting performance on energy futures. Now, it's not because they were smarter and therefore they chose Energy Future systems to put in their portfolio, but they had a wide portfolio with also energy futures, of course, inside, and when the markets showed a great time for that kind of system, they got a great result. So they had the right thing at the right time.

Having a properly diversified portfolio obviously helps. And this is exactly what they did. They had the right diversification and therefore the right tools to trade in a specific period, where you remember very well there was a very high volatility in those markets, and having the systems ready was obviously a great advantage.

Francesco
Yeah. And also you told me that you learned, in a certain way, something new, something different, on some student's approach. I remember in particular the long and short operativity.

Andrea
There was one of the students who split the systems, only long and only short. Well, just to explain, our software Titan takes the performance of the systems, ranks this somehow, and then gets the list of the systems to put at work, with some filters, some logics, okay?

So what the students said is, okay, but I don't want a system to be chosen because that system performed well on long entries and I need good short entries. So I better split systems in 2 parts, 1 only long and 1 only short. So I have a single performance for long and a single performance for short. And when I feed Titan with this data, Titan obviously analyzes specifically what they did on the long or on the short side.

So I'm not praising a system for being good on the long to trade short. I take the short system when the system did well on the short side.

This is an interesting idea, which I considered and I discussed also with our students. I did that also before actually, but what stopped me or kept me from doing the same is my great laziness, because this is a great job to do. I mean, when you have 5, 6 systems, you can do it, but when you have 200-300 systems to build twice as much, just dividing long from short, believe me, is a lot of work.

But considering this, I said, is there a real advantage in doing so? On one side for sure, because you analyze the right performance at the right time and maybe you have the right systems when the market is in specific conditions. But on the other side there is a disadvantage, because the choice of a long or a short system is slower, because you need performance from a system to make Titan decide to pick it. If a system is doing poorly just because you have a great uptrend and the short system is not performing well, then when the time has come to trade short, the system is not there, because it has to wait for the performance to be shown and therefore to be picked later on.

So this is a very good excuse for me to be lazy and not to do it. But in any case, I'm just kidding. I will consider this. The right work to do should be to prepare the whole portfolio of split systems, test the original version, what I do normally, where systems trade long and short, and then test with Titan the version where all systems are split, and then compare performances, of course. Backtest, but still to see how that went.

I mean, in that case, having already done the greatest job of all to split the systems, I could even decide to go that way.

It still takes a longer time to prepare all the workspaces, because we have to put all the systems to work when they have been chosen, but this is something that we can do. So I will probably do that, sooner or later, maybe later, but it's something that should be done. But this is very interesting, in any case it's an interesting idea that I got from these guys where they demonstrated to be curious about things and try new ways to go.

This idea was never presented in our learning path. So the student himself came up with it and showed good performance because he's one of the winners.

Francesco
Yeah, I totally agree. And what can we say... For sure...

Andrea
I noticed another thing which is important Francesco. The winner of December has a very specific and meticulous way to choose the systems to put in the portfolio to feed Titan and so to get the final list.

His rule is to basically use only systems with acceptable, for him, performance after 2019. Sort of an Out of Sample after 2019. Okay? So when something goes nuts after 2019, he simply throws that away.

And well, he did well. You can see it from the performance here. This approach is for sure clever. It has some discretional approach because it's himself deciding when a system is no longer good for him. So this is something that is his own decision, but of course, this way he chose systems from his own, or systems that are available in our Million Dollar Database, or systems that are presented as examples, when I explain the different ways to develop, so I mean, he can pick everywhere. And this is something that most of our students did. I saw that they were mixing their own systems with other strategies which are available in the Unger Academy Database.

So they tried to put many things together, even try, maybe, to pick from the Unger Academy Database, those systems that they have not developed yet. Maybe the underlying is something they didn't know very well, or maybe the type of approach, whatever, but they put things together.

In any case, he had this screening in advance, and it's fine. But considering, you can see here his account size, which is around 200.000€, this operation is not strictly necessary, in my opinion, because the purpose of Titan is "I give everything inside Titan and Titan makes the decisions for me", okay.

With €200,000, you cover most of all the needs in terms of margins or money management, whatever. So there is not a great problem of choosing what system to put at work. On the contrary, this approach to screen the systems discretionarily or with some other statistics or measures that you can put in place, is, I would not say recommended, but certainly well accepted, if your account balance is much smaller than this, small to start having trouble with some instrument margin requirements.

So if you trade, for example, with $25.000 or so, of course you have limits in the margins requirements. And in that case, to have poor systems, poor performing systems, possible to choose anyway, occupies spots that could be occupied by better systems. So cleaning up the database before the final choice helps in getting the best systems to put to work.

Titan is clever, but it's not a miracle. I mean, Titan does its job, but it makes choices, it makes choices based on a number of filters, but also on a chronological order. So, if for some reason a system is taken, is picked before, there might be no longer room afterwards to pick another system, and this may jeopardize the possibility to take the best system to put it to work.

So in that case, having a smaller account might be recommendable to do so. This is what I suggested to...I believe it was Alessandro. If I'm not wrong, his account is smaller compared to Roberto's, and he found in his backtest a great benefit in doing so. But If he's not Alessandro, sorry, I don't remember everything, my age explains why my memory is no longer the best in the world.

But I mean, he made the experiment, and he recognized that that kind of cleanup was helpful to get better performance. It was a backtest in that case, but obviously he was doing so to be better in the future.

Francesco
Okay, Andrea, so what can you say to end this video? I just say that our students did a very good job, okay...

Andrea
Absolutely.

Francesco
...with amazing performance. And this is a... Let's say, we can say we are proud because you know, we teach a method, they have been able to use it in the proper way and also beat the teachers.

Andrea
Yes.

Francesco
Okay. We have created a guide with all the best tips and suggestions from our monthly contest winners. To get your copy, all you need to do is write the word "Trader" in the comments below, and a member of our team will contact you to give you the document. So comment "Trader" down below and we'll get your document to you in no time.

And if you are interested in using the same method that allowed our traders to obtain the fantastic results seen here, contact us and we'll explain how our program works and evaluate if it could be a good fit for you.

Bye!

Andrea
Ciao ciao everybody. Ciao.

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