A Note About Stone Fund this Month
Many of you have written in to us recently about the fact that Stone Fund, after coming off such a nice stretch of positive months this year, has not had any trades yet this month, and many of you have been wondering why?
The last trades made by Stone Fund were on March 18th. It is a fact that we have never had a month before where Stone Fund has not received ANY trade signals. In fact, its monthly average number of trades is 23 trades / month. Obviously some months it is much higher, and some month’s it is much lower. To give you an example here are some data:
Lowest Volume of Trades - June 2014 - 8 trades
Highest Volume of Trades - Aug 2013 - 112 trades.
So if we do not receive any trading signals over the next 10 trading days, then this will certainly be the first for Stone Fund where it has not received any signals in a given month. However rest assured all is well. The trader is not on vacation. He did not quit. The algo is not broken. There simply has been no effective trade signals yet this month.
Remember that this is simply a computer algorithm that waits patiently for a perfect entry to occur and then, when it does, it trades.
So what needs to happen exactly for a trade setup to occur? There needs to be a strong momentum influenced move on EURUSD, with enough volume to minimize the chance of a sharp retracement (i.e., the move needs to be big enough for some follow through). The final confirmation when this situation occurs is that spreads must be low and not hugely widened as often happens during volatile market periods. So it could be that there is an accurate entry signal, however an increased spread filtered the trade from occurring.
We will see how the remainder of the month fairs out. The developers certainly feel that we will see some trades before the month is out. Ultimately Stone always puts defense before offence, (safety before profits), and it is certainly a precision system, so if it hasn’t traded yet – it’s for a very good reason!
Sitting safely on the sidelines is never a bad thing, and we must remember that typically computer code has more patience to practise this than us humans do.
… On this Note of Stone Fund
So just when you would think that they have been asleep at the helm with the lack of trading volume thus far this month, they have certainly not been sitting idle just waiting around doing nothing. We have been working with them to launch their much anticipated new program, known as “Brava Fund”.
We were going to wait until the summer months to launch this, as we began our testing back in February, however we are fast tracking this, and making it available on May 1 (or earlier for any existing investors).
Although its track record is short in comparison to Stone’s, Brava Fund carries a lot of weight and credibility due to the reputation of its creators and their success with the Stone Fund. Brava is the resulting product of their “best work to date”, and it is a combination of all of the best features from Stone Fund plus many new and advanced trading concepts.
They had set a simple and lofty goal for this project – to try to out-perform their original Stone Fund creation, and the Brava Fund was finally launched in Feb 2015 in an attempt to achieve this goal.
Please note that this is trading at 3x risk, and similar to Stone we will offer it at a 3x aggressive risk profile for a little more “sizzle” (Stone’s aggressive risk version is 2.5x so very close to this) and of course also at 1x too for a low risk version.
It’s certainly starting out on the right foot as you can see on the live 3x statement above. Since we started in February it is up just shy of 30% with only a -3.3% max peak to valley equity drawdown during this time. Quite impressive!
Please note that this not meant to be a “replacement” to Stone Fund. But rather a compliment to it, and a tool for diversification. It has many similar characteristics to Stone, but ultimately many differences as well. For starters it trades 7 currency pairs vs Stone’s 1. And for those of you who have been concerned about the lack of volume from Stone this month, well, Brava has traded 34 times already.
Stone Fund however remains as the original algo which is all about the precision and can be considered a “sharp shooter”. It’s pickier on its trade entries, but very successful with them, and most importantly it has nearly two years of proven history to back this up.
Brava does not have the same amount of history as the proven Stone Fund (although it has a stunning back-test model), but it holds a lot of credibility due to coming from the same successful team, and it is certainly off to a blazing start.
Those who are looking to further diversify their investment should consider Brava as a great option for diversifying in to as well or at the very least keep a watchful eye on it. As mentioned we have extremely high expectations for this one, due to the rare success story of Stone Fund.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for any questions or concerns regarding any of these matters or otherwise.