While the AutoTrader platform will do 99% of the work for you, it is still your responsibility to do the other 1%, which is to choose the right trading strategies for your portfolio. Choosing the right strategy for your portfolio  can become a very important strategy in itself and can make the difference between losing and winning big. We care about your long-term success and that's why we have dedicated an entire page to this subject. Some of the results from our research will blow your mind so please read this entire page.

The strategy for selecting the right strategies begins with the process of elimination. We, at ProSignal, have already performed a large part of this elimination process for you. We have reviewed the live trading performance and statistics of several hundred strategies from over 60 different signal providers and system developers and eliminated two-thirds of them from our list. If a signal provider or system developer was not profitable with all of their strategies combined, or they had more losing strategies than winning strategies, or simply had a low overall profit factor, the developer, and all of their strategies, were eliminated from our list. This is to help eliminate a developer's few strategies that may be winning by mere chance, which leaves us with a majority of strategies from developers who really appear to know what they're doing, as reflected in the overall performance of their combined strategies. 

But this still leaves you with about 100 strategies to choose from and you can trade up to 40 strategies at a time, considering you have sufficient margin to trade 40 different strategies. To trade 40 different strategies, we recommend that you have at least $40,000 USD in account equity trading a maximum of 10k lots per contract.* This is because many of the strategies use 200-300 pip stop-losses and many of them trade multiple contracts. As a general rule, each strategy should have at least a 1000-pip cushion per 10k position. In other words, you should not exceed more than 1 strategy trading 10k lots per $1,000 in account equity, assuming the strategy takes a maximum of 1 position at a time. If a strategy takes up to 6 positions at a time, you should have at least $6,000 in account equity for each 10k lot for this particular strategy. These are our recommendations for MAXIMUM leverage and we encourage you to be even more conservative than this.*

There are many different ways to choose strategies for your portfolio and we will start with some of the most common and obvious ways.

1. Average Profit per Trade: This is, perhaps, one of the easiest and most effective ways of spotting the best overall trading strategies. If a strategy has a high average profit per trade, this not only means it has been a profitable strategy, but usually means that losses can usually be made back quickly.

2. Profit Factor: Strategies with a high average profit per trade usually have a high profit factor as well. This value is the profit generated by profitable trades divided by the losses generated by losing trades. A value of 2 would indicate that twice as much money was made from winning trades than was lost from losing trades. Higher values indicate less risk. Strategies of a profit factor of 1.5 or higher are ideal.

3. Profit vs. Max Draw Down: The Max Draw down is an important statistic but only when compared to the amount of total profit the strategy has made. Strategies with a high profit factor will usually have a very good profit to  max draw down ratio so looking at the Profit Factor alone is a quick way of finding strategies that have small Max Draw Downs relative to profit.

4. Consistency: You will find that there is just a hand-full of strategies that are profitable on a consistent basis. While these may not be the most profitable strategies overall, they should not be overlooked since they can always be traded at higher leverage* to compensate for a lower monthly pip average. Of course, we have a limited amount of historical data and statistics are subject to change, but here's a list of a few strategies that have shown to be the most consistently profitable on a monthly basis to date:

* The ProSignal-ShortTerm strategies have just recently been added to the AutoTrader platform and, therefore, have very little recorded performance in the AutoTrader platform. However, the real-time performance can be viewed by generating a performance report on our charting software or by visiting our performance page. The ProSignal-ShortTerm EUR/USD strategy includes of our 1-Hour Scalp and 30-Min strategies combined, which is why it takes up to 2 positions simultaneously.

5. Inconsistency: You will find that a majority of the most profitable strategies overall are not very consistent in their profitability. In other words, they may have moderate losing months followed by much larger winning months, which makes them profitable. In fact, this inconsistency is so common that we have run tests to see what would happen if you followed the worst performers each month versus following the best performers each month for the following month's trading. The results were staggering, to say the least! The statistics show that if each month, (April through June, 2007) you traded the WORST performing strategies from the previous month, you would have made TWICE as much profit than if you had followed the best performing strategies each month. And that's based on trading 40 strategies. The fewer strategies traded each month, the wider the percentage gap in profitability between following the best performers vs. the worst performers. This may be partly due to the fact that our list of signal providers and strategy developers all have decent overall statistics to begin with and trading a good strategy after it has a bad month may actually increase the likelihood of it doing well the following month. Likewise, if a strategy has an exceptionally good month, it may be more likely to do poorly the following month. At least this is what the statistics strongly suggest. Of course, there are bad strategies that will always do poorly but it is rare to find a good strategy that will consistently do well month after month. So when a good strategy has a bad month, it may be time to consider adding it to your portfolio. It is really no different than buying on dips in their equity curve.

The pattern of good months following bad months is extremely obvious and pronounced. If profitable trading strategies are primarily based on identifying patterns in the market and using them to predict the future, then this is certainly one obvious pattern that should not be ignored! When comparing all of the techniques listed above to select strategies for the following month, this simple and yet, very unorthodox strategy beat them all by at least 100% over the course of 3 months. We are not telling you that this is how you should pick the strategies for your portfolio. We're merely pointing out the pattern and you can make your own decision from here.