My fractalerts Review – II

We asked real Fractalerts users to share a Fractalerts review—and they answered. The following is Part II of an authentic, unpaid testimonial from Brent D. If you missed Part I, start here.

Fractalerts Review Brent D.

Once I subscribed to Fractalerts’ Indices product, I started to monitor their performance in real time—but I didn’t make any trades yet. With 8 years of impressive trading results, I wanted to see it in action for myself.

I reached out again to their team to confirm the whole “no targets or stops” thing. True, I never had amazing results with my stops and targets, but I still felt uneasy going without them. They patiently walked me through their strategy, reassuring me that stops and targets run counter to their fractal framework. They also suggested that trading their Commodities signals (gold, silver, and oil) alongside their Indices signals would smooth out returns and could reduce “drawdown” over long periods of time.

Of course, the cynic in me assumed they were just trying to get me to subscribe to another one of their services. But after receiving years of performance numbers for Commodities, I was impressed.

So by the end of 2014, I had 8 years’ worth of trading results for 4 stock Indices and 3 Commodities, and I was paying for the current Indices alerts. And I had yet to make a single trade based on any of this data. So, what did I do? I made a spreadsheet, of course.

I built the spreadsheet by hand using Fractalerts’ “claimed” returns. My spreadsheet contained 96 months’ worth of entries (8 years of monthly data) for each of the 7 instruments (672 total data points). Then I rolled it all up into a single combined performance chart. I used futures contracts, converting their stated “points” into actual $ based profits/losses, instead of ETF% gains in the sheet below — but I offer it for everyone’s perusal.

In addition to the monthly breakdowns offered above, I also totaled the specific performance of each of the 7 instruments over the complete 8-year reported period. All totals below represent one futures contract for each of the instruments.

Note that Fractalerts recommends trading each of the instruments in “equal weights,” which is much easier using ETFs, since the notional value of each futures contract fluctuates substantially from time to time.

My Fractalerts Review Findings

A number of things jumped out at me (and my much more savvy trading friend who helped me review these findings).

• These are impressive returns, especially in all market conditions that we’ve faced over 8 years.
• The “no stops and no targets” mantra obviously has worked for them historically—even though there had been some gut-churning ups and downs along the way. Commodities in particular have been very good to the Fractalerts team.
• Trading both the Commodities and the Indices simultaneously does indeed help smooth and improve overall returns.
• Fractalerts’ self-reported results were authentic. Had they wanted to overly-hype themselves, they could have offered much different views of their actual trading results that might have “smoothed out” their reported results.

I was almost ready to dive in and start trading…