I participated for 3 months, and over the course of the time there were 10 trades. The model never had more than 2 losses in a row before I joined. After I joined the first 3 trades were loses. One other time there were 3 loses in a row. Of the 10 trades, 7 of them were loses.
As one other review indicated, the sizing of the position was not well explained. I partly blame myself for this, because I did not research MES trade size. I found out after the first trade that 1 contract is actually a 5x position. So my investment used margin as it was 5x larger than I expected. On top of that it was a loss, so I was playing catch-up from the beginning.
I respect the trade managers style to "not shoot the lights out" because it also prevented a big loss.
Unfortunately it worked against me as indicated in previous paragraph. The style of the trades generally were to limit gains or losses to around 1% give or take a fractional amount. In assessing my position after 3 ".months, I realized that it would take approx 10 months to recover my losses and that does not include the monthly fee. And that assumes all trades over that time frame would be profitable. However, I do realize that I could choose to increase the sizing of the trades if the results began to improve in the next 3 months. That is a risk I just am not willing to take right now. -- maybe later I will be back.
One last comment - I agree with one of the other reviews written - saying the fee should be commensurate with the size of the portfolio - not the same as the Stella 100, which is based on a higher portfolio amount. It discourages the small investor.
The strategy works better in trending markets. It has not responded very well on this bumpy and volatile market now. It's becoming unattractive for small accounts (like mine , ~25k) with a monthly subscription of $98. It's unreasonable to me that strategy manager charges the same amount for 50 Plus and 500 Plus when clearly account sizes on those strategies will be different. I suggest to reduce monthly subscription for the 50 Plus for a better chance on small account owners.
I've had the pleasure of trading the Stella Capital 50 Plus strategy since October 2021. During this period, my returns have been much higher with this strategy than with my own trading efforts. This speaks not only to the Manager's skills at reading the market, but also his/her trading philosophy, in which he/she emphasizes the fundamentals of discipline, risk management, and positive expectancy. Drawing on this philosophy and decades of experience, the Manager is very transparent and conscientious about his/her thought process, and does not hesitate to acknowledge and learn from losses when they occur. As such, I have learned an immense amount from the Manager's trading emails, which alone are worth the subscription cost.
As I approach one year of trading this strategy, and as we enter a bear market, I'm convinced that the Stella Capital 50 Plus strategy is poised to succeed over the long term, irrespective of market conditions. I have found no other strategy that combines such exceptional market intuition with time-tested trading principles to deliver sustained alpha to traders large and small alike.
This strategy trades the ES futures once per week (currently). A long or short position is taken early in the week...usually on Sunday. Stop-loss and take-profit orders are placed at the same time. It has a fixed risk/reward of about 1:1 with a win rate of about 70%. The position usually closes the next day.
The strategy manager understands risk and works to manage it. He sends out frequent communications and is responsive to private questions.
Initially I misunderstood how to scale the strategy. I scaled based on the current value of the account on the strategy's home page (which is ~$28K as of May 10, 2022). However, the scaling needs to be based on the strategy's notional value (which isn't visible) but according to the strategy manager is about $50K.
Thus if I had a $30K account, I might have assumed that I should scale at 100% (to match the home page value). But the correct sizing would actually be 60%.
In March 2022, I started by trading the strategy in a simulation account. After a few weeks, I was motivated to go live. In the past five weeks of live trading, there have been four wins and one loss. I am pleased with the results.
Not only does this strategy do very well and have great returns, but the trade manager is very communicative with lots of updates and is humble in his emails. Definitely recommend!