Topaz NQ100 M

The developers of the system are disciplined and self-confident. The system will probably be alright in the long run, but does not appear to have a significant edge. It does well when the market does its "normal" oscillations, but is completely wrongfooted when the market tanks decisively. It adds insult to injury by trying to catch falling knives that no good discretionary trader would touch. This of course is a hard thing to avoid for any mechanical system. Buying deep in-the-money call options of a market index probably has better risk/reward characteristics, and is much much simpler.

I assumed that TOPAZ system is resilient enough to withstand the US financial crisis of 2008, it should withstand the current European crisis. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case during last 3 months. The system doubles down for losing positions and there is very little chance for a stock to recover in 12 days in this volatile market. So far, this system fails miserably in bearish and volatile market. The developer also raised his subscription price by 50 pct. recently and should consider lowering it due to very poor performance.

Would be nice to be able to trust the system right now, but with 4 months of losses wiping out an entire year of gains, the drawbacks of 100% automation outweigh the positive for the near term. In these unprecedented market conditions, it is impossible to have reasonable hope that any gains are not going to be destroyed by the system tripling down on spiraling stocks that have simply no realistic chance of recovering within the automatic 10 day timeframe. Nor has any attempt been made to limit the number of buys: C2 automated margin calls on bad days can cause a lot of damage even for subs who judiciously manage their own position sizes. Rather than sitting here worrying about “missing” any gains, I think it’s time to shut it down and sit it out until (if/when) it stabilizes.

Despite its seemingly complex buying and selling rules, the system is essentially a leveraged exposure to the NQ100 and is at almost all times fully invested. As such it is highly correlated to the NQ100 leveraged x2. With its high trading frequency and thus high costs plus a high monthly subscription charge, it remains doubtful whether long term the system would outperform buying and holding QQQ with x2 leverage.

Topaz is the best stock strategy I've found on C2 and the only one I consider safe enough for my retirement account. It is flexible and profitable, both short term and long. Autotrading it is easy and there has been a steady upward equity climb since I joined (although it had to weather the tsunami as did a lot of other systems.) Sometimes the mandatory 10 day selloff can be a frustrating if a position is in the red, but the overall equity curve still steadily rises. The beauty of this once a day system is that if you want to manually manipulate any of the positions, it is easy to do so, even with autotrading enabled. Developer's website and comprehensive FAQs are excellent.