Upon joining, many new movement members reach out stating: “hey guys, my performance statistics are different from Service Alfa (insert here your favourite alternative site to Darwinex) – they’re wrong!”
Whilst occasionally stuff DOES go wrong, more often than not differences owe to the fact that returns at Darwinex are calculated differently from most existing service providers.
Other services calculate performance on changes to account balance, which accounts for realised P&L (closed trades), but ignores unrealised P&L until open trades are closed.
Darwinex performance is measured on changes to liquidation value, which accounts for realised P&L (closed trades) as well as unrealised P&L (i.e. open trades).
This is the most common reason why returns “differ”. The rest of this post explains why we do things this way, and what implications this has.
Other services performance calculation – changes in account balance
Most services track changes to balance, i.e. accounting for
- Starting account balance
- Plus minus realised P&L
- Plus minus cash flows
- Cash paid in / deducted by your broker (swaps, commissions, etc.)
- Monies deposited in / withdrawn by yourself
Performance over a given reference period is then driven by the % change in the resulting account balance.
Your Darwinex Performance – changes in mark to market
At Darwinex, all strategies’ Trading Journal reflect daily liquidation values, considering:
- Starting account balance
- Plus minus realised P&L: i.e. monies made or lost on closed positions
- Plus minus cash flows as per above
- Unrealised P&L: i.e. what-if P&L when closing ALL open positions at the end of every day
I.e. at the end of every day, regardless of whether trades are open or closed, we compute the hypothetical P&L for ALL open positions assuming that they were closed at the then going market price. The resulting account “balance” is called liquidation value for that particular day.
Your performance is calculated on changes to this liquidation value (purists would call this Mark-to-Market value) of equity. Which means, on any day where open positions are held overnight, the inputs into your performance calculation are different from the inputs at Service Alfa. Unsurprisingly, the output is also different!
Unrealised P&L – why do we care about it?
Darwinia rates strategies for DARWIN investor appeal (hence Darwinia): our standpoint is that of an investor replicating, with his own monies, all trading decisions in a strategy.
This makes us care about unrealised P&L as much as we care about account balance: let’s work through an example to illustrate why.
Market movements matter
Trader Ace with USD 10,000 balance opens a 5 lot long EUR/USD trade. For the next 3 days, this will be his only open trade.
This is what happens to the EUR/USD over the timeframe.
- Trade open at 1.30135 on day 0
- End of Day 0: EUR/USD is at 1.30115. Ace keeps the trade overnight
- End of Day 1: EUR/USD is at 1.29250. Ace keeps the trade overnight
- End of Day 2: EUR/USD is at 1.28815. Ace keeps the trade overnight
- Day 3: trade is closed at 1.30250
Investor A replicates Ace’s trades with his own monies 1:1, i.e. using the same leverage as Ace. A uses Darwinex and service Alfa to monitor his investment.
This is the performance calculation investor A gets at Darwinex and Service Alfa [1]:
| Snapshot | EUR/USD | TradeSlide | Service Alfa | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liq. value | Daily Perf. | Balance | Daily Perf. | ||
| Trade open | 1.30135 | 10,000.00$ | N/A | 10,000.00$ | N/A |
| End of day 0 | 1.30115 | 9,900.00$ | -1% | 10,000.00$ | Flat |
| End of day 1 | 1.29250 | 5,575.00$ | -43,69% | 10,000.00$ | Flat |
| End of day 2 | 1.28815 | 3,400.00$ | -39.01% | 10,000.00$ | Flat |
| Trade close | 1.30250 | 10,575.00$ | 211.03%(5.75% compounded over 3 days) | 10,575.00$ | 5.75% |
Let’s get this straight: both methodologies are “correct”.
BUT: Darwinex performance contains more information than Service Alfa’s calculation – the unrealised P&L that drives changes to liquidation value.
This has implications that matter.
Implication 1: Performance “masquerades”
Investors are always keen for brilliant performance. As always in life, there’s two ways about it: the proper way, and a short cut.
The safe one is to develop trading skills, manage risk with discipline, and work 2,000 hours a year to develop and maintain a unique strategy that delivers risk-adjusted returns. But hey, we know that’s hard work …
So why not take the short cut? If performance equals realised P&L and unrealised P&L doesn’t matter, why not “short cut” mind-boggling balance growth as follows?
- Trade winning? Close it and credit realized P&L
- Trade losing? Keep “corpses” in the “unrealised P&L” closet
- Repeat
Of course, too many losing trades will trigger a margin-call (the worse the strategy, the sooner). Meanwhile, high return, low risk growth in balance will have lured plenty of profitable investors using service Alfa…
Implication 2: Risk management
A more fundamental implication is risk measurement. Measuring risk on volatility in balance leads A to these conclusions:
- Volatility: low – A’s money “only” moves from 100% to 105.75%
- Drawdown: A “experienced” no drawdown in this trade
- Rally: A “experienced” a rally of 5.75% of his money on this trade
I.e. A will completely ignore that his monies moved around 40% over the 2 days of the trade, and that at the end of day 2 he was 6,600 USD worse-off.
Of course, Ace could argue that the trade worked out just grand, with a profit of 5.75%. But what if A was leaving for a Himalaya trekking trip and asked Ace to close any open positions at the close of day 2? Boy that would have been ugly!
Summary: why?
Calculating net liquidation values requires us to source & maintain the mark-to-market price database for all the assets you ever traded, and that’s not a small & cheap database to populate, host and maintain.
Further, the way performance is calculated on the BASIC and the DARWINIA statistics is slightly different, as Darwinia is a lot more analytically involved. You will occasionally see a few decimal differences between one and the other, as they are updated with different precision and time frames… but they’re not wrong.
But then again, that’s the only way to create D-Leverage, no DarwinIA, no DARWINs, etc. If it requires us doing things differently from service Alfa – so be it!