I don't understand how the popularity points is calculated, it says per any ip entry in the blog should earn 1 point, well I have more than one entry in my blog and I have "0" papularity point.

I would say same question from me to Dukascopy.Why?

Please note that popularity points (just as all other evaluation factors) are attributed basing on traders' rankings, not on the absolute number of points.
That means that all your points get counted, then aggregated. After that all participants are ranked and the scores are assigned basing on their positioning in this rank.

Well,

popularity is not an essential part of trading only the bottom line counts, but Dukascopy need to get something back for their effort and prizes which considering this is a no fee or deposit contest is great news for us. All Dukascopy ask for is that you tell more people about them which I consider a very fair part of the evaluation procedure. basically you need to promote the contest as it encourages people to try Dukascopy. A small price to pay for the great prizes on offer.

Is it part of trading or performance, no it is not. But as this is one of the only brokers offering a great free contest I feel they deserve every bit of help they can in promoting it to a wider audience, after all they are offering great prizes and all you have to do is trade well.

well done Dukascopy you get my vote.

Thank you for your appreciation. You put the concept of popularity points in a very concise and clear statement.

Ok, I understand the unique visitors part, but what about votes and comments? Everybody can clearly see that 95% (!!!) of comments makes no sense at all and the popularity is the only reason they were written for. And the same happens with votes, they don't express anything. Actually popularity kills comments and votes, nobody reads them or take them serious. And by the way, popularity is a drawback for long term traders and a great advantage for scalpers becouse of a great dependency between amount of trades and amount of comments and votes you get.

I couldn't agree more with you, It kind of makes the points for comments worthless

I fully agree with that one with Dukascopy being one of the few brockers offering a GREAT free demo contest,
BUT the methodology,or better put, the algorithmes of calculating points are STILL a mystery for a great
majority of contestants.That EVERYTHING is RELATIVE has already the most clever guy of all stated before...
But how relative?Points melting down with no apparent reason,even hard stuff as performance points let alone popularity.
The MAIN reason most of us are here is to excercise "trading good practice" and discipline!Whatever personal trading style!
The fuzzy laconic answers to repeted request of transparency from participants have not yet met the desired quality.
I have more than 120 UNIQUE VISITORS to my blog, most of them from Twitter Forex-groups and still 0(zero,nil, null,nix:)) popularity
points.I know, I know all is relative but again HOW relative?Previous answers are not clear....
Knowing the exact methodology with + and - makes more conscious traders,
showing where is place for improvement.Going live I will choose to trade the way I learn to trade in this contest!But nobody will be there to count my points,so I will need to know how to....Otherwise the contest loses its REAL purpose, from a contestant perspective
of course. Chances to a prize winning place average 1(one ,uno,un,en)%! and CAN NOT and SHOULD NOT BE THE MAIN INCENTIVE!
In my opinion it is high time to PUT THE FISH ON THE TABLE!

we have to understand they are trader with a balance below 100k and they are still in top 50 just because they have popularity point, the question is would you give you own money to these trader to perform for you? if not, then popularity point means nothing.

Please note that the Trader contest is not a competition based on pure equity performance. That has been stressed from the very beginning and this derives from all the rules/descriptions.

Also, please remember 2 important factors:
1. Only Participants with real positive increase of capital can be treated as Contest nominees.
2. In order to get eligible for the Dukascopy evaluation points one has to satisfy the following 2 criteria:
2.1. At least 10 closed positions
2.2. Equity not less than 100,000 USD

Hence, a trader with a negative equity change cannot be nominated to a prize position, even if he has a 100-points popularity. This stipulation was made expressly in order to stress that we do not put popularity etc. above trading, i.e. above equity and pip performance.

Funny thing about popularity..when i got minus pips everyone comment good luck and give positive rate (+ likes)
but when i got positive pips nobody comment and give positive rate

hi

ikeep getting emails saying people like my trades +1 but never get any popularity points ? new here could someone explain.

also dukascopy pints how do they work? do you need to hit your tp or sl to be considered because the comments dont seem to mean much in the leaders trades.

thanks

Hi i have nearly 400k equity and more than 10 trades but not dukas points , zeustrading??

Hi all

My opinion is, competition is balanced very well on the contrary of all other competitions on web.

There are 10 prizes not just one - if you have only one prize, it will be given to someone who had just pure luck and maybe a plenty of free time.
In such a case the winner will be someone unemployed from US, who has infinite amount of time and very fast internet connection for free from goverment.

In my opinion when there is only one prize, then no real trader could win this - no one who trades real money with 20 or 50 000 USD account would bet 5 or more million on a single or even more trades simoultaneously.
Maybe there could be even more prizes, 20 or more, but just a small amount - 100 USD or something like this. Because if you trade real strategy from real account you hardly do more than 50% a month. Maybe you do 10%. But here, if you do 100% in a month it is not even an entrance among winners.

If I was a manager of contest, I would give 1-st prize 5000, but then another 100 prizes of 100 USD to people, who traded resonable strategy. And condition would be to describe the strategy and make it public for contestants, or maybe give it to dukascopy.

I also fully agree, DukasCopy wants to advertistise competition and dukascopy itself, hence the more unique IP of a page, the more points. I think it works, also when someone is very good like snovshow, then people visit his blog and they are looking on his trades. In my opinion he deserves many points for popularity. Also, he didnot bet huge amounts like 5 milions but reasonable 1 million.

Unfortunately, I think it must be said that people dont have the same possibilities - I think BIGGER differencies are due to places where people were born or where they are living.

I understand that you know this, but just to remind it - it has connection to evaluation as well:
if someone was born in less developed country, he has problems with internet, forex education, maybe also is hard to find enough time for trading because people must work very hard.
It is noncence that some evaluation would be perfect. We can only try to go in the direction of reasonable good evaluation but we can hardly achive perfect one.
If you were born in US/ UK, Switzerland or Germany, then you are probably fluent in english, have perfect internet connection on many places, have your own fast computer with many monitors maybe solely for trading, also you could educate yourself very well in forex, you dont have to work till night to survive and you can spend afternoons by trading forex. Because you can trade London and NY hours. If someone is from Indonesia or Malaysia, China then they hardly start trading every night and will sleep during their days.
And I dont take into account many other things.
And if you add all this things to the fact that you have to make almost 100% profit almost in a week to win something, I think it is hard to evaluate it somehow in the end

you have 2 possibilities
- choose a way as a long term profitable trader with real money, who compete just for fun but you have small probability of winning something
- or try to compete and win However, it is crazy betting in my eyes, and it should not be just according to performance - contestants should publish their strategy ahead or do something like this.


So my point is, I am very happy that Dukascopy does evaluation based on many criterias and not solely on performance. There is always room for doing it better but in my opinion it is still much better than based it only on performance. It might be but then rules must be more strict - tighter SL, maximum lets say 3 positions - If you show me some real trader with 100k USD account trading daily 10 and more times 5 million trades in the evening after their working hours, I would give you the prize 5000USD

I work at credit risk in a bank and we do the same - evaluate according to many criteria and make sums of points - it is much better than have just one criteria like performance
Every month I do a table and we have 20 criterias and I still think it should be more than 20.


What I appreciate the most is, that you can trade not only one month - and why do you think that the same people are not on first place - nobody can repeat crazy hundreds% of profit - we all know it - so why so many people are begging for evaluation based solely on performance?

And best of all is we can watch traders blogs and learn from our trades - charts are beautiful, many traders publish their strategies, discuss their problems.


In my eyes it can't be better. Dukascopy has to take care of its clients and only after it if they have enough time they could make competitions and answer here in forum. Otherwise they risk to loose their real reputattion for some short term virtual reputation regarding contest. If you were a real client of dukascopy - what would you prefer - perfect service for clients or perfect service for potential clients - I hope Dukascopy takes care at first of the real clients and virtual are always on second place! i don't care if I dont have an avatar on my blog.
But I really do care if they help me in time with my real account.



I think we all have to thank DukasCopy for very good and prepared competition. It is amazing that we have a forum here where someone answer our questions, where someone cares. We have to be more positive!


thanks

Good idea - i like Would be more motivating for many traders to focus on real trading than on gambling

Agree, good idea give prizes for working sustainable strategy, not for gambling. Maybe someone could have a strategy to trade news and sudden market moves, but if it could be described in details, with limitations on some days or even hours during week, why not?

Your point is clear.

Seeing that the number of participants is growing and aiming at providing additional incentives to those contestants who end up the month outside the top-10 we are planning to introduce additional motivating bonuses for the traders finishing on 10th-20th or 10th-30th positions.

More details will be announced as soon as we come up with the updated awarding scheme.

I like this idea indeed since the contestant counter is almost a 1000 folks in it now. +1

[quote][/quote]Ok, I understand the unique visitors part, but what about votes and comments? Everybody can clearly see that 95% (!!!) of comments makes no sense at all and the popularity is the only reason they were written for. And the same happens with votes, they don't express anything. Actually popularity kills comments and votes, nobody reads them or take them serious. And by the way, popularity is a drawback for long term traders and a great advantage for scalpers becouse of a great dependency between amount of trades and amount of comments and votes you get[quote].

Absolutely agreeing with the above! Comments and voting must make good sense else all can make popularity point scores simply by replicating just the same remark all over other contestants irrespective of whether they deserved a valid vote +1 or not. Some of these can make my stomach roll 'cause some were assigning big pip losses with + 1 ! Let's see how dukascopy's team is overseeing this issue!