Read this if you want to improve the article contest. But MORE IMPORTANTLY, read this if you want to IMPROVE YOURSELF as a trader and a human being. It is a longer piece of text but I think you will find it useful

Yesterday I had some time and checked the articles in the contest. I noticed that on average they don’t have many views. Most articles have very few or no comments. Most comments were Good luck or words along those lines.

I admit upfront that I have no proof for I am going to write here but my gut feeling tells me I am right. Read on and face a potentially ugly truth.

Many people in the contest will not write comments because this means giving points to the competition. I wouldn’t be surprised if many contest participants log out of their FX Community account to check other articles as otherwise they would give more points to the competition.

Let me tell you how this is called: scarcity mentality. It is the opposite of abundance. It comes from fear that one will not have enough. It is about not giving. Consequently one also doesn’t receive because nobody gives. Everyone just lives in their small world.

Abundant living is about giving and receiving. Most people experience this only in bits and pieces because they never open up to life enough. So that you understand this right: abundance doesn’t mean money. Money could be a part of abundance but doesn’t need to be. There are other more important things in life than money. When you die you will not take your money with you but will take your life experiences and your final inner feeling. For most people the last inner feeling is one of disappointment with themselves.

Everyone thinks of themselves as honest individuals. But actions speak louder than words and opinions. When our actions aren’t aligned with our opinions/belief about ourselves we invent lies to justify the actions. This is called cognitive dissonance. It is a trap that most people fall into. If you are interested you may want to read a bit more about it on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance Your life may change as a result.

Can you answer the following questions for yourself:
• How will the quality of articles improve with no feedback from anyone?
• How will authors develop articles that are interesting to a wider audience without feedback?
• Do you believe that the best article should win or the best marketer?

Yes, it is true that if you read other articles when logged in and provide feedback in the form of comments you will be increasing the chance of your competition being better than you. They may not read you articles and may not provide comments. What is the other option? No viewing and no comments which means living in fear. How can one feel good about life and oneself if one lives in fear?

You may dismiss this outright as: “I don’t live in fear.” I assume that most contest participants are men because studies show that more than 90% of traders are men. For most men it is an insult to tell them they live in fear because this means that they are branded as cowards which is not what men should be. The truth is that fear doesn’t affect one gender more than the other. We all experience fear. Many times we hide it, many times we deny it and many times we use cognitive dissonance to re-brand it.

If you are focused on making as much money out of the contest as possible then you are not my target audience for this text. My target audience are people who understand that they may earn a few dollars less by participating openly in this contest but are prepared to forego those few dollars for the sake of one’s own growth.

Participating openly may get you less money one month but more the next. Eventually in life things balance out. A bit of patience is required. Isn’t patience something traders should have?

The overriding law is the law of balance. This is pure physics not some religious belief. It is action and reaction. Give and receive.

My prediction for the article contest is that if things don’t change the contest will suffer from the lack of quality or quantity or most likely both. Dukascopy may change the rules one day to make this a better and fairer and more interesting competition. It may be to late or it may be timely. I don’t see the future. You may want to wait for Dukascopy or do something now. Vote with your actions.

I will finish this text with words borrowed from the book Power vs Force by David R.Hawkins. “We think we live by forces we control, but in fact are governed by power from unrevealed sources, power over which we have no control.”

Live powerfully not forcefully.

I wish you all the very best in the contest as long as you compete honestly with integrity
Robert

Dear Robert

People will not change, world will not survive, crisis won't end in euro zone and will surely spread into other continent. What is happening here in smaller proportion related to making comments, liking,view the article/trader's profile giving feedback...etc. I think It is the similar mentality in the larger proportion of people in the world. It cannot be changed. For many people your words are interesting to read but difficult to follow. I just want to say one line...Life is short make it sweet.

Greetings dear Robert,

Even if the Article Contest provides a great volume of educational information
to the Dukascopy Traders Community, you have to admit that it also has
a marketing purpose for the Dukascopy Bank services and image.

It would be great if the Dukascopy Team would promote more the Article Contest
into the Dukascopy Community, in the other contests and through the Dukascopy TV
and Webminars. At this moment only traders promote the contest and their articles in
the Dukascopy community and online throughout the Web.

In my opinion the Dukascopy Community is one of the greatests forex communities
in the online environement and it should increase as much as possible so that everybody
would have something to gain from it, to be a "win-win" situation.

Trade well,
Doctortyby

Dukascopy are a good broker. They are trying to make many good ideas work the best they can. Unfortunately people have their own ideas how to exploit such opportunities.
I hope Dukascopy will continue to improve the rules and everything that goes with the contest in order to make it better for everyone.
I think the idea of promoting articles to the FX Community is a good one. I am talking really good articles not necessarily the winners. Some articles are a flagrant copyright breach. However, I understand the legal side of things where Dukascopy can be seen as endorsing a certain view which they should not. So they are in a difficult position. The participants of the contest surely don’t make their life easier.
Dukascopy have many smart people employed so surely they will think of better and better ways which will benefit everyone.
I keep my fingers crossed.

All the every best
Robert

Hello,
from my point of view, traders read most interesting articles. If you read an article from a "log off" browser, you will anyway be another "unique IP addreass" reading the article so increasing views. So people read and (mostly) comments articles they find more interesting (for their reasons). Then comes the time of end of month prizes: dukascopy will certainly take in consideration that some people simply "copy n paste" some web pages adding here and there something and that some others will be claiming best strategy ever having whole traders account wasted to 0 or so.
An article could have 1500 comments by people insulting writer for an evident copyright fraught. An so? Could that article win the contest because of 1500 comments?

For what i see contest rules are perfect, and last months winners or top articles were always something that traders and dukasopy admin found very interesting, and in none of them i found something bad. While if you take the time to read articles from rank #11 to last, you will understand that was nothing wrong with those ideas, but the ones who won, were better.

There are a lot of forums (i also was used to post in some forums) where fair play or not everybody can come and post something. Here, from my view, it's different: it's a competition! and traders will try to do their best to write down best article. And for what i see... it is really not easy!

Hello Robert,

Another highly important topic of debate.

I always believe in abundance. Even the same I mentioned in my article called distressing the stressful trader.

Of course, Dukascopy community is a wonderful and one of the most respected community. As you said the people employed by Dukascopy are of highest caliber and skills. Even the ideas they are bringing out are not less than wonderful.Further Dukascopy Trading contest is the one which works with highest transparency. I love it.

However it is due to few ( 99% community members are honest and have integrity ) individuals who do not go by their consciousness and who do not have the real souls make the things to go berserk just to achieve their objectives. Of course goal justifying the means.

Just imagine a situation.same contestant creating 2 different profiles and writes 2 articles from each of his ID's. He knows one of them will definitely win the reward due to his extraordinary marketing/spamming skills. As long as the soul agenda is to cheat , no one can stop such practices.

Please look around and you will understand whether my points are sensible?

Dukascopy has put best of its efforts to abandon such practices by changing the rules recently. However what can you do with the people who are dead by their soul and live only with their body.

I do agree with RobertBric. His thoughts are great.
But I do not know how to change the rules.
And somehow I cannot figure it out the purpose of this contest. In the beginning I was thinking that it's promotional contest, but then they generally removed outside visitors from a final score. So it's not.
It would be great if Dukascopy would tell the purpose of this contest. Then maybe people could tell some useful ideas about the rules.

I think that the underlying issue is 'amount of visitors' to the Article Contest. While the contest seems to be growing - albeit rather slowly - the low amount of traffic exacerbates the issue of cheating; a three or four visitors and a couple of comments can catapult an article to the top of the standings. I have noticed that Dukascopy is trying to increase participation by, among other things, mentioning it in the weekly contest roundup. That's great.
As I have mentioned in some other thread, I think that it would be worth considering to let the participants in the trader contest earn a small amount of extra points by voting for an article and thus drive traffic to the article contest.

Hi TBFX and Dukascopy community:

I don't agree with your point of view - trader contestants getting points - because that way we will run to the problems we have before and still have them but in less extent. I don't agree too with the way the articles are presented in front page of contest. In my opinion the presentation of articles must be random or sequential to give to all contestants the same oportunity. I think the key here is the visibility and organization of the library and quality articles.

EDIT: Just one ideia: Dukascopy can show the first part of articles in library (the ones they think useful) in ramdom order or sequential on the right side (or the left side) of all pages as actually do for Article Contest page where it's show the last articles when we are reading one article.

Just my toughts

Trade well and good luck

JL

It s human nature..once you have an incentive to win money in competitive environment, the ´ideals´ go out the window. The more inexperienced traders there are, the more likely that they will be more focused on themselves and how much money they can get from the contest (s). The more successful you are as a trader in real life or the more focused you are on improving your trading, the more relaxed and indifferent you are and the more willing you will be to share your ideas etc. in a selfless way.

Maybe Dukascopy should select the topic or topics for each month if the quality of the articles is a big concern to them..and perhaps you should get points based on how many times you comment on other peoples´articles (minimum number of comments) and these comments must be relevant questions, not just cut and paste ¨I like it, great job¨ empty comments.

Greetings,

A very decent comment from DaddyPapi, I agree with the suggestions.

Best regards,
Doctortyby

hello,
just came here to update my idea after 1st month in article contest!

i was way too much optimistic in my previous quote!
i really find non sense commenting by people in some articles while great articles are left "alone".
i'm not certainly talking about my articles! for example there is a great article by jlong in atr indicator or else positive's articles are really good and many many others that actually are very down on rankings because people even don't take the time to read them.
i really i don't understand why people don't take the time to give 2 words on what they find interesting or not about an article. there is nothing bad if some one comes to me and say "i think you are completely wrong because this and that, and i found reading your article very bad due to your grammar etc..... etc.... etc....." i would certainly do better and better the following article!!!

i agree with daddypappi and i would like to add something:

dukas should impose to people to give valuation on every article:
presentation, content, and if find it helpful and so how much and WHY!!
then at the end of month dukas will keep doing their valutation but at least every writer will have an idea on how other people judge his work and so improve, change, find new topics, etc.....

after 1st month i see things from a very different point of view, and i must say that even if rules are great, need to be modified!

thank you
bybye and good luck

@RobertBric Congrats on your decision to participate in article contest. It is nice to see new, talented faces in article contest. I liked your intention but certainly not your attitude. I don't think you have understood the purpose of the contests properly. With out any reason or proof you condemning people at large which are totally based on your own assumptions makes me feel that you are living in fear than others.

for your kind information, over 13500 members of DFC can comment and vote your article and millions on Facebook and Google+ can vote the article. Reach to them. since they don't write articles they WILL NEVER be in FEAR.

Whether it is trader contest, strategy contest or article contest it's your responsibility to spread your work. for example, i am not a programmer and don't understand the codes written by others. i hardly visit the strategy contest page. i visit that only when some one shares about his work on strategy. like wise, those who are not interested in the articles and don't want to learn more will hardly come to article contest page. Sharing your article among DFC members is the best way for spreading your knowledge but some stupids call it "SPAM". if a member doesn't want to receive your comments he will certainly block you or reply asking you to keep away from him.

I see your participation in the contest for the first time and looks like you are highly frustrated with lower no. of visits to your articles and written all blah blahs......

As you say stay calm and keep writing.

I also would like to bring to your notice the previous months final result after the Dukascopy evaluation change huge positions. those who were in top5 have not got the prize for involving in unethical methods to win and those who were in below 10th position were awarded prizes for the great writing.

So, DONT WORRY BE HAPPY
Live on logic not on assumptions.

Nagaraja Adiga

Hi Dukascopy Community and Contest Team:

I firmelly believe in the share of knowledge and with the massification of internet we have the easiest way to do that. I think Dukascopy can get more return from this contest if don't see it as only a contest - and the articles go to oblivion month after month after contest - but a way to implement a knowledge base for all world and Forex adicts in particular. In this contest we get can some diferent views, some diferent ideas or some diferent ways to see this "world/business". I don't agree with the way that "forced" or "afinity" visits or likes works on actual classification method, but i must say, i can live with this, and Dukascopy can do whatever they want about this. If i don't like the rules, it's easy, i don't participate. As i don't agree with this way i refrain to write comments if i don't have nothing to add or to discuss the article. Also i send my thanks and comments over PM if not related to the article or don't add nothing to my article itself. Usually i read all articles and comment them if i have something to add and if i like it i give them a like (not usually latelly as i'm getting too busy to read them all). Some people here just say "the world is perfect as is", "take calm" but if we live by this words along the time we stay on "stone age" today. Also, they don't live by what they say, they use all means at their disposall to get advantage over others and that is ok as the rules allow it. If i want to cheat the system, i have the means to do it easy, but i don't want do that and i think that don't is fair to our community at all. You know what i think if you have read some of my posts here. I think i repeat myself and don't bother you all with the same words again.

Just to clarify something: @NagarajaAdiga: you say " for example, i am not a programmer and don't understand the codes written by others. i hardly visit the strategy contest page.".
If we see your profile:
"Strategy Contest: View profile
Current position: 90/174
January 2012: 68/200"

Can you explain how you participate in a contest with programming skills needed ? Or someone give it to you to participate ? Or you use someone else strategy without changing it ? Strange, your words don't math what you do. Is this logic or assumption as you say ?

Trade well and good luck

Best Regards

JL

Relax JL,

don't be half baked please. you should also see my strategy contest profile page. my program never initiated any trade. i in fact borrowed a program from some one just to know how these programs work. nothing else. You may also see my strategy description for what i wanted from that. you see my position in 60,90 range because my program did not lose money.

Every one have their own ideas. my idea may not be in sync with yours but forcing my idea on you is not the way to learn. but article contest is only a way to share our views and offering others about what they feel about our idea. that's why you need people to come and visit your article. you will not gain anything from cheating the system.

live on logic not on assumptions

Hey Robert, Scramble, Daddypapi,Jlingo....Please reread my last post in this thread ....Didn't I tell you? Mates - I know you all live by your consciousness.....I am with you.... please don't waste your time....