Who is ThePipsMaster UK?

ThePipsMasterUK is a trader from the UK who has successfully become one of the most profitable signal providers on ZuluTrade in recent months.

This particular trader is currently ranked 10th on ZuluTrade (as of 18 September 2018) out of the thousands of signal providers that offer their services on this site, and currently has more than 4400 subscribers following them who have chosen to trade their signals automatically in their own accounts.

This is largely because they have an overall success rate of around 98%, and have generated a total profit of 2867 pips in the 26 weeks that they have been trading.

I’m sure you will agree that this is an exceptional trading record, which is why I wanted to profile them on this site and keep an eye on their results in the future to see if they can keep up this impressive record.

Therefore I have included this widget that automatically displays their overall trading statistics in real time, and has links that will enable you to open an account with ZuluTrade and follow their signals yourself if you so wish:

Trading Performance Update (March 2019)

I originally said below that I worry that this type of trading strategy isn’t really sustainable in the long run because when you are targeting small gains every day and using significantly larger stop losses, it only needs one bad call to wipe out months of profits, and unfortunately that’s exactly what has happened in recent weeks.

After opening overnight long positions on the EUR/USD pair on 4/5 February, the price never hit his modest price targets and after the EUR/USD started to fall, he and his copiers have had to anxiously wait for a reversal for the last month or so.

ThePipsMasterUK advocates a stop loss of 150 points, but when the price looked like it was going to take out these stop losses, he made the costly mistake of extending the stop loss to 250 points for each position (which is never a good idea), and after another price fall, he has now closed all of his trades for a huge loss of 1337.9 points.

As you can imagine, this has devastated the accounts of both him and his thousands of copiers, and many people have understandably stopped copying him, despite the fact that he is still over 3000 pips in profit overall.

However the problem is his money management rules because unless he can find a way to tighten his stop losses and still make money in the long run, these blowouts will inevitably occur again in the future.

Trading Strategy

The signal providers on ZuluTrade don’t provide full details of their trading strategies because they could easily be copied by other traders, but they do tend to provide a brief overview of their strategies, and in this case ThePipsMasterUK has revealed that he is using an overnight trading strategy on the EUR/USD pair.

So in other words, they focus exclusively on this one pair, which is good because it means that they know exactly how this particular behaves, and they only ever trade this pair overnight when the markets are quieter, volatility is reduced and the price movements are more predictable.

Profit Targets

If you take a closer look at their trading history, you will notice that this strategy looks for small gains from every trade, generally between 6 and 10 pips, with up to 8 positions opened at any one time. Therefore if the trades are successful, you could expect to make up to 80 pips profit per day following this trader.

Stop Losses / Drawdown

ThePipsMasterUK uses an arbitrary stop loss of around 150 pips, but this is largely to enable the trades to hit their target price without being stopped out for a small loss each time.

In reality these stop losses are never hit based on their previous track record, and the maximum drawdown so far has been 481.3 pips with a worst trade of 85.2 pips.

However the big worry for me is that when you are using large stop losses and are only targeting small gains with a high success rate, it only needs one bad trade to wipe out several months profit.

So far it hasn’t happened (it has now – see update above), but I have been in this game long enough to know that a big hit is inevitably going to happen at some point using this type of strategy.

Final Thoughts

Overall I have to applaud this trader, and am happy to see a fellow Brit achieve such impressive results in the 26 weeks that they have been trading, but I do worry that this type of strategy might not be sustainable in the long run.

ThePipsMasterUK has a remarkable 98% success rate, which is almost unheard of in the forex industry, but to maintain this kind of record over long periods of time is exceptionally hard to do, no matter how good your strategy is.

I myself don’t follow this particular trader and would probably worry about incurring a big hit every time the price moves 20-30 pips in the wrong direction, which seems to happen quite often, which is why I would probably feel more confident following ThePipsMasterUK if he tightened his stop losses and maybe lengthened his profit targets.

However he has said himself that he has no intention of changing his strategy, which is fair enough. I just hope that he can continue his success because I have seen many profitable providers crash and burn on ZuluTrade, and it would only need one or two bad trades for the same thing to happen here.