Jan. 8th to 21st: Tier One Program News
Posted by rabbit on January 21st, 2006
North Sea Forex Group (NSFG)
I reported last week that NSFG was accepting deposits and withdrawal applications via its web site. Now they have scrapped these features of the site and are making their Managed Account Services the focus. A few people have contacted me asking what is the difference between a forex Managed Account, and a regular pooled account. With a Managed Account, you send your money to a forex broker (In the case of NSFG it is FXCM). With a pooled account, you send your money to an admin who then pools everyone’s funds and put it into a forex account for trading.
A Managed Account is generally safer than a pooled account because your funds are secure with the broker (the only risk being bad trades by the trader). With this type of account, the trader have trading access and rights to the account, but cannot make deposits or withdrawals. These rights and access are granted by you to the trader by what is called a LPOA (Limited Power of Attorney). You can revoke the LPOA at any time if you are not satisfied with the performance of the trader. You can also make deposits and withdrawals anytime you wish (althout some traders require a minimum balance to continue trading the account).
The advantage of a pooled account is that you can start off with a significantly lower balance than a Managed Account. To open a Managed Account, one generally must have a minimum of $5,000 or more. With NSFG, the minimum is $25,000 for their Managed Account. However, you can join their pooled account program with as little as $100. If you wish to join the program, all you have to do is send a blank email to info@ns-fg.com to get deposit and other information. I was told that the returns for the pooled and managed accounts should be roughly the same (maybe a tad more for the Managed Accounts because of the strategies being used).
MPDW
MPDW is still humming along. However, there are still some controversy surrounding it at the moment. You can read all about it here. So far I have not seen or heard anything definitive to make me change my direction with the program. I still think it is a good program, which is why I still have it listed as Low to Medium risk in my Tier One programs list. The return for the week of January 8th to 14th was 3.60%.
Again nothing much to report for this program. The program is running smoothly and everyone is happy. The returns are also picking up from previous weeks lows. The total returns for last week (Jan. 15th - 21st) was 4.30%.