Where did 7 million dollars disappear to?

The Outlook page showed Total Funds of $34M a week ago, now it's at $27M, and yet 'Funds Lost' is roughly the same. Any mods on this site know what's up?

Other variables look a lot lower in general than last week (the lot position for various pairs, etc). I'm guessing the earlier numbers were inaccurate and corrected?

The profitable / non-profitable figures are almost certainly inaccurate, as the same figures released by the brokers aren't even close to 54% profitable..

https://www.myfxbook.com/community/outlook

BrianFX, this is actually not an error - the outlook takes into account only updated accounts. Since the holidays had started, less users are trading and updating their account, hence the drop in the total funds - it should get back to the original numbers after the holidays.

As to the profitable/non-profitable - these numbers are accurate, for Myfxbook users. I'm not sure why you're claiming it's not close to real numbers? I've taken this screenshot directly from Oanda's homepage, and it says they have 48% of profitable traders.

<a href='' target='_blank'><img src=''/></a>

Interesting, so if a user doesn't login to their trading account after a certain amount of time (a few days?), their data is expunged from the Outlook tracking? What if they still have open positions?

Since the Outlook page is only tracking active accounts, then that explains why the profitability figures are so high - survivorship bias. Accounts which are no longer trading (due to losses) are dropped from the tracking results, thus skewing the figure higher for the active accounts.

The Oanda numbers are heavily skewed by their inclusion of interest paid on accounts. A $100 account not used in years, but that accrued a few cents in interest every quarter, is counted as profitable.

Yes, your assumption is correct - obviously, margin called accounts will not get updated anymore, thus will not be included in the stats.

Also note that these are validated accounts only. If an account returns to an unvalidated mode, it will be excluded from the statistics also.

Brian, how long do you think, not updated accounts should be kept in the stats?

I don't think Oanda numbers are skewed. If it's profit made on price difference, or profit made on interest rate difference, it is profit which can pay your bills or can buy your bread. It's money taken out of the game so it is profit.

BrianFX posted:
    Interesting, so if a user doesn't login to their trading account after a certain amount of time (a few days?), their data is expunged from the Outlook tracking? What if they still have open positions?

Since the Outlook page is only tracking active accounts, then that explains why the profitability figures are so high - survivorship bias. Accounts which are no longer trading (due to losses) are dropped from the tracking results, thus skewing the figure higher for the active accounts.

The Oanda numbers are heavily skewed by their inclusion of interest paid on accounts. A $100 account not used in years, but that accrued a few cents in interest every quarter, is counted as profitable.

speki posted:
    Brian, how long do you think, not updated accounts should be kept in the stats?

I guess it would depend on whether they maintained open positions. I review similar sentiment/position level indicators at other sites (Oanda, Duka, FXCM, etc) and they don't drop data for open positions. What about long-term traders that make trades on a weekly/monthly basis? If the activity drop-off is one week or thereabouts, it wouldn't account for these types of traders.

I certainly don't fault Oanda for paying interest (it would be great if all brokers did the same!) or reporting interest as a profitability metric (it's great marketing!). But unfortunately it affects the data for comparison purposes. Hopefully either the other brokers begin paying interest on account balances, or the CFTC revises the formula Oanda is using.