Krach Review: Market God
School. Work. Your partner. Friends. Videos of cats falling in bath tubs. With all these priorities taking up all your time, how could any trader be expected to have enough of it left to analyse their trades? Eric Thies came up with a solution for all of us: Market God v7.
Market God is a custom indicator on Tradingview created by Eric Thies. Unlike a lot of other indicators where you have to check for divergences, compare two charts and other such caveats and challenges, MG7 simply gives you buy and sell signals.
So, easy review, right? Just check how many times the indicator was right and how many times it was wrong, take that as an average and make it your “Krach score”. Done! In fact, Thies already did the backtesting for us and it has some nice results.
Hold on.
Thies might show the results, but he hasn’t shown us how he actually did the backtesting.
How did the tool get to its target and its exit? When using leverage, could we have been liquidated before reaching the target? In fact, there are a lot of questions concerning the tool and not that many answers. Sure, there are tutorials on how to set it up on Tradingview and what candles are preferred, but nothing much on how to devise a winning strategy. Not on the website, Twitter or Discord.
Thies explains on his website, marketgod.io, that the tool is a “confirmation of the trend” and “users should use their own technical analysis for determining entries and exits”.
So, don’t buy when the alert says ‘ buy’?
No. Do some TA first. They emphasise this often, even in an interview with a trader, where they claim that although the indicator is supergreatbuyitnowihaveamortgageandawifewhobuysdesignerbagsclaimingtheyreinvestmentspleasekillme-kind of good, it is only to be used in conjunction with proven strategies.
Let me get this straight. As a trader I need this because I suck at trading and/or I just don’t have time to analyse the chart, but now you’re telling me I’m still gonna have to take some time to learn how to trade and then apply it?
So why would I buy it?
Three reasons:
- Trend confirmation
- Alerts
- Additives (extra indicators. Always handy on a free account)
(Sigh) Alright, I’ll bite. Let’s first learn about candlesticks, trend lines, support and resistance, supply and demand zones, etc. and, oh god, I’m gonna have to learn about Heikin Ashi candles. What are those again? Be back in a jiffy.
Montage
[Unnecessary montage here. Read at own risk. You see me standing in a shop. Filling a cart with boxes of machinery. Handing over money to a bored cashier. Kicking boxes across the street to my condo. At home. I’m setting up my gear. Looking intrigued at a wire up close. I stand up with a broad smile across my face, wiping my hands. My state of the art pc shines colourful LED lights all across the walls of my room like the inside of Craig Wright’s a***ole on margarita night at Precinct DTLA. Twenty monitors full of charts. Perfect cable management. A cordless Hello Kitty mouse that I glide across my desk way too many times. My professional chair with built-in ass massager so I don’t atrophe (atrophise?) my greatest asset off. My glasses — even though I don’t wear glasses — are reflecting charts and endless lines of code while I’m ponderously staring at the screens, rattling away on my mechanical keyboard with moving LED lights that are stroking out my cat in the corner. I draw some lines on a chart. Price breaks through them. I beat the keyboard. I lean back and set the massager to ‘high’. I stand in front of a blackboard writing down equations, but ultimately slap the board in desperation while my cat shakes his head. I set the massager to ‘rage’. I read some books. Watch some videos in between the cat videos. Try to teach my cat how to bark. Vigorously writing equations on the blackboard. My cat reading along, gasping at the insights. Price bouncing off of trend lines. Me running up the stairs of the trade building in my city only to be escorted out promptly. My trades are getting bigger. But then? Big red candle down. Liquidation. I’m hurt. My pc and twenty monitors in the trash. Walking along the beach distraught, throwing pebbles at oil covered seagulls. Enter an empty home. My wife left me. My pc is turned off. I look at the beam above. Unfortunately I fail to hang myself because the cables in my home are bundled way too tight to pry loose and use as a noose. I curse my perfect cable management to the heavens! Eating undercooked chicken because I’m too much of one to actually put that gun against my-Wait. My eyes grow wide. I’m circling my equations on the board while my cat’s head’s spinning. The numbers on the computer screen are getting longer and longer. The CD-rom drive opens up and beautiful, beautiful money falls out. I buckle to my knees and laugh at the sky. My cat slightly crooks his aviator glasses, winks and gives me a thumb’s up. I set the massager to ‘Ricardo’.]
Alright. I’m back. I’m an expert trader now who’s winning every single trade. Time to use Market God so I can get an alert every time the trend changes, because that’s what I need apparently.
Efficiency
In my testing I wanted to keep this as fair as possible. According to Thies the higher the timeframe, the better the results. That’s why I will be testing the results since January 1st 2018 of the weekly (W) and the monthly (M). Also, apparently Bitcoin works best in conjunction with Heikin Ashi candles, so I will be using those.
How to best use Market God to form a successful strategy?
Who knows. Thies hasn’t shared a guide or anything else on the matter and a quick tour past social media reveals others haven’t either. That’s why I will share how far price went in the direction of the signal (plus) and against the direction of the signal (minus). All this will be counted before the next signal.
Results
Monthly (since January 1st 2018):
Two calls.
Sell:
- -4,52% (it went up 4,52%)
- 50,98%
Buy:
- -12,87%
- 61,77%
Weekly
Three calls.
Sell:
- -45,84%
- 27,68%
Buy:
- -1,59%
- 250,60%
Sell (current):
- -31,96
- 3,47
Thoughts
Now I know what you’re thinking.
- “All the money into the monthly!”
- “If I had put $100 on every weekly trade at a 50x margin, I’d lose everyone of them, but that 250% one. At 50x and 2 liquidations that would have netted me over $17.000!”
Unfortunately it’s not that cut and dry. Besides the obvious where history might not be a good indicator of future events, without proper technical knowledge (even with proper technical knowledge) it’s difficult to know when to exit. You wouldn’t know the correct margin to apply. If we’d used 100x leverage for that one trade, we would have been liquidated long before we ever got to 250%.
But it’s human to think of the best possible outcome. Let’s do a little experiment. Below I have shared a screenshot of the daily BTCUSD chart. Don’t worry about it being Japanese candlesticks instead of Heikin Ashi. I purposefully picked a spot where the signals are the same for both candles. Now, where does your eye go?
I personally look directly at the big drop to the left. All those red candles down and what do I see? A sell signal right before it! Nice! That’s over 35%. Even without leverage you could have added to your portfolio by a third.
So then you check out the Buy right after and…its’s another win.
The Sell after that loses, but who cares? Two out of three wins. The Buy after that? Another loss. Damn. But as long as our risk management is good, a tie means we’re still winning.
If things can go right, we will often imagine it will.
If things can go wrong, we will often tell ourselves we’ll be able to manage it by the virtue of what is presented in front of us, hoping it will align with our expectations.
In reality you have to assume you’re doing everything at a sub-average level. I’m not saying, “Put all of your portfolio on one trade and set it to 100x leverage. Yee-haw!” I’m saying, “If you treat every signal equally, put the same amount of money in a trade, choose the same leverage, enter and exit at relatively the same places, would you come out a winner?”
The answer: No.
“But Thies is saying it’s a tool, not a blind signal indicator!”
Sure. But people who buy an indicator with buy and sell signals, expect to be able to buy and sell based on these signals. Putting a disclaimer in front of it saying, “It’s just a tool in your toolbox so you’ll keep an eye on the trend” is kind of like Google Maps telling their users “it won’t get you from A to B. Hell, we don’t even know if we’ll get the direction right half the time, but it’ll definitely keep you on your toes”.
It definitely is not the end all be all for successful trading. However, you could become profitable — even without knowledge of TA. Proper risk management could help you. It’ll at least give you an edge over blind binary trading on a higher timeframe. But what about the lower timeframes?
We did another backtest on a lower timeframe, the 1 hour, with other conditions. The rules were:
- We are trading at 100x leverage.
- Our target is 1,15% (double)
- Our exit is 0,85% (bust)
So we either double or money or get liquidated.
The results? There is no edge there. We doubled our money less than half of the times, leaving us in loss. To be fair, if we hadn’t cashed out every time at 115% our possible profits might have outweighed the possible losses. It does seem like an alright trend indicator.
My advice? The only current way to use this is to do some TA and when you’re done, make the MG7 signals visible to confirm your thoughts.
Other platforms
Thies has his marketgod.io website along with his Medium platform (Eric Thies), a Discord aimed specifically at users of Market God and his Twitter feed. The last platform is the most active one since he tweets regularly.
Support
Thies is quite helpful. There have been issues in the past with Market God not being rolled out to every user as quick, but he has been quick to provide feedback and fortunately that specific issue has been less the case as time went by and the company grew.
The question “How do I use MG7?” is often still heard. Thies has added tutorials on his website, even pulling in a trader who absolutely loves the indicator and gives a little insight on how he uses it. But it’s crumbs as we are still waiting for that coveted guide “Creating a winning strategy with Market God”.
Community
According to Thies there are now a thousand paying customers of Market God v7. On Discord there are a little over 450 members, with members being online daily at about 90 on average (as of today 30 Oct. 2019). However, the community participation isn’t very involved. Checking just now, the last message in the “general” channel before today was from last week. It’s not unexpected cause we’re talking about an indicator that shows buy and sell signals. There really isn’t that much need to get involved. It would have been nice to see people sharing thoughts on the strategies they devised to become profitable with MG7.
Price
The MG7 is based on a subscription fee of about $35 a month. This may seem like a lot, but during the course of my reviews, this is actually an average price for an indicator. Are there other, maybe even better indicators for that price? Quite possibly. But there are also ones that are a lot worse and cost way more.
Additions
The indicator comes with a few other indicators, like the Guppy EMA, Bollinger Bands, Keltner Channels, Ichimoku.
Also, there are plans to introduce automated trading. I, for one, am very curious about this, because it would mean a unified strategy can be devised to become profitable with this system which is something a whole community of people could not provide ever since MG7’s release.
Conclusion
There is no doubt Market God version 7 is a promising tool to have.
If you have $190 a year to throw at an indicator that alerts you of possible trend changes and can give you the confirmation needed for your TA, by all means buy it.
If you use only this indicator without any TA and/or proper risk management, you will go broke. Even though you might be able to create an edge there, especially on higher timeframes, going off buy and sell signals alone does not work which is unfortunate especially for an indicator that does just that!
In the world of probabilities that is trading, this tool is a good addition in thought, but its practical uses do not warrant the price. If there was an added strategy, if there were indications of exits and entries, if automated trading was implemented successfully, if if if…But there isn’t. Thies has worked hard to create this, he’s a nice guy and I would love to give this a big fat score. I truly do. And if everything Thies wants to do with this indicator actually gets done, I will immediately update this review and give it an awesome score, but in its current state the indicator’s usefulness is lost on me.
Krach Score: 5/10
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Krach’s (Karim Heiden) Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarimHeiden
Eric Thies’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingThies
I am currently busy writing my novels, trading and doing other projects, so bear with me. I do hope to see you for my next review. Will it be a course? A scammer? Requests are encouraged!
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