I would like some feedback on the performance of one of Tim Sykes students. His equity curve does seem to resemble that of an option selling strategy that at one point could face serious draw down. With a 72% win rate, he could conceivably have a negative R:R and still make money. But, he also has taken trades that had large unrealized losses that he held onto hoping for a rebound and if he had not done this I doubt his % win would be that high. Did this guy get lucky (survivorship bias)? Or can this kind of performance be replicated by others with the right skill? He does trade fairly illiquid stocks which are generally hard to short. http://profit.ly/user/kroyrunner/chart
on profitly you can select , pick and chose your trades, You do not have to import all your trades...so no matter what people say DO NOT TRUST PROFITLY..even if they are verified trades as you can pick and chose which ones to verify and import..so you can easily manipulate a curve by importing more profits, less losses, import some smaller losers to make it seem real and do not import bigger losers hope that makes sense
You can also use a demo account and pick and choose those trades. So the site is very good for vendors selling their wares. Not much use for anyone else.
Not going to comment on Tim, however I think this question (which in some variation I see often) is deeply flawed and implies a fundamental misunderstanding. The problem is that hindsight lets you see the winners record (20,000% return in 4 years or whatever) but not the 1000 other people that blew up trying to do the same thing with no more or less skill. It looks "automatic" or "low risk" only because of this hindsight perspective. You can't "replicate the performance" because you can't insure that you will have the level of luck that the winner had when creating that track record. My point is that there is ALWAYS luck involved. Even a skilled pirate (to use an analogy) needs luck to score a big treasure.
The strategy was explained. He uses a demo account, or two of them, and picks the trades that are profitable to upload. Or he is a genius trader who is now a millionairre.
I just signed up for a free account there and looking at some of the symbols traded. Most of the stocks seem really thinly traded. And all of them are "HTB" (Hard To Borrow) on ThinkOrSwim. Are these profit curves based on actual executions or simulated? I would think transaction costs + slippage would make those equity curves go straight down?