Here's your paradigm. I've been there often, and there's nary a sempervirens in sight. If you've found your crevice, who cares about the sequoias?
How is what you are thinking of setting up different from a plain ole investment club with a macro perspective??? PS By the way, you might have to be careful being short on China. People in the US really underestimate that monster. I know their internal dealings may seem nebulous as they aren't as open. But the reason they aren't is b/c they are like that duck that looks smooth on top but is paddling vigorously underneath. If they are as powerful as they are now with only a minute portion of resources utilized, imagine what they can accomplish if they harness more of those??? Makes me wonder if I should take up Chinese...
Vlad The problem to me with any lose knit group of traders/investors (good or bad) who are supposed to be working as one, is that everyone would look at the markets from their own different viewpoint. You may find it's actually more productive to just let them get on with their own thing. What I'm proposing is a training process so that everyone analyses markets using the same fundamental knowledge of how markets and price works. Now this is not the same as producing a number of clones or teaching some system where everyone buys/sells together at the same price. With what I propose there's plenty to room for people to go of in different tangents but still with the same underlying knowledge, like I said everyone speaks English but with different accents. As for China, I'm not either way, just saying that it's a good example of how one should try and analyze all the potential possibilities of what may and can happen.
a note on China. As you may or may not know, they are in more of a banking crisis than Japan. The main problem holding them back is lack of adequate measures to allocate resources - and yes I am an economist but that doesn't hurt my trading as I ignore that section of the brain and go with common sense. Their gold is cheap labour. I recently saw a report stating that China produces more math and engineering graduates per year than all graduates in all other areas in the US. Combine that with cheap salaries, and all major firms (MSFT, GE) are there. Watchout in 30 years from now. Your view of position trading is the best possible view. Technicals alone cannot make you profitable. Taking in consideration broader views, and probablity statisics, and you have a powerful model. If you look at all the blow-ups, LTCM for example, they all fail because they don't account for contigency plans. No back-up, no hedge and no view other than their main theories. Canuck
I'd say more like 10 or 15. They are also probably a bit more industrious/hard-working/focused, although that's just my observation.