Thanks for your reply puffy gums "I would not have to take out ads in the futures magazines. It would just be making money." I agree, but I also believe some of these system developers do better at teaching and selling their systems rather than trading them, maybe because they don't have the mental discipline to trade it mechanically. Who knows. That is just a thought. tah
One thing that vendors never mention (after the fact) are their failed systems. You will see this on the front page of spbankbook's website: "The Limit Line trading system has been discontinued and replaced by the MONASHEE S&P TRADING SYSTEM. A swing type trading system with some unique features and quite profitable. " Apparently they had been selling a "Limit Line" system, which must have crashed and burned. At least they do acknowledge that it is gone, but doesn't help if you were trading Limit Line as it had its drawdown. The other thing I notice at spbankbook is that they only have results back to march 2000. What happens if we return to market conditions like 1999, 1994, 1989? How soon will you recognize the change and pull the plug on their failing system? Or any system for that matter. I guess that's another subject entirely. -Jeff
Hi Jeffm, Thanks for your reply. In response to : "Apparently they had been selling a "Limit Line" system, which must have crashed and burned. At least they do acknowledge that it is gone, but doesn't help if you were trading Limit Line as it had its drawdown." I agree, although supposedly this system only had a track record going back only a few months to Febuary of this year, so I would not have even touched that system anyway, since it didn't have a long enough testing history. Also , in response to :"The other thing I notice at spbankbook is that they only have results back to march 2000. What happens if we return to market conditions like 1999, 1994, 1989? How soon will you recognize the change and pull the plug on their failing system? Or any system for that matter. I guess that's another subject entirely." I agree with you. I guess the only reasonable thing to do is to trade the system until it goes into a drawdown larger than the greatest historical one. Hopefully (the key word here) the system will continue to make money for a while to get you some profit on the table and then if it crashes, then you only loose the house money. But yes, this is kind off subject. The main thing I am trying to get out from this thread is to see if these backtesting results are for real and I haven't got in touch with anyone who has actually bought this system and actually backtested it theirself. Thanks, tah
I was curious and emailed the vendor about backtesting. Specifically, whether or not he has tradestation code for his systems, so that someone else can perform the same backtest. Nope. All the "backtests" are done manually with qcharts. That's a charging bull red flag there. Now maybe this guy is better than me, but anytime I "backtest" visually, then go in and do a real programmed test, the results are always very different. The code catches tons of conditions where your setup happens, but your eye doesn't immediately snap to it when you're just looking at the chart. This doesn't mean the guy's methods dont have merit. I have no judgement on that. But I do have serious reservations about the accuracy of his manual backtest results. I suppose one benefit of manual backtests is that the system is less likely to be over optimized, since it takes so much time to perform each backtest. I think that's a dubious honor though
Hi Jeff, In response to : "Nope. All the "backtests" are done manually with qcharts. That's a charging bull red flag there. Now maybe this guy is better than me, but anytime I "backtest" visually, then go in and do a real programmed test, the results are always very different. The code catches tons of conditions where your setup happens, but your eye doesn't immediately snap to it when you're just looking at the chart. " Well, I agree..normally I this would be a charging bull red flag, but I believe this vendor is just not familiar with using Tradestation. I agree , if the system was based on something visual, then manual backtesting could be very deceiving, but the vendor has told me that the system is purely objective and mathematically mechanical...so this would alleviate the subjective and visual problem. Jeff, I am by no means sticking up for this guy...I am just as skeptical as anyone else, and that is why I created this thread. Thanks for your reply. tah