The burning question is do you even exceed those benchmarks. Your opinions about markets are often more conspiracy based or overly negative. That has to hurt longer term but certainly on any corrective year a lot of you guys get (over)confident in your views. My guess is no you don't do all that well longer term investing or trading, but have very high standards for others anyways. Like any guess could be wrong maybe you've found ways to overcome your bias and have some modicum of success. Seems somewhat doubtful though given your posted opinions. Or maybe you just don't really trade much.
The ones who train traders and deliver food are on my ignore list. I don't see the value in posting how much you make on your good days. I agree that commodity stocks are hard to trade. For the most part I missed a hell of a run a couple years back.
The difficulty is most of the really good runs in TSX commodity stocks are often preceded by hard sell offs in individual names and often not even for rational reasons. Particularly in energy which trades like a thin market dominated by sporadic big purchases. Gold/Silver mining I think harder stop losses makes sense. TSX energy right now is great value in Oil one year out and Nat Gas two years out imo. However, you have to plug your nose and hold to get there unless you catch some really good entry points then let the positions ride. Most miners I took a quick loss on I never regretted doing so. Energy however it's often cost me money; Surge Energy in particular I took a loss a year or two ago and then it pretty much tripled within months afterwards.
Why is being able to beat 9% a year with 50%+ drawdowns, on a small account, even a burning question? I would expect every trader on ET, anyone who has really found a positive edge in the markets, to be able to handsomely beat the S&P. But only up to the capacity limit of their method. I am not doing anything special. The main reason why i can beat the S&P, is because as a trader I control of my downside risk. I don't ever need to have anything like a 50% drawdown in order to average just 9% a year. This is not to say i can beat the S&P every year, there are years where the S&P beats me. I am talking about long term results.
I check twice a year, September and end of December. If S&P is negative, I want to end up positive, if short of positive year in S&P, will add size. For Me it's more of challenge of self vs self.
I take that is your reason for trading, although you cannot outperform a buy and hold strategy. Is that the same as having a strategy with a 90% win rate that loses money. I don't like the term "Long Run", but shouldn't your goal be to employ your capital for the best return in the long run?
TBH this is what's holding me back. I fail to see any viable method that noticeably outperforms buy-and-hold SPY. Yeah, I've seen methods that make money, but it doesn't hold water once you compare to buy and hold. I guess there are inefficiencies out there that do, but I've not been smart enough to find them.
My problem with buy and hold is I didn't like the rollercoaster ride or the years that showed negative returns. A simple trend following system where you exit when a trend starts down and re-enter when the trend is up, will outperform buy and hold. It's a system that has kept me out of the market during major corrections. You take some whipsaws but your drawdown is never significant.
Even though these sound good on paper, and backtesting they look great, when I forward tested some with out of sample data, they don't hold up. Is there a secret sauce I'm missing?