There's some good stuff in my trading journal, mainly the intraday scalping stuff. Sadly I didn't always follow my rules and often allowed my personal bias to toss risk management out the window. My day trading overall was pretty darn good back then. CL offers a lot of excellent intraday opportunities for experienced, highly disciplined traders who trade with an advance plan.
The aggregate sum of any combination of instruments traded reduces to a single theoretical instrument traded. Either way you are reduced to either a winning or a losing state at the end of the day.
You can spend the whole day trading grapes, cherries, apples, oranges, etc. At the end of the day, however, you have traded, once, a fruit salad which is either tasty or not.
I use three systems. I do this for one reason: money vleocity considerations. One algorithm underlies the three systems. So I use one algorithm only. The algorithm IS complete. I do not have any down time. Markets offer; I take the full offer. What you write lacks rationality. You suppose something external to your incomplete environment. The thesis of "more than one......" is all based upon unfinished business. The name is "incomplete".
The post does not include the effects of variance and covariance (of the parts) on the variance of the whole.
This is your opinion and every time you talk is your opinion. Just like in 12 talking about things you aren't informed about wastes everybody's time. If you know your system, glancing at the chart should tell you how well it might work without having to backrest to be able to find out. I have made my living on stocks food and energy so those markets maybe being as needful as they are have more to do with an efficient frontier analysis and back testing before ever worrying whether my instruments are too few in number or whether I might be correlated which at 0 monthly probably means no to that however that still had to be back tested to find. Killing Nasdaq is where I've made practically all of my net income. Then corn and gas based on efficient frontiers that prevent the correlations and meaningless scalps you're always so concerned about.
The Russell 2000 (TF) very often slips -1 tick on a stop, because it is rather illiquid. So the listed spread versus reality of fills are two different things. Bars on a static chart tell very little about how they actually form in real time with real money at work. As for price action? TF is spiky and spastic due to illiquidity and by that I don't mean if you can or cannot personally fill a one-lot. The term "illiquidity" refers to available size when algos come ripping thru the price levels. CL is still decent but it has zero price edge over ES or any other emini for the past year-plus. Day margin is twice as high in CL as ES, so you can trade two ES per one CL contract for the same margin size. Secondly, CL now makes 1 - 2 modest price moves per session and sometimes 0 at all. But it will chop sideways hard for hours in between, every day. CL is decent, but no longer the most bountiful symbol. At best it's equal to the eminis, and many days greatly inferior in price action. The once mighty CL is merely a shell of its former self and that ain't up for debate... it is a structural fact visible on your own bar charts.