First, your comic book, two dimensional logic ignores the previously noted incontrovertible facts. Second, you appear to accept at face value that his dilettante-trader daughter won a contest under presumably normal circumstances when not one of his legion of seminar attendees has even come close. People who have devoted years of their lives and thousands of dollars attending multiple LW seminars, courses and whatever else he produces into salable sausages of dubious content. Surely if one or more of them had performed anywhere near as well, you would have heard about it in testimonials, because LW is nothing if not a self-promoter. Where Are The Customers' Yachts? Why is the Hound of the Baskervilles not barking? Let's bring it home. Just ask any of LW's devotees right here at ET. Have any one them won any contests lately with their trading, or has their trading been anywhere near contest-worthy? Guess what I think the answer is. Sorry, Surf, but when old Larry blows sunshine up your dress, you just giggle like the deep thinker that you are.
Save it for Volcker. Let's not compare BO and LW. Many people whom even you hold in high regard have endorsed BO. Only vendor/shills and rubes endorse LW. Context, boyo.
Williams employed a simple money management strategy to get the results. 1) He started off with a reasonably good system (but remember, systems generally only work for so long) 2) He used Ralph Vince's Optimal f money management strategy. Optimal f was the secret. The basic summary of it is that as you win you risk more and more money on the following trade(s). The downside of the strategy is that the systems that make the most money (if right) also lose the most when wrong. So a system with an optimal f of say 0.85 will at sometime suffer a drawdown of 85% (or even more). But the upside is that if/when you hit a hot run you can take £10k into $1million in a very short period of time as was with the case with Williams. Say he had continued and say the markets were kind (luck?) and say the markets being traded in had almost unlimited volume/depth there's no reason why a system with an Optimal f of 0.85 can't take $10k and turn it into say $1billion or even $10billion within a year or 2. Optimal f has its merits but to trade it properly is very very hard for the average person. Could you for example take 50% - 70% drawdows as if they were nothing special - AND KEEP TAKING THEM AGAIN AND AGAIN. And could you make 100%s over a few months and not be affected...............
People who employ Optimal f get optimally f'ed. No actual trader worth his salt would use such a bone-headed money management strategy, and it does not adequately explain LW's stellar performance in the contest while simultaneously losing money hand over fist for his managed money clients. One coin. Two sides. Read my earlier posts in this thread.
I know many traders who use Optimal f but there do it with tiny amounts of money. Spread bets is usually their market of choice. They start with £500 of £1000 with a target of making £10k - £20k. If/when that's done they bank (away from the markets) say 50% of the profit and save the other 50% for a trading bank. They then take £500 - £1000 from the trading bank (or slightly more) and trade that like a madman. Then the drawndowns aren't too much of a problem on the brain. PS. Sorry I didn't read most of this thread so can't comment on what other people have said.
Sorry, but optimal f is a lottery ticket that relies heavily on a false sense of numeric specificity. You should only use it to trade money that you are prepared to lose, and lose quickly.
Truth is both larry and michelle won the contest fair and square. plus the guy really trades and trades live in front of seminar attendees, he wins and loses just like any other trader. that is fact, i am not here to argue about the validity of his methods, other than i find his COT research to be quite interesting. here is a site that you will enjoy given your thought process: http://www.ctrl.org/graphicHome/CTRLhome.html surf
*Sigh* Intellectual honesty comes at a steep price. No doubt, Anna will recover from my absence. She's young. She'll bounce.* * I mean that figuratively, of course.