If we count money which is paid for trading programs develop for professional money managers to trade other peoples money then a large percentage of my income comes from trading.
What if we ignore the professional money managers, the question was, how profitable are you with the products/systems you are featuring on FuturesTruth and ET to the little traders?
I think you are missing my point. I am making income based on how well my systems trade managed money. I am making a good percentage of my income from that. The systems I am using include both some which are variation to my retail ones as well as one I am not selling. My professional management programs are based on multiple systems trading the same markets in order to deal with scaling in and scaling out. This is why I have both similar systems to what as sell as well as different ones as part of my money management programs. The systems I sell are very good and for example Trend Harmony is the core of my trend following component. Trend Harmony was also selected by Future Truth as one of the top ten system of all time in the article in SFO magazine. I have three different S&P500 strategies and the one I sell is one of them along with two I do not make generally available. If your point is do I make money based on my system trading results versus sales. I do make a sizable percentage of my money from system performance in addition to money from sales.
Murray, you should really concentrate on teaching traders how to develope trading system on their own to fit each individual trader's profile rather than directly selling your ready-made systems to them. In this way, you are contributing a valuable service to the retail traders. Remember the old saying. 'Teach them how to fish; Don't feed them the fish'. Or something along the line. There used to be lots of theoretically sound trading systems in the past. However, none really survived the brutal realities of the market. For instance, look at Aberration by Keith Fitschen. As usual, the old Heisenberg Principle kicked in this case also.
One thing you are forgetting is that I sell all my systems fully disclosed. This make them finish systems as well as learning tools. I disagree with you that all the sound system have failed. I have a lot of relationships I used which worked in the 1990's and I am still using today. Some things have broken, the question you need to understand as a system developer is why. Some system are not really broken, it's just that many concepts will go though a year or more of drawdown as a way to protect the market. Then they will start working again. That why my strategy is to trade multiple systems that trade the same markets. I do offer one on one training for system development but most people are lazy and want to start with finished trading systems which they just warm over to make their own and start trading them or buy them and never trade.
With all due respect, Murray, I am pretty certain that you have a good intention. In fact, I believe you are indeed one of the very few trading system vendors who are sincerely offering genuine trading products. However, let's face the reality. At the risk of discrediting the posters of elitetrader.com, I am willing to go as far as to say that most of the posters here in elitetrader.com are chronic losers in trading. As much as I recognize that you are offering something worth exploring, I must regrettably admit that your efforts are gravely futile. That is, even if you give these people the finest tools in your formidable arsenal, they invariably will not be able to trade their way out of it with their lives depending on it. Anyway, to the rest of the members of elitetrader.com, I would like to ask you for your understanding and your forgiveness for my blunt comments. I am just merely trying to make a point.
You know, I had a look at the performance of I-Master a while back and, having seen the performance of many systems, can say that in my opinion the system never actually failed. Indeed, any system that outperforms the way I-Master did is likely to regress to mean performance or even below for a while. So, i would suggest that I-Master's performance prior to it's correction was possibly out of the ordinary and that's it true potential is somewhat lower. Looked at in that light it's a string system, of it's type, many of which struggled during the low volatility years. Anybody who isn't ready for mean reversion in equity performance is fooling themselves. Indeed, Trend Harmony may mean revert sometime soon (have a drawdown) as i believe it's been running well recently. I also agree with murray's comments about the impact of the pre-market on systems that trade at the traditional market open. For some time now i've not been fond of trading the open as there is now so much volume in the pre-market. Thx D