I have found the more you trade, the more chances for trouble. I say use simple strategies utilizing as few trades as possible and gain the best percentage. This is fairly easy just as long as you know where you are in the market. Like now, we can all sense and visualize a pullback coming soon. So a simple strategy would be to wait a month or two until that pullback happens and try to get in on the market when it is in an oversold condition. Another strategy is to trade from July to December. Get in on the market when the summer is beaten down. In the last 3 years, there has been that summer panic. Then hold and wait until the end of the year. Then you can short stocks as they are going down in May. 60 trades in 4 days means you have 60 chances of things going wrong. I say the beaten down method is best. Wait until a stock is hammered all the way down and you can confirm a breakout on a chart. Then go long and ride it up to the point of consolidation.
Selling covered calls is an appropriate strategy for people who like to drive from Chicago to NY- by taking a needless detour through Texas.
It sounds so cool though. Standing there in a suit, grabbing a phone and yelling at some guy at a trading desk to sell some covered calls. Oh so Wall Street.
Sure thing. Use ET for the back test. Copy out the sorted lists that were posted the last year or more. Tab up the entries for those lists that were made by ET people. People who have made a choice. Now you have two lists. One for the universes and one for the entries. For each entry you have, just go along and read the comments on when that person exited. Enter the related exit in the second list that you have made up. You will find that for almost every day of the year there are multiple entries for a given stock made by differnt people. All of which were derived from the sorted lists that were posted before the entries and then the corresponding exits. done by T people who are working. Compare this with the screwed up backtest posed by Trader666. He has also posted that if he turned the backtested trades up side down (you know do the opposite of his backtest) that that test does not overcome the trading costs either. A backtest that sets the record for all pairs of backtests. Compare your sorted listed that you collected with the trader666 backtest method. You see immediately where trader666 screwed it up. He did not have a sorted list of stocks to trade nor did he add/delete his list as he did what he did. An he can't do code either. You are stumped and you know people clear 100% a year. You say that it is not as easy as what I post. It is easier than what I post. And it is more profitable. The basic and primary reason is that practioners of what I describe do not use the conventional orthodox financial industry traditional paradgm. That was invented by people who make money in brokerage firms and banks doing what brokerage firms and banks do to make money. That tradition conceived to make money from investors has had its day. It was largely based upon gambling and playing the odds. and not in any way based upon market timing. You can see by the chat and phrasing in posts that this stuff is still the mainstream. I advocate extracting from the pools of capital by using reliability, repeatability, effectiveness and efficiency. These are all optimizing aspects of making money and they have nothing to do with probability and gambling and betting and playing the odds. I was never from 1957 onward ever tuned into anything but taking out of the market what it offers. You think 60% is hilarious and you know people taking out 100%. I have never taken out 100% either. After you have made the lists and done the entries and corresponding exits you will no longer be stumped. As has been noted recently the conscious to unconscious rate of data acquisition is 10,000 to 20,000,000 elements per second. So I am simply stating to you that if you do as I suggest, your unconscious will be replete with how and what people are doing to well exceed 60 or 100% a year and as a consequence you will not be laughing at how my posts read any longer. What if a person actually did the work to just go through the journals of people actually doing the trading?? What do you suppose would happen if enough people learned to trade and passed it on to others. Say like Spydertraders does day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. There were over 10,000 poeple doing it by 1992 or so. We lost track after that. So I'm giving you a backtest. Really figure out why you aren't going to go through the effort. Figure out why most people on ET will not "do the work" as Spydertrader says. Here is a thought for you. Why do you think a closed journal has had 100,000 hits since it was closed? This is another kind of backtest. It is not to just keep ET in business, though it does. What does a person learn when he is passing it forward to help another person learn to do it? This is a surprise of surprises. That person learns to make money much much better than he could before he taught anyone else. What happens in communities that have people meeting and doing this stuff? They meet more often. Why? The reason is simple. It is easier to learn to make money working together and being with others who are doing the same thing. People who help others and learn together get to expert faster. What would it be like on ET if it were possible for a person like me to start and have a thread? It isn't. What would it be like? We started an office a while back a few months ago. Now we are tripling it. Why? Why do the PHD's come to Tucson periodically? They meet for five days each time. It is all video taped. Why? The answer is not blowing in the wind. When a family has money it can weather any storm. 70% of families have storms. They have an average shift down of 40% in their life style. People learn and pass it forward and they contribute some profits to local problems. These people get it and understand that everything is a grassroots deal and that is what makes things work. I have about 50 years in on this and I am really proud to know people. I like these people and they like people too. Your hilarious laugh is where you are and you say to me to do something for you. Well I am. I walk the walk. Read the record, make the backtest lists and get the picture. It is your choice for every day for the rest of your life. There is nothing wrong for anyone to sit down and think and change his mind about becoming what they can be. It can be very contageious and a person never has to be concerned about the future for his family. I'm 73 and I'm playing the 73 card. I post long posts because I have something to say to you and others here.
Yes - BUT - you have to admit, it is relatively safe and not very time intensive. It's a buy only stock strategy that requires a simple knowledge of options. Seems like what this guy may be looking for. If he had asked to make +/-150% a year I'd tell him to day trade the ER2 or the QM, or even GOOG or CME for that matter. Selling covered calls is slow and steady, that's why I made the suggestion. Mike
what does selling covered calls make a better strategy for someone striving for 15% than buy and hold? i don´t really see the difference
jack hershey: i see spydertrader´s equitycurve was +100% in a year, i don´t know if he followed exactly what you mentioned before here, or there is some secret sauce added, which i am not going to find out, i am more busy with my own research. in the first case i´d be stumped hehe
When the market is range bound/flat or dropping, you sell the premiums and keep your position. *It is buy and hold* but it also allows you to make a premium when the market isn't going anywhere.
I've backtested this nonsense and IT DOESN'T WORK. NONE of Hershey's stuff that I've tested has worked (been profitable). Here's how you can check it too if you're into wasting your time. But keep in mind that when you come to the same conclusion, Hershey and his minions will claim you did it wrong or that it can't be backtested or backtesting is useless. I've heard it all from those clowns. 1) Get a list of 80/80 stocks for the time period of your choice from P123. For example, if you want to backtest a period that starts on 1 Jan 02, you can actually get a list of stocks that made the 80/80 cut as of 1 Jan 02. 2) Take the list from step 1 and scan for the stocks that have 20% channels. Spydertrader wrote code for this in a ChartScript on the Wealth-Lab site or you can write your own. 3) Take the list from step 2 and check for the STOCH 5, 2, 3 signals. You'll see that this method doesn't work unless you want to play make-believe.