Just wanted get the opinions of people on Mark Brown's Oddball S&P 500 mechanical trading system. www.oddballsystems.com It looks pretty good. Anybody trade the system?
I've follwed Mark Brown for a few years now. He's the real deal. Simple system with a valid premise, imho.
did well in trend day but give you whiplast in choppy day and on the average there are more choppy days than trend day.
I studied the system a bit and yes I do believe it works if you have plenty of money and you're not worried about long droughts. As the prior posters have said you can get whipped like a step-child until you hit a series of trending days, but it does work. I don't like the system for psychological reasons. If I personally go too long without getting a decent win I can get quite discouraged (you probably would too). At one point in recent history the oddball system went nearly six months (with a healthy interim draw down) before it made a new high (that's an awful lot of time to second guess yourself). If I go a month without making money, I'm usually feeling pretty low. There are better systems, but if you like it, give it a try.
Good points...That is exactly why even some of the better systems statistically are just untradeable, unless of course you are running a Commodity Fund or something similar and do not really care about the drawdowns...
I doubt many individual traders would trade it after seeing the equity curve. I doubt many fund managers or fund investors would like these kinds of returns ( the distribution I mean). Who trades this stuff?
I agree that few individual traders are going to accept that much open ended risk...But I am always amazed at how mediocre returns are for the majority of CTA's that probably use systems with similar parameters, time horizons and risk/profit objectives and parameters...