Honest question: why are so many in this thread rooting for Surf's failure? One of the many complaints on this site is that people are not open about whether they are profitable or not and what strategies they use. We have very few people who'll give their actual pnl, Atticus and maybe a few others. Yes, Surf does attack TA, but at least give him a little breathing room on his strategy. What has it been, three or four months since he's started.
I'm absolutely NOT rooting against him, just rooting against the bravado that comes from a few good trades. Also rooting against being told what DOESN'T work in the mkts when I know what works for me.
I'm sure most of you traderz already know about this, but here's a "price driver" that was active today: $1.25-1.75b of Benny Bux, injected all over the The Market http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/tot_operation_schedule.html :eek:
I don't think anyone is rooting against Surf or the PDs....but he did give this post such conviction. It caused me to give up some sleep Sunday night to sanity check my stuff as to why I wasn't feeling the same bad vibes. I must be honest, I am glad the PDs were a little early this time.
This is why I offered surf the opportunity to see the results of TA in real action with an audited account provided he also showed a 12 mth audited account. Surf is afraid of photoshopping but he can chose the top 5 international accountancy practice and auditor himself and I don't mind if it is a friend of his. They can pour over a single broker statement file and even try to reverse engineer the trades so he can polish up those PD's of his It's not about calls in advance, it's about how much confidence in each call you have that is reflected in how much money is placed on each trade. Surf said some pretty nasty things about TA and those of us who use TA and called for proof of TA while he boasts endlessly of how TA can't match is PD's. Well now who is running scared of comparing PD's with a newbie using TA to trade a $10k account into $1,000.000 in a year? We have just finished the 1st month and the account is up 200+% in profit and that's real money. The first week was a disaster as the newbie had never traded before so he made every mistake in the book and then some, but then we got the rules reviewed and committed to with a fantastic recovery and end result. The audit will show warts and all so tell us again why not surf? Now I'm on ignore so perhaps some of you might like to let surf know he can chose who does the complete audit. I actually thought surf would have thought this was a great idea. Not a paper trading Combine but the real deal and not for a few weeks but for a full year. At the end of 12 mths of this journal no one will really know how surf's PD system has performed because there is no real record. Even this current trade has disputes about what is happening to the account. And it seems Jack doesn't have anyone too enthusiastic about his SCT method to do an audited performance. I thought it would be fun to have a Hershey student and surf and my student show three different ways to skin a cat and all come out on top. It would be great for ET and it's not meant to put each other down. Simply a fun challenge because we all seem to have confidence in what we do, except some think their way is the only way but funny enough, I see nothing but feathers blowing in the wind when it comes to willingness to prove the point. Guys, if you are asking why I'm doing this, can I remind some of you that surf asked for proof umpteen times and said TA'ers were running scared of showing the evidence. So I thought, instead of top gun TA, I'll take a newbie student who on paper has no chance and put him up against surf's PD's and Jack's 6 X ATR method. Wouldn't that be a fun challenge for all?
I perform somewhat similar experiment, running a live chat where people see everything as it happens as real-time as possible. That's the first stage of the plan so far... must say that live reporting of trades makes me realize many things, so it's a great experience.
There is no excuse for not looking at charts when trading commodity futures. Since there is no "portfolio" per se any risk/reward from 4 months, (when it has really been over 2 years), is not relevant, and I don't need to mention if you were to base a good trading history on 4 months and 10 years of unbacktested trading and sporadic live account history that would never stand the test of any audit that there is no actual history of what is being represented here throughout the years on ET. Any excuses as to whether consideration for the current price and volume isn't whether one or the other is more relevant, but just as quanta the volume contracts and shares traded act in concert with where price eventually moves. No, it is not random in the sense that a dumb microcosm of illegitimately researched studies about overloaded data mines filled with these stupidly ridiculous and simplistic AI machine learned ideas that if we modify a few parameters in the most common technical analysis maths then that should prove capital efficiency? Give me a break. I'd bet there is nobody in the world that could have written a statistical arbitrage program for futures on the first crack seeing nothing but data, 5 minute bars, and being told that techniques such as quadratic projection do predict profitable opportunities. First try with a model? How'd he do it? Well, besides the fact that he's a genius from Stanford with a math PhD, how about reading the years of elitetrader drivel and sifting through the most important parts, particularly a discussion about linear regression analysis in trading, and how to use it. About 80 lines... and pretty much all you have to do is tell the quant: "Hey, look: we need a statistical arbitrage program that day trades and is flat by the end of the day. Using genetic algorithms, optimize a strategy that uses linear regression analysis to use as a trading strategy..." So, which one of us is the genius here? After adding a standard holy grail of 40 lines of risk management to the code, you get so much money that it's stupid for me to exaggerate. Billions, and fuck if it weren't for PFG there would be 8 figures on my dinner plate right now. There are systems that only account for beginning and entry prices, but as far as the drawdowns I've seen here they aren't possible to estimate without some idea of the size of the portfolio. It appears to just be trading fixed lot sizes, when as far as I'm concerned, if you go from 1 unit to 15 units in 3 months... if it took a 40% drawdown for a 1,400% return annualized at some stupidly high rate, trading like that isn't really comparable to investing in stocks, but quite similar to options. There is no disclosure about how a future might appear more attractive to his models, but, either way, I don't want to see anybody lose money. It's just the arrogance of belittling gateways to a better understanding of market fluidity is unnecessary. On this site, there is a misunderstanding about the process one must go through to become part of the industry, and even if you're still an individual being part of the industry is still true. In other words, most of the profitable traders are identifiable by what they mention as relevant to their trading...surf appears marginally profitable by the way, and appears to run a news event headline reading engine that if it were automated would be quite impressive but it may just be google alerts for key search terms and subjective timing of placement of commodity futures trading in YM mostly.