As to the rules you mention, yes, these are all disclosed here there and everywhere in Sykes materials and more particularly by Grattini. Grattini is particularly good at disclosing what he is looking for. But I suspect you are right - he picks his times.
QuantConnect has poor historical pricing quality, especially for penny stocks. Same with wrong data on splits, dividends, mergers, acquisitions, etc. I've been buying data from their data providers and sending them dozens of emails about pricing and data issues. Until I've stopped because I've realized I'm giving them more value then they provide to me. In the end I've invested thousands of hours into fixing data issues. But the main issue with Quantconnect is that it's a system created by people who have no idea what they're doing. They just hired programmers to create a system for other programmers. This is not what Jim Simmons did. Simmons' team doesn't manually tinker with rules and strategies. And they don't have or need a million other "quants" to do their work. And I'm pretty sure their "rules" aren't a few indicators glued together, if they even base majority of their systems on "rules". So you may be on a completely wrong path and making incorrect assumptions that by knowing a few rules and using QuantConnect you can do a lot. But then you're saying that you can't while other like Sykes or Simmons can Anyway, I wouldn't waste time on this unless you can build your own version of QuantConnection and go through every problem they've encountered but missed because the founder is not a developer and doesn't see all the issues his developer ignore. And then realize that you'd need something completely different. BTW, some time ago someone on Quantopian (similar to QuantConnect) created an algo that seems to be very profitable. I then modified it to show that a monkey could make random trades (on that stock) and would've gotten better results, with that system but without rules.
I have certainly had issues with bad prices on Quantconnect. Yes, I believe I know the system you are talking about on Quantopian. It was also ported to Quantconnect. You surprise me greatly by mentioning Simons and Sykes in the same sentence. The former a giant and the latter a pygmy.
I imagine you are talking of Simons rather than Sykes here? The latter seems to work on "a few indicators glued together". I am quite sure the former does not.
Systems will show that basic support and resistance trading is not profitable as well we all know that trading is more than just math at the end of the day your buying or selling for a price difference. the only thing that has shown to really work is long term investing since overtime the market will go up given an economy where goods and services are being sold.
FWIW, different traders could trade Sykes's set ups and come away with different profit factors and the difference will be the exits not the entries. Four traders might enter at the same price based on the same breakout level, and one sheds half of his position every 10 cents up and is flat if price reaches +$0.40 from entry, another holds the whole position and exits at the first red candle after entry, while another uses a trailing ATR stop, and another limits out at the next daily support level. Sykes tends not to hold for very long which gives him a high probability/low risk/low reward trade. Also, how sure are you that you are modeling Sykes's set ups? Do you know his rules for trading breakouts, e.g. is he buying the breakout if the prior level is broken by a penny? a dime? Is he using time as an element to determine if a breakout is to be judged as aa proper trade opportunity or not?
Sykes publicly teaches his methods. Or are you saying he teaches one thing but trades something different?
Well I don't know if he is doing anything illegal but he does seem to have a lot of experience in trading. His book "The Penny Stock Trading System" also explains how he started making money with penny stocks. Most of these techniques do not work anymore, as the internet has changed a lot.
Tim Sykes has some useful YouTube videos and imho is one of the good guys. His coaching re hard work and risk management is helpful. Tim's a hardworking smart guy.
Sykes gives away very little to the public for free. I am referring to materials found in Pennystocking, Pennystocking Part Deux, TimRaw, TimTactics, Tim Fundamentals, Tim Fundamentals Part Deux, Shortstocking, and Reading SEC Filings. To my knowledge, you must pay to access those materials. I may be mistaken. Perhaps he has gotten charitable in his middle age.