I could claim to have beaten the system as I did a little of true risk-free arbitrage here and there, without possibility of losing. The profit was instant. I made $80K the first month I tried this. And that was in 2017. Here are couple screenshots I saved from that time. But, it ended the following month and I could see/feel that market makers were quickly closing holes that I found. Since then I was able to make couple $thousand here and there, and later just a few $hundred on occasion. It's no longer worth my time. I'm still playing around with various other but related concepts, now taking some theoretical risk but not having practical risk (or making it minimal), and I believe there may be some potential for scaling. But the issue usually comes around to market makers or other traders taking the other side of your bets. If you take other people's money too easily then they won't play with you, or will cut off your oxygen supply.
I think the trick to picking the right fund is to understand what they are doing and whose lunch they are eating. Ackman who has a very well defined strategy - while volatile, he has a very well defined edge based on his hands-on involvement in the companies. I'd avoid people claiming to have deep insights into something that is mostly based on public information - macro, long/short in big caps etc.
I don't understand why anyone cares of who "beat the system", I believe in what it takes for me to beat me. As far as 100%, one has to define success rate. When I changed from making the most profits to risk management, always working on getting drawdowns lowered and finding ways to have risk at positive expantentcy. It been few years of overall direction on shorting future's Indexes being too early, lost count of how many shorts/hedged took place, but like in almost all long counter-term futures' trades, the last one becomes the hugely profitable, much more than 2008 so far, so am beating myself of prior years, so most would say system's 5-15% positive trades per year to be too low, fine for me. Through errors, I think most patterns or inventions of price I have found, not 100%, but losing percentages closer to Holy Grail targets, well...old dog learns to never be greedy, do low enough amount so no one actually finds them and every once in a while send in trades meant to lose, as far as cracking the code, don't think can be manually, as one ages, forget nuances, just way too much to remember, plus can't stay awake 24 hours. Most likely wrong, but believe markets goes lower, economy will suffer as unemployment will increase and many bankrupt restaurant's, small businesses. When middle income suffers, buying stops, we been long overdue for a depression/recession. Cash is king. Just don't care what other's make. Most likely I won't understand what they are doing anyway, definitions change every ten years. I like guys who keep buying the qqq's and don't hedge, what happens if markets goes sideways for fifteen years? Great time to learn other ways to make profits...
I get that you're already saying that doesn't make sense, but I am just agreeing with you. Losing years is amazingly bad(particularly if we're talking about greatest individual traders). There's traders who make 20% a month and rarely have losing days, much less years.
Right! I'll be happy to hear anyone else thoughts on this and more names. The key here is an individual trader, not managing outside money with a verified track record for 22 years. I don't want to disclose more as not sure he wants that info to be public before the book is published. Those returns were also achieved with a very reasonable drawdown. And he uses only quantitative systems. Never blew his account or came close to it. Sure there is Dan Zanger, Ed Seykota and many others, but as far as I know most had their great few years they became famous for and then no one knows how they did %-wise after. Val
Try to make a huge % return with hundreds of millions or even billions under management. These guys aren't trading micro futures ... First of all consistency is key, smaller returns also mean smaller draw downs. Secondly, with such money it is impossible to make giant returns, you can only buy as much as there is being sold.
Two Stellar Track Records come to mind. Madoff. Hillary w/ Cattle Futures, 200K very first outing...not too shabby but not enough for the girl, moved on to greener pastures, as it were. Madoff didn't know when to stop, had plenty of warning could not take the signal and hold up at third, no he headed for home but well not so fast there Bern. managed to piss of damn near everybody and now gets free room and board.