i see. thanks! try this http://www.jwh.com go to performance tab, see currencies and the other programs. surfer
http://www.jwh.com/templ007.cfm In the column Est. Annualized Return, sub Since Inception I see returns between 3.55 and 25.84 Mind you, inception sometimes is as long ago as 1984. How significant is -13% on an annualized return of 25.43 percent over a period of more than 20 years? So what is not working?
are index trends dead? this would certainly explain the abysmal performance of the trend funds in the last several years. ran across this article by brett steenbarger---- the final sentence is exactly what we have been doing recently with success. although i don't agree with everything in the article, dr. brett is really onto something here it seems..... Here's The Edge You Have Trading Stocks Instead Of The S&P 500 By Brett Steenbarger September, 2001 was a historic occasion for the stock market, but not for the obvious reason. It was then that trending behavior in the S&P 500 Index officially died. What follows is an autopsy you might find revealing. My TradingMarkets article earlier this week dealing with traders' recent struggles brought more mail--all of it positive, thankfully--to my inbox than any previous piece. It seemed to strike a chord among traders who realized that market movement just isn't what it used to be. Inspired by a recent article by Fred Goodman, I decided to investigate the issue further and study the historical trending behavior of the S&P 500 Index. What I found blew me away. I went back to January, 1966 and investigated 250-day periods in the market--periods amounting to roughly one year of data. I counted each occasion in which the market was either up following an up day or down following a down day. These I called two-day trends. My goal was to determine the percentage of occasions in a moving 250-day period that qualified as two-day trends. Before we examine the data, let's think about this logically. If the odds of the market rising or falling on a particular day are 50/50, then we should see roughly one-quarter of all occasions displaying two-day uptrends; one half of all occasions showing no trend; and one-quarter of all occasions exemplifying two-day downtrends. So, all in all, we should see--in any moving 250-day period--about 125 trending occasions. If we see many more trending occasions, then we have a directional bias: market direction is likely to persist. If we see many fewer trending occasions than 125, then we are displaying anti-persistence: the market is biased toward reversing prior movement. Here's the chart from 1966 to the present: What we see is that market trendiness is trending, and it's trending down! Indeed, we are at the lowest level of trendiness in the roughly 20 year period, and we are well below that average point of 125. Note that early in the sample--the late 1960s and early 1970s--we saw consistently elevated levels: Gains or losses on day one tended to carry over to day two. Now, however, we see the reverse: Gains or losses on day one are more likely to reverse on day two. And that September, 2001 date? That's the last time we had a reading of 125 (though we have come close late in 2004 and early in 2005). While we're at it, here's another piece of evidence that I recently posted to my site: simple technical trading systems aren't working. The Barchart market service has an interesting feature for subscribers that tracks the performance of all stocks across an array of technical trading systems. Those systems, such as moving average crossovers, are momentum-based and trend following; that is, they buy strength and sell weakness. The systems generate signals formed over a variety of periods, from a few days to several months. The website tracks the winning and losing trades and overall profitability of each system for each stock over a three year period. When I entered Google (GOOG) as my stock, all of the systems were profitable. When I entered (SPY)--the exchange-traded fund for the S&P 500 Index--none of the systems were profitable. Not one. What I believe the Barchart site is really tracking is trendiness. It provides a useful assessment of trendiness because it taps price-persistent behavior across multiple time frames. Google was trending over multiple timeframes: it was following strength with strength, weakness with weakness. The S&P 500 was not trending on any timeframe. That is significant. It also helps to explain why it has been so difficult to make money in the stock index. It is human nature to extrapolate the future from the recent past. If we see something shoot up, we want to buy it and vice versa. That is exactly what hasn't worked in the S&P, as traders have learned. There is a silver lining in all of this, however. As my experience with Barchart suggests, it is possible to find individual stocks that display trending behavior even as the market languishes. Measuring their performance against benchmark technical trading systems of varying durations might be a useful way to derive an index of trendiness for stock pickers. A different strategy would be to identify individual stocks that are likely to benefit from market anti-persistence; i.e., that are most likely to rise after a fall or dip after a bounce. My sense is that the TradingMarkets PowerRatings, as well as the trading strategies in Larry Connors' book How Markets Really Work, pursue this latter strategy. The important thing is to clearly identify where there is opportunity in markets. My best estimate--and it's hardly an original conjecture--is that the market indices and individual stocks that are most frequently included in arbitrage trading are those that are showing the greatest loss of trendiness. Explorations in the small cap and micro-cap worlds for trending issues might prove fruitful. Alternatively, it might be possible to find an edge by waiting for market moves to occur in the most arbitraged sectors and then fade these. I will be exploring these--and other--strategies on my site.
Im suprised he didnt mention that according to his theory the end of trending coincided with something else that happened Sept. 2001.
Not sure why youre addressing this to me. All I said was Im surprised he did not mention 9/11/2001 in the article, the inference being that fear became a constant in market prognosis from that time forward.