Absolutely wrong. No direct experience in placing capital with them. This in no way should be construed to mean I have not read all the readily available information in an academic and research role for the publishing side of my business. In addition to deciding not to invest, despite the hype, in trend funds. Of course I know of margin to equity ratio and it's effect. It's one reason for steep drawdowns as is not cutting losses and getting whipsawed.
While my goal is not to run a fund, I trade my own account. My book first 'Trend following' was first published April 04. It was updated Nov 05 and Feb 09 -- reflecting updated performance histories of those covered. How is the content dated? Trend followers, the type defined in my work (CTAs, managed futures, whatever you want to call it), buy pullbacks? Please explain that notion.
Surf, everyone has an opinion, but if you are going to take this stance... I have laid out quite a bit more work saying something just the opposite. Might be time for you to take your view to the long form! Note: I am not saying some guy should take his last $5000k to the futures markets to try TF.
There is no mathematical discussion or quantitative numerical analysis. Defining trend is important to the extent that it can be expressed mathematically. Output from real research would be better than talking about other traders. I've already posted my financial research here, in many other threads. I'd like to see equations for your definitions, code summaries, or other definitions to test. This is primarily where the cord is cut from sophisticated to average. I prefer math, some prefer to be verbose about philosophy. Sometimes that's good, but most of the time talking about a very concrete definition can only be expressed by mathematics and statistical output of other analyses. This thread needs more quantitative definitions to be useful, and broke is not how I would define the American Dream, nor is anybody that has rock solid quant math going to take unnecessary risks. Crossing the line into arbitrage is where the hedge funds pay PhD's, but mostly, after factoring cost of doing business from slippage to other incidental problems, these types of quants are good at curve fitting. I liked ProfLogic's spreadsheets. That is more useful, and for many, elusive.