They overthink the solution and thereby violate Occam's razor. What one needs to know if you have been in higher education is that a terminal degree does not indicate intelligence, it indicates persistence. Persistence is what is coveted in the corporate world. Not intelligence. Universities train, and unless you take control of that training, you will be little educated. Any major you graduate in indicates training, not education. I cannot emphasize this enuf.
You see, almost all people do not even get such a basic topic like moving averages. The problem with them is NOT the lag!!! When there is a strong trend, they capture a great profits with lag or without. The hardest thing is a choppy market when MAs could generate 15 losing trades in a row. I really really feel comfortable trading the most simple concepts out there Other traders (my competition) are mentally unable to grasp the most obvious stuff.
RCG- you're perfectly correct. And Jim Simons is right on the money saying "there is no real substitute to common sense". In universities there is very little common sense. Worse- the thinking there reminds dark ages. Take cold fusion for example. Professors will deny it, because its in opposition to whats been teached for decades. I love the fact that hard core scientists when employed by Merrill, Goldman, BNP, Deutsche, etc. will ALWAYS use some mean reverting, relative value or arbitrage kind of strategies. Pyschologically, they cannot admit that fat tails do exist and trend following makes the biggest money with the lowest risk. With academic background PhDs do not even use BRAIN and LOGIC. Instead, they're blindly tricked by their EGOS. Ego tells them: hell, i've spent 10, 20, 50 years reading books and listening to others. now, i can't admit to myself, i've wasted all these years....
DT-waw, Nice feast of sarcasm there. Just a teeny bit too much salt for my taste but not bad, not bad...