Hi everyone. Simple or silly question, your call. Suppose, as at the present moment, that SPY is up roughly 11% this year, and QQQ is up 22%. Suppose also that I'm up 15% and that I only trade/invest in Naz100 stocks. Am I over- or underperforming?
I don't think its a question that helps. That is, no matter what your answer, and how satisfied you are with it, it doesn't lead towards better trading. If your strategy has holes in it you know already or you should do, so you could make it better or get a better one anyway. Finding out you met or missed some arbitrary target is not constructive.
I look at Risk. Does my strategy out perform in a down market. I compare my performance to a buy and hold strategy. I don't mind if the market outperforms when it is moving up but I want to protect my capital in a down market.
so you could be sleeping on the beach for 10 months and get 22%, yet you hustled and only got 15%. that is a very sad under-performance.
I get your point. If you set too high a target, you could very likely end up disappointed. Yet some sort of reference level could be useful as a feedback, to tell if the overall direction is promising or not. That's the meaning of my question. I agree, finding holes in any strategy may not be easy, but it's always good practice.
Yes, I know and I agree its a professional approach in business and almost any organised venture to measure what you do and then gauge the performance against a benchmark. But I think its one of those areas where trading diverges from conventional career fields. In our game, if you have a strategy and its 100% as good as you can make it and you follow it 100% and you take 100% of the entries and abide by 100% of the exit signals or rules, then your performance was 100%. No matter what the S&P did or whether it paid for a new car or just a new pencil.
If you trading for yourself, it can add disappointment or make you trade more risky to get some goal you set 360 days ago. But if trading OPM, benchmark is S&P Index, everyone have stats on something.