All I have been trading for 5 years. I have beaten my key benchmark (SPX) in each of the last 5 years by a decent margin. This YTD I am beating the SPX by 10% My actual return over the last calendar year is 28%. My risk numbers over last calendar year look like this: Max Drawdown: 4.85% Peak-To-Valley: May 13 - Jun 13 Recovery: 1 Month Sharpe Ratio: 1.93 Sortino Ratio: 2.68 Calmar Ratio: 5.96 Standard Deviation: 3.96% Downside Deviation: 2.01% Mean Return: 2.21% Positive Periods: 8 (66.67%) Negative Periods: 4 (33.33%) I run a long/short equities & commodities portfolio. Macro focus. Some positions I hold multi-year others trade intraday. Six figure size. At what point do I know I have 'an edge' or will I never know this?? Arb
True but 2008 - 2009 was no picnic in the park! My edge is not algo based but rather my ability to build up trading themes and execute them well. Not easy to backtest!
Okay, well, in that case, you're right. As long as you can read the tea leaves between bull and bear markets, and invest/trade accordingly, then you should be good to go. Just watch the drawdown. When it surpasses your max historical drawdown, reassess the strategy.
Are you whining? This guy manually backtested over 10000 trades. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=278386&highlight=10000 You can't do a few hundred?