who is profitable, with what strat. I am profitable since 9 months (I know, not a long time!) using swing trading (only long). Hold for three days and sell it. Tell me if you are profitable and which strategy you are using. Thanks!
I moved a 401K rollover IRA, into a futures account. Im using a trendfollowing mechanical system to trade it. All orders are market-on-open for the next day. There are no stop orders. The system trades both long and short. The portfolio is more than 40 futures markets traded on exchanges in Canada, US, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore. Fairly standard stuff: currencies, metals, grains, meats, "softs", petros, stock indexes, bonds. Started with $100K, 14 months later am up to $190K. However the past 3-5 weeks have been abnormally good. Ever since the French voters said "Non" to the EU constitution, the system's bonds and currencies positions have gone bananas. The EuroSTOXX stock index futures have had a nice little pop too. These trends will probably retrace before my system exits and locks in profits. So my account equity will probably retrace too. No biggy, it's part of the deal when you agree to follow trends.
My system tends to execute about 1500 round trip trades per year, for each $1M of account equity. This is a standardized way to measure trading frequency, and is prominently featured on all the CTA evaluation websites such as www dot iasg dot com. Since I only had 1/10th of $1M of account equity when I started, I only expected to execute 150 round trip trades in the first year. So I chose "The Telephone" as my execution platform. I call my broker on a voice line and say "For account 123-4567, buy 2 February Heating Oil at market on the open". Historical backtesting was accomplished using Trading Recipes and Athena. Curiously, both packages were at one time endorsed by Van K. Tharp, then later dropped. He doesn't appear to endorse either one of them at the present time. I generate my everyday trading signals from a custom software module I created myself using Microsoft Visual C++. I really only did this so I could force the daily printout sheet to include warning messages such as "Hey butt-face, you've got a roll over the day after tomorrow in Gold, so get your sorry ass ready!". For some reason, Trading Recipes doesn't print messages like this. It's an IRA futures account and the United States doesn't offer a lot of choices for futures IRA's. I selected "Millennium Trust." There are about 3 other possibillities, or so I gather. Millennium seems to be in bed with the big Chicago wire houses.
we found out that two strats work: - swing trading long into panic selling - trend following (I assume) on a whole portfolio on different futures. So who else makes money? Where are the stock momentum players? (works too!) Where are the guys who play fundamentals successfully?