Curtis Faith introduced statistics in his book that time based exits performed better than all other the simple TA exits he presented such as double and tripple ma crossovers, BB , Donchian ,ATR breakouts etc. I beleive it was over a test period of 10 years on a basket of commodities and financial futures. Maybbe the fitting of time based exits , the sweet spot, did not give back much profit where the TA systems must give back more of a positions max profit in order to stay in the trend. Anyway, he offered no reason for this surprising finding. Strange though that over 10 years on a diverse basket of asstes that this was the case.
Your only evidence is the word of Curtis Faith, currently in jail. Why was I able to locate the performance of all turtles inside the program, month by month performance and AUM, but none for Faith? That data is in my book The Complete TurtleTrader:
One of the aspects of trend following that has always been useful. The month by month perf. data tells a story.
No markets trend forever? No kidding. What's the point? Why has Winton, Aspect, TransTrend, CFM, ISAM, Campbell, DUNN, etc. continued to excel? Find fault with JWH, fair enough, but to imply trend following has stopped due to his case is idiotic.
Mr Covel, I never heard about you nor about your book. Probably because I don't live in the US. But also because I don't like reading books about investing or trading. It pollutes my way of thinking. I know a few companies in London who, for the same reason, never take traders with experience. They want to start with a blank sheet and form them as they want them to be. When I read your title it gives me an extra reason not to buy or read your book. This reason is the title: "How 23 Novice Investors Became Overnight Millionaires." Did 23 novice investors really become millionaire overnight? I did not read your book, but I am sure they did not. I expect these kind of titles from some UK (garbage) newspapers that need this kind of statements, besides of putting naked girls on page 6, to attrack readers. Readers who are attracked by the title not by the content. And attrackted by page 6 of course. I don't say that the content of your book is not good (because I never read it), but the people who bought your book based on that title, and that is the reason why the title it there, will be probably disappointed. None of them will be millionaires the day after reading your book. I hear many times about people making crazy multi million dollar claims. The title you used has some potential I think. For the good understanding: I believe and use trendfollowing. To me the best way to survive. I don't want to fight your vision. But NOBODY can teach somebody to become a succesful investor or trader in 24 hours or even shorter, as overnight is only 8-12 hours.
One of the oldest clichés is something about not judging a book by its... For the record I only wanted the phrase TurtleTrader on that cover. HarperCollins in their infinite wisdom had other ideas. However, it is a true story about inexperienced traders given a few weeks training and set off to make millions. Hating the cover doesn't invalidate the pages behind it. And for anyone that bought the book expecting to make millions tomorrow, I have never met those morons.
What's the use and relevance of a title then? Why not put: " How to learn fishing in 1 hour." From what I remember of the turtles, there were a lot more than 23 candidates. That would put 23 in a completely different perspective. 23 is only a small part of all the candidates that wanted to be part of the experiment. Maybe they bought with their last money the book, couldn'tb make money and had no money left to sue you. Couldn't resist to make this joke. @Visaria thanks for the update. I stopped buying the magazine because I did not find any girls on page 6 anymore (did not read any other pages, my fault). I will take a subscription again!
Interesting... I really think that you have to use a strategy that fits current market conditions to make money in the markets. Long term trend following is just too slow to adapt. I understand what kut2k2 says about changing parameters, but i still think that is too slow to do, given that LTTF is by nature longer term.