my journal 2

[Yamato]

rod stewart live 1977"georgie"

 

[Adamus]

Yeah. I am still reading the article above. Yeah, too bad the thread on elitetrader.com got removed. Inflector is still a member and still writes... no, wait, got it!

Here's what he writes in 2006:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1036275&highlight=turtle

Is this what was removed?

http://web.archive.org/web/20071013160554/http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=92696

Annoyingly I can't get any more than the first page of the thread.

 

[Yamato]

Yes, by the thread number, that is exactly it. Thanks for finding even just that one page and congratulations on your research skills.

 

[Yamato]

how to convert xpo to ascii for tradestation 2000i

I just taught myself to export the goddamn .xpo file into ascii, without having to buy any expensive software such as this one:




First you create the symbol, then you import the xpo data, then open the symbol and load the data:




Then you print to file (it will go in the same directory as the xpo):




This stuff is stuff that drives you crazy when you are trying to use tradestation. The rest is all easy. This is the hardest part of back-testing systems.

It does take a few minutes to export the file, if it's a big one.

There's also this other way, which is better in that it gets rid of the data i don't need, but first I have to be able to load it onto Prosuite 2000i:
http://www.finanzaonline.com/forum/trading-line/835547-xpo-ascii.html

Nope. Wrong. My method did not work, so the only good method is finanzaonline's.

Here's what I got with my method:



And it is not ascii. Ascii looks like poetry compared to this crap.

So now I'll have to stay up until I solve this goddamn thing.

MOTHER ****ER!!!! ALL i had to do was restart it. It was a goddamn bug.

If you reboot pc and restart it all over again all you have to do is start global server, choose FILE - IMPORT DATA - GLOBALSERVER FORMAT (use exchange traded time when asked) maybe via the edit symbol first (import data into symbol) and then you just start the gbl.orw file and it works.

But this time I will save to txt once and for all. It is a ****ing nightmare and i don't want to experience it again.

I have done it finally. One day I will have a celebration and party and invite all the people who wrote posts that helped me on the internet, such as this precious post here:
http://www.finanzaonline.com/forum/trading-line/835547-xpo-ascii.html

Now I have the GBL data in ascii format instead of .xpo and all it took me was a few seconds. Thanks, nait, for your 12 thousand useful messages.

OK, done, no more problem with GBL.xpo.

Now I could go back to sleep but I want to tell you a little story, without telling you everything. Besides, I am just talking to myself here, most of the time.

Anyway, the breakout system works and guess what? It works, with the same settings, on all futures: currencies, stock indexes, gold, oil, natural gas, bonds. It doesn't work THAT well, but it works well enough to be traded along with all my other systems (except on stock indexes). It doesn't trade THAT often, but it doesn't matter if you trade it with a bunch of systems. It doesn't have SUCH a regular equity curve, but it's ok, too, because if you put them all together they do have a straight equity curve. I think we're going to hit 70 systems soon. Yeah, cause it was at 63 right now, so we're adding 4 currencies, 2 bonds, gold, no wait: it fails on gold as well. Well, it succeeds, with the same code, on 8 out of 13 futures (on 3 it breaks even, on 2 it loses), so that is good enough for me. I still have not checked the out of samples, but will be good for sure in their majority.

 

[Yamato]

homework for December 4 and 5

Resuming from here:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/85510-my-journal-2-a-180.html#post1336218

Now I will have to select another system to backtest:

Las reglas originales del sistema de las tortugas (Inglés)
Done

Sistema 1,2,3 (Inglés)
This is next

Ruptura de canales de Donchian (Castellano)
Done, because it's the same as the turtles/tortugas.

Sistema 3 barras + stochastic (Castellano)

Sistema SVBreak -Ruptura de rangos de volatilidad (Castellano)

Estrategia Bandas de Bollinger (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Dinamic Break Out Strategy (Inglés)

Método Lowry de Medias móviles (Castellano)

I have done this step now, so I know what is next, but maybe will work on it next weekend, because first I have to get done with the automation of the other 8 systems - presumably, if they don't fail the out-of-sample. The out-of-sample for me has gone from not using it at all to being sacred, it's like getting your grade for an exam. Suspense. By the way I have to watch a movie now, to relax a bit.

 

[Yamato]

the problem/limit of my automation on excel and of my brain

I need to think of how I will deal with a serious problem of my automation on excel.

For example, this member writes about the Andrews Pitchfork and how it is a profitable thing to use:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/95392-goldmine.html

Great video about it by this guy: http://www.forexoma.com/about/

So, here I am, wondering how well it works. But there's a problem. Two problems:

1) Those 3 goddamn lines are not easy to draw on tradestation. I mean - they're easy to draw manually, but not with code.

2) Those 3 goddamn lines are even harder to automate on excel.

The same applies to the Bollinger method, suggested by Urraca (see post above).

This is all beyond my reach due to my choice of excel. And due to my choice of my brain and training. I should not have studied ****ing political science but physics, computer science, math. Better to be a retarded science student than a proficient student of political science, which is a waste of time.

Now because of these limits of mine (of course I chose excel for the same reason: I am not smart/knowledgeable enough to do anything better) I am unable to try half of the things I should be trying. Either the strategy is simple or I can't do it on tradestation, let alone excel.

All the strategies that draw lines on the chart are not for me.

...They're writing songs of love,
But not for me.
A lucky star's above,
But not for me.
With Love to Lead the Way,
I've found more skies of Gray
Than any Russian play
Could Guarantee...

 

[dog4]

Re: the problem/limit of my automation on excel and of my brain

I need to think of how I will deal with a serious problem of my automation on excel.

For example, this member writes about the Andrews Pitchfork and how it is a profitable thing to use:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/95392-goldmine.html

Great video about it by this guy: http://www.forexoma.com/about/

So, here I am, wondering how well it works. But there's a problem. Two problems:

1) Those 3 goddamn lines are not easy to draw on tradestation. I mean - they're easy to draw manually, but not with code.

2) Those 3 goddamn lines are even harder to automate on excel.

The same applies to the Bollinger method, suggested by Urraca (see post above).

This is all beyond my reach due to my choice of excel. And due to my choice of my brain and training. I should not have studied ****ing political science but physics, computer science, math. Better to be a retarded science student than a proficient student of political science, which is a waste of time.

Now because of these limits of mine (of course I chose excel for the same reason: I am limited in my programming abilities) I am unable to try half of the things I should be trying. Either the strategy is simple or I can't do it on tradestation, let alone excel.

All the strategies that draw lines on the chart are not for me.

It sounds easy but automated line drawing is not easy. Some things that make it tricky include:

- do you use a log Y scale?
- where does the line start exactly?
- what if there is a brief dip through the line. Is it still valid?
- which of the [5] lines you draw do you trust to use?
Etc.

Having said all of that, I find support & resistance lines very useful in many markets. But automating that could be a PhD topic

 

[Yamato]

Good point. I could sense it was hard, but now you have shown in detail how hard it is. After all, my limits could be a blessing. The smarter guy will go for the automation of those "tricky" lines and he will work on it for years before he achieves anything (he probably will quit altogether). Me, on the other hand, or I, on the other hand, will create 60 simple systems in the meanwhile, without even trying to do what he's doing. That is why I know some engineers who've been working on a trading system for several years and haven't placed a live trade yet.

A solution would be to open an account with tradestation securities and that way, if I can do it on tradestation, it will also be traded (and it will be traded the same way it was back-tested). This sounds very good and if it were free to use tradestation, I would do it.

But it is not, and I don't like to be prisoner of tradestation securities. If one day IB dies, I can move strategies elsewhere, with my excel workbook. If I do everything on tradestation and rely on them as brokers - because they force you to do that - they will have me by the balls for life. Not good. That's why I keep thinking about doing it, and I keep discarding it after thinking about it for a couple of minutes.

On the other hand, also excel is a software so I am relying on one software rather than another, but the big difference is that once you have excel 2003 you can keep it for life - even if you stay offline, and you can use it with any broker. Instead if you have to rely on tradestation securities being ONLINE, to execute your tradestation orders, that is a different thing. I mean: I am using excel but I don't have to use microsoft as a broker. Whereas if I rely on tradestation to EXECUTE my strategies, then I do have to rely on tradestation securities as a broker and they can charge me any fee they want. They could suck as a broker and I'd still have to keep them.

Yeah. So I think about it for 2 minutes, and then I say "screw that".

So, guess what, everyone. I will go for a walk. I am officially leaving the house for an hour. Wish me luck. I am going to have lunch at the restaurant on the other side of the block.

 

[Yamato]

back

I made it. It took me about an hour as expected. It was raining. I was the only customer sitting outside. Then I talked to the waiter and to the owner of the restaurant. She offered me a cigarette. Actually I asked her to lend me a cigarette.

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've come to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why"
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_(Paul_Simon_song)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Chitty

...He met Kathy Chitty on 12 April 1964 at the very first English folk club he played, the Railway Inn Folk Club in Brentwood, Essex. She was 17, he was 22 and they fell in love. Later that year they visited the US together, touring around mainly by bus. Kathy returned to England on her own with Simon returning to her some weeks later. When he was back in London he recorded the album The Paul Simon Songbook that included "Kathy’s Song", and had a photo of Simon and Kathy on the cover...

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Simon-Songbook/dp/B0001LYGVC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paul_Simon_Songbook

...The album cover shows Simon and his then-girlfriend, Kathy Chitty, sitting on "narrow streets of cobblestone" in London, the city Simon had adopted as his home...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_Silence_(song)

"The Sound of Silence" is the song that propelled the 1960s folk music duo Simon and Garfunkel to popularity. It was written in February 1964 by Paul Simon in the aftermath of the November 22, 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.[1] After being later re-mixed with electric instruments, this commercial version has been called the "quintessential folk rock release".[2]

The song features Simon on acoustic guitar and both Simon and Garfunkel singing. It was originally recorded as an acoustic piece for their first album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in 1964 but on the initiative of the record company's producer, Tom Wilson, it was later overdubbed with electric instruments and rereleased as a single in September 1965...

...Simon began working on the song sometime after the Kennedy assassination. He had made progress on the music but had yet to get down the lyrics. On 19 February 1964 the lyrics apparently coalesced, as Simon recalled:

“ The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run — I like that sound, it's very soothing to me — and I'd play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again'.[5] ”

Simon showed the new composition to Garfunkel the same day, and shortly afterward, the duo began to perform it at folk clubs in New York. In the liner notes of their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Garfunkel claims:

“ 'The Sound of Silence' is a major work. We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this is more than either of us expected.[6] ”

The duo recorded it for the first time on March 10, and included the track on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which was released that October...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Morning,_3_A.M.
http://www.amazon.com/Wednesday-Morning-3-Am-Exp/dp/B00005NKKW

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_Silence_(song)

...On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon & Garfunkel's 1964 version, and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni), electric bass (Bob Bushnell), and drums (Bobby Gregg), and released it as a single without consulting Simon or Garfunkel. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson's re-mix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a "working entity".[3][8][9] Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who in spirit with the success of The Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song.[3] Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they technically superimposed on the original acoustic piece...

...For the B-Side, Wilson used an unreleased track he cut with the duo a few months earlier on which they had tried out a more "contemporary" sound. The record single "Sounds of Silence"/"We've Got a Groovey Thing Going" entered the U.S. pop charts in September 1965 and slowly began its ascent. In the first issue of Crawdaddy! magazine, January 30, 1966, Paul Williams, in reviewing the later album, wrote that he liked this B-side song which he found pure "rock and roll", "catchy", with a "fascinating beat and melody" and great harmony.

Simon learned that it had entered the charts minutes before he went on stage to perform at a club in Copenhagen, Denmark, and in the later fall of 1965 he returned to the United States. By the end of 1965 and the first few weeks of 1966, the song reached number one on the U.S. charts...

 

[Yamato]

zulutrade vs collective2

Somehow I resumed my work instead of watching a movie.

My mind has been wondering about zulutrade, I don't know how it got to it.

So I did a search on google with "zulutrade is a scam".

Found some interesting links:
...

Oh, wait. I remember: I was reading the Forex Morning thread. Then there was a guy who had copied markfric's system and was selling it or something like that.

Then this guy has a web site, and he says "check out my trades at zulutrade".

Then I went to zulutrade and that site looked too good to be true. Some systems had 100% of wins.

Then I did a search on elitetrader and I found mixed reviews.

Then I did my google search, and I came across a link of forexpeacearmy, but that link was listing opinions of readers like "john from italy" and "masa from japan". So the forex auditing site itself looked like a scam. As if those comments had been made up.

So I decided to look up collective2 on it, to see if it was real people with real knowledge and opinions or just fake messages. Yeah, 'cuz I know collective2 is not all bad.

And my search found gold and here it is, in that it combines brains, knowledge and an opinion on both collective2 and zulutrade:
http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/public/review/www.collective2.com

Mirko, Germany
Rating:
Date of Post: 2010-09-04

Review: Collective2 has changed over the years. They have much better APIs right now and work more stable, support more orders (like limit and stop order which they did not have before) and maximum loss.
It is up to the user to learn which signals are made to trade via Collective2 (you can not scalp via C2 because the volume are to low in many markets) but if you choose a good swing trade signal you are able to make money.
For me the main problem is that many signal provider fake their signals or results and for that reason many trader have unrealistic dreams about what is possible. C2 provides the real view on the markets - and that is a de-illusion for many traders. It is hard to find a system which is profitable on the long run in reality. On ZU** it is easy to fake the results through the MT4 History. For me C2 is a good an honest company with some smaller technical issues which may be fixed sooner or later.

Marty, Belgium
Rating:
Date of Post: 2010-01-16

Review: Collective2 is an honest signal provider service. It hosts over 10000 of which 95% are indeed very bad systems. The guy behind it, Matthew Klein, is very ambitious, helpful and cheerful. (contact is best via posting on the forum, he hardly answers emails). I've been sending signals via Collective2 since '07 and it has been nice for me.

Recently however, the site was hacked, which was not fun for us providers, as our cc info was compromised!!. The site is legit, provider raking iss honest, rebates are good. That can not be said of its main sompetor Zu.. you know which one. We all know there are so many scammers in the forex world but trust me, Collective2 is the place to look for a system (you'll have to look good but there are good ones)

Bob, USA
Rating:

Date of Post: 2009-07-04

Review: As other reviewers have noted, they rarely if ever respond to emails. Even the simplest question gets ignored. That is inexcusible in my opinion. If they are too busy, hire a freaking secretary. Even a "form" email response is better than nothing at all.

Second, 99% of the trading systems on the site are complete junk (I've tried several). I set up "auto trading" and lost 50% of my account when the "trader" I was subscribed to went AWOL and left the trades he opened just sitting there going further and further into loss. I had to go onto the site and hit "emergency stop" which closed my positions, otherwise I would have lost my entire account.

Any idiot can post a system on there (go to the site and look under "sell a trading system", and you can post one there yourself right now). For all you know, you have subscribed to a "system" being traded by some 12 year old out of his bedroom.

The concept is great, but someone mentioned Zulu trade, so I may check that out and give them a try. Although it is a good idea, they have a LOT to learn about proper customer service, and probably need some kind of filters to keep out all the worthless BS systems that exist there.

Ahmed, Germany
Rating:

Date of Post: 2009-04-30

Review: i opened an account on C2 to sell my signals and actually its very good idea BUT the problem that the website has allot of bugs and the Founder of the website actually dont know How to deal with Customers , so i opened my account for providing signals since 4 months and i made around 60% from the capital but the problem that his system is very very slow , has allot of bugs , errors , its not accurate his statistics has allot of wrong calculation, like the draw down i dont know how he count????
what made me so angry from this service on the 28th of this month i took short position on the G/U and i made my target 1.4516 and the price hited the target and the system didnt close it!!!
i contacted Mattew ''the founder of the website'' i said to him the problem he sent me very cold message ''The price not hit c2 price feed' his price feed is FXCM , i have a friend he has Real account there i met him and i opened the account and i found that the price hit 1.45142' that means my position should be closed , i contacted him again and i sent him the chart and the price he didnt answer me and ignored me!!!!
plus that he has horrible customer service no even Telephone number , when you want to register with him and you dont have credit card he dont accept another solution like paypal ''he has already pay pal'' i have friend has another account there too and he owns him 200$ and he dont sent to him as check because his rult to send just checks when the amount is more than 250$ , and my friend dont have paypal because he is from Egypt and he gave him another paypal for his friend he said no i cant send it

until i still have my trade open and i said to him i will not close it and i will leave the system like this and open some where else

thanks

Brandon, USA
Rating:

Date of Post: 2009-03-21

Review: After trying out ZuluTrade there is no comparision. Collective2 is not catered to currency traders like Zulu and there are no systems on C2 that are consistent. Their software is also full of bugs and you can't adequately control risk. Your trades are based on a percentage of how many lots the signal provider trades and the max lots feature only applies to one signal provider on one currency pair, which means you could theoretically have 30 trades open at once (since there are about 30 different pairs) even if you had the max lots set to 1 with the lowest percentage possible. This is idiotic and shows they don't understand forex.

2009-02-01 3 Stars First off, I have lost a significant percentage of my account from using C2, so keep that in mind. What I have learned is this: The performance of each system is not doctored and is for real. The systems I traded matched to the fraction of the pip of the opened and closed positions. I am using FXCM as the broker, which is probably the best for this type of service.

The difficulty with C2 is finding a consistent system. I chose two systems that were performing amazing for 3 months and they both collapsed soon after I subscribed (ShadowBanker and NewsProfiteer aka FXNewsWiz).

I am still searching for a system that is consistent. I would say only stick with systems that have been profitable for 4 months or longer, has a high sharpe ratio, and doesn't have large drawdowns. There are too many systems on there that only last a couple of months.

One other thing I don't like about C2 is the money management. They make you set a percentage of each trade, not a set amount of lots per trade. They say they do this so you can follow the system's money management rules, but this isn't always a good idea. I would like to see an option to trade a set amount of lots per trade signal instead of a percentage. The website is a little buggy, but they seem to stay on top of fixing any issues. For example, their auto sync feature will automatically enter you into any open trades a system has if you subscribe to a system that has open trades. This is a hidden danger that should be changed. There can also be oscillation of positions if you don't set the percentage right (opening then closing the same trade because the system thinks you have overleveraged).

Anyone else who has used C2 please post your results and experience. Thanks.

These posts are from 2 years ago almost. If collective2's owner is not a scamster then the technical problems might have been solved. I believe zulutrade is a scam, so things cannot improve there. Matthew Klein graduated from a top university in the states, he writes and publishes novels:
http://www.collective2.com/mediakit/C2_Founder_Bio.pdf

A graduate of Yale University, Mr. Klein also is a critically acclaimed
novelist who has published two financial thrillers. In 2007, the New
York Times said Mr. Klein's most recent work, Con Ed, is "funny, full
of tricks, and very, very hard to put down." The Book Place called Mr.
Klein's Switchback, "One of the most accomplished and daring debut
crime novels of 2006," adding that it is "a fantastic read."

You can tell this guy is not just after making money. Not to be racist, but he has a reputation to preserve I think. To the contrary, these guys look fishy to me:
http://www.zulutrade.com/Company.aspx#company-management

Let's keep reading at any rate.

I will quote in random order, as I browse, always providing the link before the quote. If I don't provide the link before a quote, the quote comes from the last link provided.

Major quality link from elitetrader:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vB/showthread.php?threadid=148324

1. There are no 7000+ ACTIVE systems on C2. That number is probably all systems since the website has started.
There are probably about 200 systems that are at least 3 months old, still active and profitable...

2. Sure one could enter a bunch of systems, but it costs money and time, and it also shows, so it takes even more time to cover the ownership.

3. The survivors still have to perform in the long run.

Everyone in the 2008 thread complains about speed of execution (mostly system developers) but no one about collective2 being a scam.

Another thing: on ET's automated trading (and it is a serious place) there's 68 hits for collective2 and only 30 for zulutrade.

Great one here now:
http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/public/review/www.collective2.com

Alan, México
Rating:

Date of Post: 2009-02-27

Review: I am broadcasting my signals in C2, and I think the idea and the service is awsome!!!

Yo will find a lot of system and traders, but most of them are not constent enough, and the most of them are very risky, thats because probably they doesn't trade their own trades!!, and the drawdowns are really big in some of them. The in-depth statistics help to see what's the risk involved with each signals provider.

As the C2 creators says... Anybody can be the next Warren Buffet on C2, so you don't know if you are paying for a newbie's signals, or for the ones of a real pro...

Conclusion: Service Excellent!!!!, providers Average...

http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/forex...tal-non-performance-its-signal-providers.html

...I have lost in total 20000 usd in all my above stated accounts due to poor signal providers of zulutrade on whom there were no proper checks from zulutrade to verify their credentials and due to hiding of important information of signal providers having multiple names. Hence I claim refund for this lost amount along with interest period from the time they have been funded and causing mental stress. I am marking of copy of this mail to Mr. Matthew Lange of the NFA to whom I have complained with proof of the above facts of zulutrade hiding information either deliberately or due to no proper checks on their signal providers or their site administrators.

I have given one week for zulutrade to refund me back the amount as above failing which I shall be forced to initiate other ways including arbritration from NFA or from forexpeacearmy.

regards
Balaji Iyengar

On the other hand, no one has sued collective2.

http://www.forexjustice.com/Review_Section/Forex_Signal_Reviews/Zulu_Trade.html

Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Written by Mark M from Germany


Hello,
Im a zulutrade user for some time now and so far im very satisfied.
The only difficult part is to find a good signal provider...this needs much testing
Also zulutrade has changed their ranking system and it now includes open trades and its much more "fair" now for the top providers.
But remember everything you do, first test it on a demo account.


Thursday, 18 February 2010
Written by Paul VH from Netherlands


To those who know, FOREX business is risky and zulutrade doesnt defy this rule. I have been trading with zulutrade for some time now and through careful choice of signal providers (DONT choose one of the top 5) and custom settings, i have managed to get a nice ROI. Try opening some demo accounts first before putting real money, dont let the brokers' advertising tricks "drag" you...

It's not that I want to buy signals. I just want to know which web site hosts serious systems and which one does not.

SCAMSunday, 31 January 2010
Written by Roy Lange from USA

Zulutrade is a SCAM. I opened a $5000 cash account after tracking the top trader "LowestDD" who they claim has a 99 percent win rate and 12% drawdown. Here is the problem. He opened multiple positions on the same pair to kind of "double down" on any losing trade. He will risk hundreds and hundreds of pips just to take very small pip wins. Fact is that his drawdowns a MASSIVE.
It is like a roulette wheel strategy where you keep doubling your bet until you win. AVOID THIS SITE UNTIL THEY CHANGE TO REAL CASH ACCOUNTS FOR THE PROVIDERS WHERE THEY SHOW THEIR REAL CASH RESULTS AND THEY MUST HAVE STOP LOSS RULES AND ALSO ONLY ONE LOT PER PAIR TRADED AT A TIME.
There may be some good traders in Zulutrade, but good luck figuring out who they are!!! Their #1 guy did nothing but lose for me!

That sums it up well: good luck figuring out who is a serious trader and who is a scamster. I don't want to be searching like crazy for an honest trader. Zulutrade NO GOOD.

Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Written by N*** from Singapore

I have used Zulu since May 2009. So far I have made profit around 2000 pips.
Zulu is just an interface for you to choose your own signal provider.
Signal provider is trader who execute to open and close positions for you automatically.

The trick is to find safe and good signal provider.
There are a lot of signal provider who just gamble open and close position because they are only using dummy account. Start from this year (2010) you can select signal provider who is using their own money. You need to find signal provider who used '$' (dollar) sign, which means they used their own money to trade (give signal)

If you are not confident, I would recommend you to try using Zulutrade using your Micro account.
Deposit maximum $1000 and trade max 10 lot per signal provider you choose.
You may find some signal provider have very big drawdown, but since you have 10000 pips ($1000) you are save to keep open the position.

I my self have been trading and try so many forex robot. I prefer Zulu much more because from many signal providers you can learn how they execute their position. Beside that I can always decide not to choose the same signal provider if their performance become worst.


There are a lot of signal provider

Mmh... I am changing my mind. Let's say that if you look hard, you can find good systems in zulutrade, too. But it's not as easy. Even the fact that the dollar sign has appeared ONLY in 2010 means that it started out as a scam. Maybe they're now becoming legitimate, like the Corleone family:
http://www.subzin.com/s/in five years the corleone

02:14:39 In five years the Corleone family is going to be completely legitimate.

Holy cow! Check this out:

Sunday, 03 January 2010
Written by tony from USA


I have been trading stocks,options,futures and currencies for 30 years and came across ZULUTRADE and joined on as a signal provider.As a signal provider you must complete 30 trades before you become public.I was testing the system and had 30 winning trades for 30 attempts......so far so good.To my horror I began to notice that my close orders were not processed and was unable to close no matter what I attempted and incurred extremely large draw-downs and every attempt to have ZULUTRADE correct the situation resulted with a complete run around.What seemed to be a great idea turned out to be a complete disaster.At the time I had 60 followers and could only watch their accounts dwindle.I felt very badly for those people and stopped trading with ZULUTRADE.I strongly suggest you do the same!

I am starting to suspect this. Zulutrade rips both providers and buyers of signals to split the gains with the broker. It would be a huge scam in this case.

SCAM Sunday, 03 May 2009
Written by mike from United Kingdom


worst service ever!
their signal provider dont stick with their promises .
use very high SL (not always)
i have tried their service with total wipe out!


SCAM Thursday, 30 April 2009
Written by Dave Sidwell from USA


Apr. 2009
I have been a customer of ZuluTrade for 4 months. The first time they missed an exit signal from my selected provider, I caught it just in time, and it 'only' cost me 46 pips.

Couple months later, ZuluTrade again missed the exit signal, this time cost me 540 pips and wiped me out. Their 'rep' acknowleded the mistake, but ZuluTrade would not own up to their mistake. Never ever trade with ZuluTrade.

Yes, I am totally done with zulutrade. They're scamsters. I don't care if they're slowly becoming legitimate like the Berlusconi family or not.

Now let's see what the same web site has to say about my baby, collective2.

I did a search on the site's engine and it doesn't show anything. So I used google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=collective2+site:www.forexjustice.com

Guess what: so honest that they are not even listed on the forexjustice web site. Let's look for covestor, just in case:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=covestor+site:www.forexjustice.com

Told you so: the honest companies do not show.

Now it's really time to relax. I have to find the strength to stop working and relax. And watch a movie or tv. No more work, no more research. Or tomorrow I'll skip work again due to insomnia. Yeah, because I keep working while I sleep as well.

 

[Yamato]

major question about collective2: real money?

I've been searching their web site to find out about something of major importance.

If we say zulutrade is a scam and we say it because they just inserted the "$" symbol saying which account is trading real money and which is not, then we must also make sure that all collective2 systems are indeed trading real money.

I've been searching and I have not found this out yet.

Premise: I've already searched covestor and they state clearly that they must be able to monitor your account and you must trade your own strategy, whether you're building a personal track record or selling a model. They won't tell us how much a system developer is investing, but we know that he's investing something into it. Even though an interesting question would be: what if he is investing just a few thousands? How much does he really care about failing? So I guess we can't find out but we're missing important information by not knowing how much money someone is investing in his own strategy (whether a personal track record or investment model).

Now, since on collective2 there is no distinction of personal track record vs model, then they must be all live, except it doesn't say it clearly anywhere.

Here's the page where I am on right now:
http://www.collective2.com/static/systemDeveloper.htm

I already got here and still they did not say anything about whether it is real money or what:
How much does Collective2 cost for system developers?

Nothing yet, zero. Now listen: why would you need a broker account as a system vendor, if you don't use it to place orders? And yet it doesn't specifically say anywhere that you have to place orders. What if I use IB's account and use their paper trading? I don't get it. It's something that is extremely important, so it is not clear or even fishy why they are not stating it clearly.

Now I am here:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/system/grid.mpl

Nothing. It doesn't even have a list of subscribers per system, which would be important to know. Nothing of the individual pages of the systems either.

Now I am here:
http://www.collective2.com/startSystem

Create your own trading system
If you are interested in selling your trading advice, you first create a "trading system." Collective2 tracks results by trading system, and customers subscribe to particular systems. You may create as many trading systems as you like.

Ed.: meaning you don't have to trade them with real money?

In general, trading systems are organized around general principles or philosophies ("buying when things are oversold"), but they do not have to be. Opportunistic traders may simply want to create a "system" which is not really a system at all -- but is rather a set of recommendations and picks by one person.

Let's start by filling out information about your trading system. Don't worry too much about your answers; you'll be able to change them later.

And - remember - it's absolutely free to start a system and begin entering trades. So there's no risk to try it.

Oh, good... I am going forward in the process of creating a system to see what they ask and here it is, finally:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/offer.mpl



Damn, no! It talks about a fake account. This is not real money, or else they would not say what they are saying. I am going to finish this process to get to the bottom of this thing. To know how good the system vendors are I have to pretend I am one. What I can say right away is that I didn't have to give my name nor my account. So I am not too happy about that, considering I want the vendors selection to be as strict as possible. All I had to give was my email, which means nothing basically. So far I could have created 10 of these accounts, whereas the same does not hold true for covestor.



Ok, here we go. I created my system, "this is a test". It is totally free to create it, so I guess I am ok so far. However, it is not free to use it (after 5 signals you have to pay). And indeed i will not use it.

Now I know that my ONLY guarantee that the signals vendors will be serious and honest is that they are paying 100 dollars per semester. And that is if they decide to go beyond the fifth free signal. Otherwise they can just keep on opening new accounts. Until they get five straight winners. This is not too much of a guarantee, but on the other hand no one chooses any systems that have placed less than the 50 trades. However, the only guarantee then is the 100 dollars they pay every semester. They could also not be trading real money as far as I know. At least as far as i could find out up to here.

Disclaimer: I might be more stupid than the average trading system developer - I am indeed, because they are a smart bunch.

Ok, folks. I have gone through the whole web site. This is my conclusion.

If I wanted to get subscribers for a system that sucks - even if I were in good faith - a system that is overoptimized and a system that will fail once the market changes (say for example that the dollar starts rising instead of falling, or the Dow Jones reverses), then all I need to do is pay 100 dollars per semester. And not even risk another cent of my own money.

Not just that. I don't even risk any of my reputation. Because I can create more systems, delete the old unprofitable ones, or even better, create more identities. Which is probably breaking the rules, but it's probably the only thing against the rules.

Having this in mind, if someone places 30 trades per month, and keeps paying 100 dollars... let me do some basic math here.

Worst Case Scenario
Let's say you are a crooked money manager and you build 10 different systems. And you subscribe for them all, paying just 100 dollars per semester. You spend just 2000 dollars in a year.

You pick 5 different markets and trade two opposing methods per market. After a year you either have 10 breakeven systems (they don't count costs). Or, more likely, you have some losing systems and some winning systems.

Then, after that year, you get rid of the losing systems. And you are left with just 5 winning systems. Of which some will be quite good.

Someone who is inexperienced will subscribe to you, since you have a track record longer than a year. Where will it say that you deleted some unprofitable systems?

I have to see if this shows or not. If it doesn't show, we're screwed.

Not just this.

Why don't we hypothesize this. Even if you dropped systems will show somewhere, you could open ten different accounts (all it asks is an email address) and use one account per system. That way you will be a winning trader with no bad systems and a track record of one year.

All you've spent until here is 2000 dollars: and here they say that...
http://www.collective2.com/static/systemDeveloper.htm

Earn money selling your signals. With over 37,000 registered users, and hundreds of millions of dollars of automated transactions flowing through our platform each week, Collective2 is the dominant trading system platform. If your system performs well at C2, you will make money. How much? That obviously depends on your system, but we can give you some benchmarks: top systems on Collective2 earn between $9,000 and $15,000 per month in subscription revenue. Almost half of systems that are profitable have earned at least $1,000 in subscription revenue.

This means that even if you get unlucky and even if you suck as a trader you will break even with this kind of scheme. And your investment will be zero (just the 2000 dollars in fees for the 10 systems). Now let's even say that you are not that bad. You won't gamble with your own money, but just with paper trading. However those following you will not know this.

I am saying one has to be very careful here. This is what I am saying. If I find out more about it, I'll write it here.

For now, I stop. Conclusion: some of the trading systems may be in good faith and profitable. Others may be in good faith, unprofitable, and yet get subscribers because they're lucky. Others may be scamsters. I'd say about 33% for each group of vendors.

With covestor this is less probable, but you still don't know how much they're investing in their strategy.

Still, collective2 remains a great place to look for ideas for new systems.

------------------------

Now I am looking into that problem I mentioned: if you delete a system, does it show somewhere? Can I search by members and vendors?

The forum, search engine, all this stuff totally sucks on collective2. I wonder if it's on purpose or just a limit. They're quite good programmers, so either way it's a big fault.

http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/t200.mpl?want=finder

For example: why can't I search systems by:
1) name
2) member's name

Why can't I find out the number of subscribers?
Why can't I find out how many systems a person has deleted?

This all goes against the credibility of the service.

This right here totally sucks, check it out for yourself:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/t200.mpl?want=finder

It goes against the logic of any search engine.

It would be as if you searched something on google and, before doing your search, it forced you select whether you wanted hits of this type:
1) cool
2) fun
3) serious

Geez...

"Hidden gems"

I am forced to select either of a series of choices among which "Hidden gems", which I don't even know what it means: what is this a restaurant menu?

Why can't I select "all"?

For being a site by scientific people for other scientific people, this really sucks. They must have hired a couple of stupid girlfriends, too. Probably they are in charge of the search engine and the forum.

My best bet is using the "grid":
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/system/grid.mpl

Ok, here's how I will select (you can fill in the green-shaded boxes) what I think might be safe.

1) age more than 200 days
2) trades more than 200
and that cuts it down to 40 systems
3) sharpe > 1
and we're down to 33
No, wait, I was only doing "futures".
Have to restart all over again.

Ok, all as above.
4) profit factor > 1
5) annual return more than 22%

Ok, they've got 51 good systems all in all:



If I set age to >500 then the number goes down to 33, which is really the systems I should study.

These 33 systems all have C2 scores between 751 and 1000.

max dd between 8 and 76 % which means nothing unless you know their return. We should have Return On Account but we don't.

Now, they don't count costs, so we'd have to consider better those that trade less.

Number of trades goes from 200 to 10 thousands. That one must suck in terms of profit ("gulf stream" systems).

Sharpe goes from 1 to 2.6.

Half of the systems trade stocks, the rest is futures and some forex.

Average trade length goes from 1 hour to 4 weeks, and this is the filter I did not use.

...

Basically I have managed to copy past those results onto my excel sheet and I don't have to list them to remember them. Not only that: I have found out that you can see columns that did not show when you see them. There's like hidden columns which show on excel but don't show on the web. Wow, excel rules. It even makes me see hidden columns. Too bad the grid cannot be exported. Which is another thing that sucks about this web site.

http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl...dhilite=3538&searchstartat=3538#msgid24934138

No ****, the question got asked already, but no one answered it. It was asked 4 years ago. I guess he's considered like a troublemaker or something.

Subject: Export The Grid to Excel?
Posted by: Donald Pirl ( C2 Score: 128)
Ignored by 0% of those who use ignore feature.
Ignore user's posts for week month forever
When: 2/02/07 (14:05)
Systems: Sand 2 Pirls 652015

Why not have an 'export to Excel' button for those (probably most) who have Excel? Then we can sort and filter to our heart's content.

Ok, the grid has a feature that allows to save the searches, which solves part of my problem. For the rest I can copy paste onto excel.

Also, the grid has a feature to choose columns.

So a lot got explained.

However I just looked around and found another problem. Look at this guy, the guy who wanted to export the grid like me:



He quit and where does his system show except near his name on the forum? Anywhere?

Where is the list of the forum members by the way?

The "system is no longer supported". Since you boast having 13000 systems, then give me a list of them and tell me which ones are and aren't supported any longer, because the guy quit. You say you want to be transparent? Be transparent then. Also tell me how many subscribers each system has, and everything you know that doesn't violate their privacy.

Ok, I also found how to search systems by name.

All right, overall it's not that bad, provided that I select the systems that have been trading for at least two years.

 

[Yamato]

insomnia, again

Another question to answer is how these % returns are achieved, if with a fixed investment or with compounding. I would like it better if it was with a fixed investment.

I am going to do it now since I can't sleep anyway. It's two things:

1) as usual, my brain doesn't want to be turned off
2) i want to skip work, subconsciously i rebel against the whole deal, like a student who skips class (like I did often) - somehow it would not be so bad if I got fired.

So, here's more work for me: compounding or not? It's a major question in assessing performance.

Two places I'll do my search on:
1) http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=compound+site:www.collective2.com
2) http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/board.mpl?want=searchstatus (searched for "compound")

I am still digesting the lunch of several hours ago. It's always like this.

Ok, it seems that "compounded" is the deal. Let's look for "non-compound":
1) http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="not+compounded"+site:www.collective2.com
2) http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/board.mpl?want=searchstatus (searched for "non-compound" and similar)

This is all I've found on google:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/c2systems.mpl?systemid=33283025
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/c2systems.mpl?systemid=19811124
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl...dhilite=7982&boardid=9323885&displayblock=8_7

People talking about non-compounded performances...

There is a lot on the forums and this just about sums it up, about how stupid they are in using "compounded returns" (of course he's "ignored", since he's a troublemaker, like the other one suggesting a feature to export the grid in excel format):
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl...=9323885&msghilite=42339847#msgdirect42339847

Subject: New drawdown stat suggestion
Posted by: Jules Ellis
Ignored by 4% of those who use ignore feature.
Ignore user's posts for week month forever
When: 8/11/09 (2:14)

In response to post by ironcito of 8/10/09 (19:58)

Yes. It could be taken one step further, giving vendors the option to have a fixed buy power for their systems, which wouldn't grow along with the account size. This would have several advantages:

- Stats such as drawdown and return could be calculated based on this amount. This would eliminate the DD problem I mentioned earlier, and also the problem of diminishing % returns as the account size gets bloated.

- It would allow prospective subscribers to easily know what kind of capital they need to start trading the system at any time.
(but maybe they don't care that they know, Ed.)

- Subscribers could rest easy knowing that a vendor who usually trades 1 or 2 contracts won't suddenly trade 30 contracts trying to make up a loss or something, just because his system which started with $50K and usually trades based on that amount, now happens to have a $1M account at C2.

- No need for the current rescaling process, which doesn't seem to have much acceptance and screws up the historical trade record.

The usual account size would be maintained for displaying the equity curve and such, but only as a historical record. The vendor would only be allowed to trade using his fixed buy power amount (if he chose to have his system operating in this mode).

I like that idea too, and similar requests have been made previously because most statistics assume that the system is compounding. But there is one little problem with it: Will the buying power also remain constant after losses that reduce the capital to an amount smaller than the initial size? That would act like a bonus on gambling, because it assumes that the account will be refunded after each major loss. The rule has to be somewhat more subtle than only a fixed buying power. Can you formulate a clear rule that deals with this problem?
(the precise rule would be like reality, that if you can't trade your systems because you blow out your account or run out of sufficient margin, then it's over - the system fails and it stays on your curriculum, with your name and last name, but they don't allow any of this, because you stop paying the subscription fee as a vendor and that's all they care about - they care about seeming legitimate not about being a serious web site, Ed.)

If this is implemented, then vendors who use this mode should be warned that it is disadvantageous for many statistics. Most statistics at C2 assume compounding. It is also hard to compare a noncompounding system with a noncompounding system, even if you are aware of the difference. For example, for a compounding system you should use the compounded annual return and for a non-compounding system you should use the non-compounded annual return, but even if you do this then the two annual returns are still not comparable. This problem exists already now, so this is not due to your suggestion, but having a separate mode for fixed buying power suggests that this is a fully supported mode while it is actually less supported - even after adding your DD statistic.

Yeah, of course I forgot to mention that also the previous post was dead on target on the idea of "fixed buy power".

Yeah, so since the crappy stats use compounded returns I just don't know what the hell to do. I should just ignore returns but that's impossible. On the other hand, sharpe ratio discounts that, so i could ignore returns and only use sharpe ratio.

It's a ****ing mess. Another problem is that now that i see how this whole deal works, i know also that a person could change his system during the race and no one would say anything. He could change the number of contracts. He could start doing discretionary trades even... a mess. The worst problem remains that a person might not be trading that system at all with real money. They keep mentioning here and there some sort of connection to the broker for systems vendors, but I don't see it as a requirement. A lot hints to the the fact that it is not a requirement. Unlike covestor they don't audit your account basically. They audit your paper trading record - that is what seems to be the case. Huge difference.

I either have it all wrong or Matthew Klein is not doing things properly. He is only doing half of the things properly, he may not be in bad faith, but then he's not as intelligent as I thought.

I've identifed these problems so far, in random order:
1) bad forum altogether
2) bad help section
3) bad searching functions
4) accounts not being audited, just the paper trading record is (unlike covestor and even zulutrade)
5) bad statistical data, badly organized, important data missing
6) bad auditing of even just the paper trading record, because I can easily register as often as I'd like. And i can delete my non-profitable systems without them being shown
7) problem with compounded returns
8) problem with returns without deducted costs

Still, overall this is better than nothing, and it remains the best financial web site for automated trading, which is the best thing for trading, so it is the best financial web site period. There's a concentrated quality you can't find anywhere else.

You see, even the objection on the forum are teaching me to reason the right way about this stuff. It's a great gym for automated trading... too bad the users are way better than the web site administrators, who suck big dicks.

What saves this web site is the quality of a few system vendors: once these are gone because there's a new web site offering a better service, this web site is going nowhere.

In fact the only difference between collective2 and zulutrade is this:
1) http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=collective2+scam 665 hits.
2) http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=zulutrade+scam 19600 hits.

They will never be a full-blown scam, but they might be surpassed by a better web site, soon. Maybe it exists already and I don't know about it.

Let's do it, let's find it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=collective2+covestor+site:www.elitetrader.com

Its name might appear next to covestor and collective2.

Here's one:
a project to compete with Collective 2
Nope, didn't seem to get anywhere. It was a perfect idea, but didn't make it happen.

Good thread here, but haven't found a substitute yet:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/printthread.php?threadid=195311

Another issue is that they conceal any subscriber statistics.

Based on what I have seen from opinions and other things:

the 10,000+ systems is really more like a couple hundred currently active systems

Probably all but a couple do not work (do not ask about "the 2, please?")

You may get some subscription revenue as a vendor, but unless you are pretty profitable with good statistics, and have been around at least a few months, you will likely be disappointed

If you put two and two together ("only 2 systems work" AND "unless your system is good you won't make money"), it should mean that there's no subscribers. But this can't be the case, because such a complex web site would not have the fuel to keep going. So, unless collective2 takes all the money, but that is not the case I think (because it's hard to rip off system developers), then the case is more like this:
1) only a few systems are good,
2) a lot of people get ripped off and
3) collective2, system vendors and brokers all profit from it.

They also force you to leave a system up even after you know the discretionary aspect won't work in a particular environment. Say, if there is a regime change and that particular strategy no longer works in a particular Market, so you have all these abandoned strategies that they want to keep up, its just another way the vendor can make money for each one you put up.

How about collective2 and brokers make the most money, and some money is also made by vendors. Other vendors get their systems copied.

In that case I'd trade another strategy under the old system name. I guess in that game you should devise new systems all the time because rules change, edges get widely known and disappear etc.

So if I display a system that exceeds certain threshold for sharp ratio, drawdowns, liquidity etc - what do you think, will I be able to earn $10000 with it? Otherwise it's not worth an effort.

This is bull****. Edges don't disappear as quickly as you say - if it stops working like that, it wasn't a profitable system. Or else what is the point of back-testing? I wouldn't be able to test anything over ten years, because the edge would only work for a year, and then disappear? Bull****, ridiculous.

Posted by sysdev1 on 04-01-10 08:58 AM:

This forum is true gold mine of useful info .. but you should sift through 99% of raw ore (meaningless garbage) to extract it.

Found about timertrac, covestor and other similar sites. Covestor requires you to actually have a trading account. Also a guy stars there with 300,000% returns (!!!) who is "shorting penny stocks". Tell me, how can you short penny stocks? My broker won't allow to short anything under $5. Doesn't add credibility for the site.

Uh huh, got it: www.timertrack.com
Need to check it out at length tomorrow. It might be a better alternative to collective2.

Nope, still have to check it out, but at the moment it sucks: I have to subscribe to be able to see anything:
http://www.timertrac.com/Signup/Subscriber/Default.aspx

In fact it seems aimed at investment funds:
http://www.timertrac.com/Public/SignalList.aspx

HOMEWORK
However, I used that name and got even better results from a search on ET (it returns 128 hits):
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2611729&highlight=timertrac#post2611729

Here are 8 places to get tracked again:

timertrac
collective2
thetaresearch
timerdigest
Robbins
Striker Securities
Attain Capital
futurestruth

You need to stop preening and self glorification and demanding people back up YOUR claims with THEIR money or expecting them to dig through your random numbers to see if they have any value. It is nauseating.

You want to prove yourself, stop snorting and seeking attention and making excuses, and put a stake in the ground. Sign up with one and start trading. Get back in 4 months with your results.

Tomorrow I need to check them all out. ****, I got myself into a lot of work this time.

Major discovery on collective2 here:
http://www.finanzaonline.com/forum/...-trading/790409-collective2.html#post18192839

Se vai a vedere i track record le operazioni in neretto "dovrebbero" essere state eseguite realmente tramite appunto l'autotrading, mentre quelle in grigio chiaro sono quelle che sono state comunicate dal sistemista al sito di c2, ma non eseguite davvero.

He says that grey is for non-executed trades and bold black font or similar is for autotrading, which "should" mean they got executed. This is very important.

 

[Yamato]

resuming from above

True, there is a distinction between real trades and fake trades so to speak, but it doesn't show on:

1) csv file of exported trades
2) grid

Or does it? Whether it does or it doesn't, it is not stated clearly and visibly on the web site, so this is one aspect that sucks and makes me think of a scam. Without a clear indication of whether the trades were made or not, you're encouraging other scamsters, and if you host scamsters then you're one as well.

If the most important rules are not stated visibly, then you lose credibility. But I guess they make more money this way.

Listen, now I'll finish this thread and tomorrow I'll check out all those web sites:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/printthread.php?threadid=195311

Wow, I just found another guy agreeing with me. So happy, since I've only been studying this web site for this weekend:

Posted by 15rms on 04-01-10 09:43 AM:

The difficulties with C2 are numerous. Most importantly the owner is arrogant and not helpful. Does not seem to understand he needs people to be profitable.

After that the site allows too much fraud. It is possible to sign in under as many aliases as you want. There are people there that use many. The most visible and vocal person in the forums was allowed to conceal his 76% ignore rating he so rightly deserved. The same gentleman has over 5 aliases that have been discovered. Starts multiple failed trading signals only to go to another alias and start anew. All the while using the forums to bash and belittle other vendors that are far more successful than him.

The signals are for the most part are put out by vendors that have little knowledge our know how of what they are doing. When looking at a signal there is no telling the experience or capabilities of the vendor.

I would suggest anybody interested in C2 to take a look at the reviews of the signals. It is extremely rare to find anybody that actually C2 and makes money. Looking at the reviews that are on the front page today is a good example, 3 out of 4 of them are bad. The good review starts out with “I have only been subscribed to this system for a couple of weeks”.

After observing C2 for some time now it is clear the site blows out far more accounts than it makes money for. Most smart traders observe the site and go on their way. The other traders, vendors or vendor clients that have been there for some time are just chasing their own tail.

It is not a question of if C2 will lose your money it is a question of when.

Ah ah... and to say I thought this was the best financial web site ever. Well, I never meant to buy or sell signals. But it does provide ideas for markets and statistics. Can all these statistics really be worthless? Mmh... I have to discover this. Obviously it is bad enough that the majority are bad. Like almost everyone seems to say the reliable systems on the web site are from 30 to 200 at the most. Out of the 13000 that have appeared there, according to what they say.

So we could forget about all the good and bad systems that are not active and say that only 5% of the (active) systems are good and deserve to be studied.

Ok, here's one who has used it:

Posted by oraclewizard77 on 04-01-10 05:21 PM:

The problem is you will get some systems out of pure luck there by luck will go up for 4 to 6 months and may be tuned to the market during that time period.

However, the market changes, the trader / vendor has no real idea of risk management, and lets a single trade or a series of trades wipe out all the profit and most of the subscribers accounts, since subscribers are probably not going to join at the start of the system only after it has been doing well for awhile, so the big hit may only take the vendor down 30 - 40%, but the subscribers probably get wiped out.

i previously made some money with a system there once, but I look now especially after someone hacked their website and stole credit card information, that I no longer see high number of views for some systems that may be fine to trade. This leads me to think their popularity is declining. Also, when you have tons of subscribers who have had bad experiences by losing money with C2, its hard to attract new people there even if you were to put out another good system since the audience that you are trying to reach already lost their money. Plus yes, you do have a bunch of bogus systems that make say 4 cents profit on a trade that would be a loser if you auto traded it since you would not get the same fills and subscriber fees and commissions would be a net negative.

Therefore, I think its better to trade on your own, or start your own website to promote your trading so that you don't have to compete against random systems that may have better stats than yours until they implode.

Fascinating info. I am glad they are getting punished if that's the case. You can't just pretend you enforce honesty. You're being dishonest if you do that.

Posted by sysdev1 on 04-02-10 05:02 AM:

Another interesting question : have anyone looked at well-performing strategies there and tried to reverse-engineer to get hold of the trading idea?

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Posted by TraderZones on 04-02-10 07:05 AM:

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Quote from sysdev1:

Another interesting question : have anyone looked at well-performing strategies there and tried to reverse-engineer to get hold of the trading idea?
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*yikes*. Almost everyone who is a newbie considers this a good idea. And pretty much everyone who votes "great idea" or "that is what I was thinking" is also still a newbie.

After you spend a few years trading or take a few logic classes, you will realize how worthless this idea is...

Oh yeah? bull****, even if all I understood was the markets and length of your trades, that would be useful (if the system makes money).

Ok, let's start doing this:
www.timertrac.com : little info unless you subscribe
www.thetaresearch.com : little info unless you subscribe
www.timerdigest.com : little info unless you subscribe
www.robbinstrading.com/system : little info unless you subscribe
www.StrikerSecurities.com : YES YES YES
www.AttainCapital.com : YES YES YES
www.futurestruth.com : little info unless you subscribe


Let's define the problem. The problem is that:
1) I don't want to subscribe
2) I don't want to sell
3) I want to study the systems that work
4) I don't want to waste months finding systems that work among a majority of systems that don't work, such as happens on collective2

Those web sites above are all serious, so probably but only probably, they have systems that work, but they won't tell me anything anyway, so I can't use them. They probably will also leave investors in the dark as to the performance of the systems: unless they first subscribe to them (which is not very useful).

On the other hand, there's two web sites that seem to do exactly what I wanted. They select for me the good systems. Yet probably they will also tell me a bit less about them than what I am being told on collective2. But what is good is that i can already count on the fact that the systems work, so I can spend my time focusing on what they do. If, again, I don't get told at all about what they do, then I might as well stick with collective2.

If I were an investor, I would opt for collective2 because you pay less and you get to see what the hell the dentish is doing in your mouth. These people are like stuck up and they tell you "we'll take care of it for you, don't worry about it". That seems to me to be the case from a quick look.

These are the good ones:
http://www.strikersecurities.com/En0301_trading_systems_about.php?webpageID=6&webmainID=3
http://www.attaincapital.com/altern...nce/trading-systems/recommended-systems/page1

 

[Yamato]

attain vs collective vs striker

Let's what we've got on ET:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=collective2+attain+site:www.elitetrader.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=collective2+striker+site:www.elitetrader.com

I will skip when it's just a list of places to go. I will quote where i find specific opinions on one of these new two services. Even if I find something new on c2.

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=61509

Attain Capital is similar but much more professional than collective2.

I'd love to see more systems available there since the only results he sends out are of ACTUAL trading.

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2997185&highlight=striker#post2997185

Now is Now


Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 1637


10-31-10 01:29 PM



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Quote from intradaybill:

Not according to the terms and conditions I just read. If the system blows up, the customers of that service can request rebates for the fees paid and those are deducted from your cc. So you may end up paying a lot of money.

http://www.collective2.com/static/i...msofservice.htm

"If the amount of refunds that we pay out on your behalf exceeds the fees that we collect on your behalf, we may at our discretion bill your credit card for the amount we are unable to debit from your Collective2 account in order to cover the cost of any refunds we have paid to your customers."
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And that is AFTER they have taken their 30% fee from the monthly lease fee....C2 is strictly for the benefit of C2.


Regardless how successful the system may be in the first month users can benefit by it and still demand a refund....and they get refunded no questions asked.

The net payout is after 60 days....there is no reason to use C2 other than for your own gratification of running a sim system.

No reason for the OP not to spend the 80 bucks ,but don't torment yourself dealing with C2 to lease your system....if the results are good...set up an account at Striker and you will get noticed.

NiN

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?postid=2827690

Now is Now


Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 1637


05-15-10 12:21 PM



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote from bwolinsky:

You are misinformed. All fills are based on bid and ask prices. The "if touched" problem was clarified a couple years ago, and people still disregard the results when it is really like only letting people play with wooden bats. It's a matter of equality.
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Real time results are the ONLY legitimate way to go...

Collective 2 and similar sites are good for testing trading theories, but lend little credibilty in the real world.

Sites like Striker.com would have to be more credible than Collective2 as they are real time, real money accounts...Another could be Robbins...

NiN

See, I told you that collective2 was not real money in most cases, and you can't tell which ones.

So I think I can definitely conclude that attain and striker are better. What is yet to be understood is if they'll tell me enough about the systems I want to study.

Anyway, between these 3, striker, attain, collective2, I have my hands full. If I'll ever be missing any ideas for trading systems, I'll just go to one of those 3 web sites and find them.

It might be harder to get to the personal blogs of the systems vendors, which is the best place to get new ideas, where they tell us about their methods. I wouldn't want to wonder from a company web site to another business web site. I want to see personal stuff, where people speak out. So, collective2 has that - yes, it has 90% of unprofitable systems as well, so I will need to see if what I lose is more than what I gain. I lose outspokenness and I gain seriousness and profitability. I want to be around serious people, but not so serious that they won't teach me anything. I want to be in a free and outspoken environment, but not so free that it abounds with scamsters, including the site's owners in some cases (cfr. zulutrade).

For example, zulutrade, because of the level of dishonesty, makes me lose more time than i can gain by finding resources. Collective2 has a lot of resources, but I still have to filter out a majority of trash/dishonesty. Even though, I could also get efficient at doing that. But if I can have a lot of resources and quality at the same time, those two other web sites are definitely better.

 

[Yamato]

I need to regulate my compulsive work

Because of this compulsive research/"home work" I am doing, I've kept working all the way to 3 am both sunday night and thursday night, which made skip the real work, the "office work". That's because while I keep a mad scientist's schedule, I also want to sleep, and as a consequence I have to skip work.

This can't keep happening, because they need me, and because I need my job as well.

From now on, I will have to curb my compulsive working and researching, and limit it to a few selected hours of the day. Otherwise I won't be able to relax and then I won't be able to sleep when the time comes.

So, in random order, here's what I have to try to do:

1) ONLINE MOVIES:
if I watch a movie, I have to relax completely and watch it from start to end, without interrupting it to do research on the cast, or to translate the greek subtitles, like i did yesterday (and the move was in english).

2) TV:
watch tv as much as possible, without doing research on the people that appear on tv.

3) TRADING RESEARCH AND POSTING IT:
do trading research for just a few hours a day, and document it here only if it's necessary to keep me working, or if it's useful to keep a record.

4) PERSONAL POSTS:
post fewer music/movie youtube videos, and do less research on them.

5) HOURS OF WORK:
whatever research/computer work I do, I must not prolong it till later than 10 PM, because it will interfere with my sleeping mood and capabilities.

6) MANAGING THE SYSTEMS:
Of course I will keep doing the compulsory tasks such as turning the systems on and off, regardless of the hour of the day. But I should also try to curb my compulsive checking of trades and equity line. I should export on excel the trade reports only once a week and not on a daily basis.

The first consequence of trying to get off my compulsive researching is that today for sure I will not do that research on attain and striker.

 

[Yamato]

Ridiculous. To keep my promise to not write here. I wrote myself notes and did the research anyway.

I might as well post the whole thing here.

I will have to stick with collective2, because both attain and striker fail badly. Here's why.

From "attain_fails_in_comparison_with_c2.txt":

As a developer:
You show more as a developer to them: they know the code, unlike on c2.
You show less to the public, who doesn't see the trades.
As a subscriber:
You can see less about a system: you're in the dark (you can see the trades but not in detail, no hours and such)
You can trust them better to pick a good system for you (they have a selection of recommended) and to forbid scams for all systems

QUOTE FROM:
http://www.attaincapital.com/commod...g-and-partnerships/trading-system-development
Attain does not work with everyone who wishes to become a trading system developer, and puts potential trading systems through rigorous testing prior to accepting new systems on our 'platform'. This testing includes applying realistic slippage and commission numbers such as $50 per trade for an emini S&P trading system, deducting the cost of the system, and running the system on out of sample data. In addition, we require all trading systems invested in by our clients are run in house, on our machines, so we can insure our clients are not at risk from communication line failures, bad data, and so on.
If you have a trading system which will hold up to this type of stress testing and you believe can consistently post above average risk adjusted returns, Attain Capital would love to work with you. To learn more about how Attain can help turn your trading system into a business - call John Cummings at 800.311.1145

"in house" means that they get your code.
"rigorous testing prior to accepting" also means that they get your code.

when it says for a system "Logic Not Disclosed":
http://www.attaincapital.com/alternative-investment-performance/trading-systems/detail/692
It only means the subscriber knows nothing about the system but they still have the code - which totally sucks.

The only purpose of Attain is to see how well the best systems perform and compare my own systems with their best systems.
True, I can also read a bit about what developers have written on each system that is good.
For everything they show, they're transparent: no scams here. But not much is disclosed. Plus very bad for developers becasue they disclose nothing to the public but everything to attain.

Out of 541 systems on their web site, only 62 systems are profitable.
For finding strategy and hearing about them, it's much better to sift through collective2 and hear opinions by the expert posters.
But this is good a term of comparison and all the top 50 systems are guaranteed to not be scams, especially the recommended ones.

A problem with attain is that it doesn't say exactly neither when the out-sample starts (which would mean nothing because you can give them your system after having used it all up and cheating therefore) nor when a system started live trading with them. Instead it does say this on collective2.

COLLECTIVE2 BEATS BY FAR ATTAIN ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

SHAMELESS: they are also recommending systems that have merely been back-tested!!! This web site is all about appearance.

FAILED. I should not waste time with it, as a customer, as a developer nor in a reverse-engineering effort.

From "striker_sucks_even_worse.txt":

The same system appears on both striker and attain, so I can easily compare.

The trades don't show the times, for any system.

Their rankings tables cannot be ordered by columns - worse than both attain and collective2.

Useful web site to find out about a specific system, but it fails all in all, and it is even worse than attain.

Ok, now I can stop working for a while, as promised in the previous post.

Practically speaking, i need to add some reflections. Here's my reflections:

As a system and signal buyer, do not be one, because:
1) if you're ignorant, you're better off not investing at all in futures.
2) if you're knowledgeable and therefore you're also a system developer, you're better off investing in your own systems.

As a system seller:
1) if it's bad and you want to try to rip someone off, you're better off going to zulutrade or collective2.
2) if it's good, the best is to use it yourself
3) second best let as few people know about it as possible
4) third best go to attain capital (because their web site is better - superficial yes, but that's all i know, so better than nothing), with the risk that they will keep your system even without paying you, but probably you'll get money and not run the risk - like on collective2 - of letting people know too much about your system (the people at attain will know, and that's a lot of people).

As someone looking for trading ideas:
1) use attain to see what profitable systems are capable of in terms of performance, and try to find out as much as possible about them
2) once you know what a good system is capable of, its characteristics, look for those systems on collective2, and look for more information on the good systems of collective2, once you learn, through the various comments and posts on forums. Included the blogs of those who created them. Most likely you won't be able to find on collective2 the same systems that are listed on attain.

After all, attain is not all that bad. The updated comparison goes like this:
1) zulutrade is 99% trash and 1% good info: total scam, doesn't live up to its promise
2) collective2 is 75% trash and 25% good info: partial scam, partially lives up to its promise
3) attain capital is 0% trash and 5% good info: no scam, but not enough info to trust them either

Zulutrade can be skipped.
Collective2 despite having a lot of scamming, overall it delivers much more info than attain.
Attain doesn't do any scamming, but the info it provides to me (and to its customers) is much less than collective2. Not enough to give them your money, as I said. It's not clear how long the systems listed have been traded, which is of major importance. And it is something we know on collective2.

My plan is this once again:
1) find out from attain what the profitable systems are like
2) look for similar systems on collective2
3) find out everything they say and there is to know about those systems - get rid of the bad ones
4) study the strategies they use and try to get ideas for your own systems

Collective2 would be so much better if they just stopped asking money for subscriptions. They must stop making money from system sellers via the subscription, because that is a conflict of interest and an incentive for them to:
1) allow sellers to change names
2) allow sellers to drop systems without a record of it
3) allow sellers to not trade their own systems
They must stop taking money from sellers altogether if they want to live up to their promise of being honest and caring for investors.
Also, they should stop taking money from the brokers, because that is a conflict of interest and an incentive for them to:
1) allow bad trades to go through
2) allow bad systems to gather subscribers

The only thing they must be interested in is the profit of the investors. NOT the amount of trades the broker gets through them, NOT the amount of moeny they get from systems vendors.

Their profit should be a share of what the investors make through the systems. Here's how it should work:
1) the web site gathers systems and customers (as it is now)
2) it gets the signals from the systems and it sends them to the customer's broker (as it is now)
3) it does not get paid ANYTHING by either system vendor or broker
4) it gets paid... say 20% of the profit made by the customers via the systems
5) then it pays an equal percentage to the system vendor

That way it makes more money and it doesn't have to rip anyone off in devious subtle ways like it's doing now.

The only purpose of the web site is to:
1) bring vendors and buyers together
2) make sure the buyers can trust the vendors and viceversa
3) provide the infrastructure for signals and trades

It should be to signals what the CME is for futures. A place where you put buyers and sellers of signals together. You don't want to allow any criminals in that market and you don't want to be a criminal yourself.

But hell no... collective2 is not doing this. Nor is zulutrade doing it. They're being the criminals of the situation, together with the brokers. It's almost like a corruption going on: if you send me a lot of trades, I will give you money for it, and we screw the investors together.

Attain on the other hand is not out to screw the investors. But not looking to make them profitable either. I saw subscription fees that depended on whether you used the systems or not, and not based on the profit you made with it. So this is bad, too. I guess that if you want to do things right, you've got to be happy with an investment fund that will give you 10% a year if you are lucky. Or you have to do it all by yourself, as if someone went to the country to buy potatoes straight from the farmer, which is what I am trying to do basically.

Ok, anyway, I may have gotten some parts of this wrong, so don't take my word for it and go and look for yourself. However i am only interested in getting ideas for new systems, so none of this is my problem.

 

[Yamato]

Rough Seas Iceland great waves

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdvj2vM5XR4

The most peaceful scenery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7RSryuJAwE

I was looking at the only systems we can really trust. These:
http://www.attaincapital.com/altern...nce/trading-systems/recommended-systems/page1

25 trading strategies on the Attain Recommended list

I guess collective2 looks better just because there's some more scams. Or maybe I've got something wrong.

The fact is that they recommend a few systems here that are not even profitable. Systems that overall have not produced money for the investors. And they recommend them. Hmm. Go figure. They've been trading for 10 years, produced losses, and they're being recommended. Not clear at all. "25 trading strategies on the Attain Recommended list".

I thought my systems were performing awful, but they actually do better than half of the systems they're recommending.

I highlighted in yellow the systems whose performance I match, column by column. These systems either suck, too, or I should be happy about what i've created. We'll see. I don't think my systems could be doing any worse than they're already doing. I was expecting 3000 a month, judging on past performance, and they made 300 a month.

We'll see: maybe I am being unlucky or maybe I was having an optical illusion. Whereby, just like discretionary traders, I felt my (automated) trading was better than it actually was. Wishful thinking type of thing. Maybe only when your performance is being audited you realize that you're not as good as you thought you were. I don't think the systems could be underperforming because they're under pressure. They don't feel emotions.

My hate towards vito and work in general is making me having optical illusions, mirages. Wishful thinking that gives you hope and clouds your judgment, makes you imagine things. That's what leads the discretionary trader to blow out his account. With automated trading instead the account grows more slowly than you'd expect.

Things are not always turning out for the best. You see a system that has performed great in the in-sample, a bit worse in the out-sample, and it performs even worse in real trading. This is the reality.

You can't expect to choose the best system and see it perform equally well once you've selected it. You've selected because it was the best, yes, but there's randomness in the markets or whatever it is. It doesn't work like it works with people.

With people, you choose the best student/friend, you give him a good grade/feedback and he keeps on being the best student/friend, both because you're the one reinforcing that behaviour, expectation and judgment: you're the one who ultimately keeps grading the person. Pygmalion effect and all that.

With the students and people in general it works like this.

The markets don't give a **** about the pygmalion effect and you can't expect them to please and adapt to you like people do.

Now watch this video and instead of "people" and "employees" put the word "markets". It's funny how we think that our expectations will influence the markets somehow, as if the markets were like people. We can't will the markets to do anything. That's why they never live up to our expectations. The sooner I'll get used to expecting the markets to deliver only half of what I'd expect and half of what they delivered in the past, the sooner I will focus on what else I need to do to get what I want out of the markets.

With the markets (and with systems) it's different. Unlike employees, we can't "inspire them to achieve their highest performance". That's how, once we've gotten collective2's and zulutrade's scams out of the way, we end up with attain capital's list of 20 profitable systems.

That's the proof that they are more serious than collective2. They've checked performances including all costs. They've back-tested the systems themselves (this is a problem only for developers, who had to give their code). And all they could come up with is 20 profitable systems. And they're even recommending non-profitable systems. This probably means that most of those who have a profitable system, keep it to themselves. By the posts I read just on elitetrader.com (automated trading section) and on finanzaonline.com, my guesstimate is that the people capable of creating profitable automated systems are hundreds. So the profitable systems created are thousands. However, they rarely end up on these web sites. I don't know why. I don't do it because I know that I'd have to give them my code, but I don't if and when I'd see any money.

 

[Yamato]

correlation to the dow jones / sp 500

A friend telling me that my (traded) systems are correlated to the Dow Jones got me thinking. Then I went on attain's web site and one of the columns for appraising their systems is called "sp 500 correlation".They also have a category dividing their systems by: negative correlation, no correlation, positive correlation:
http://www.attaincapital.com/altern...nce/trading-systems/recommended-systems/page1

So I checked if and how my systems are correlated to the sp500. I don't mean all the systems but just those that I am trading live for the investors.

Well the news is this. I have no idea what I should calculate the correlation on.

1) daily changes on the systems (gains or losses) vs daily changes on the sp500 and eur/usd, too - yeah, cause i thought of adding it in the comparison.

2) changes in the total equity (running total) vs changes in the total value of the sp500 and eur.

So, listen: if I look at the daily changes, everything looks good, like this:
S&P 500 corr. 0.12
EUR/USD corr. 0.26

Then, if I look at the running total, then things look much worse:
S&P 500 corr. 0.80
EUR/USD corr. 0.71

So, I don't know which one is right.

The chart, with the right scale, does not look reassuring at all:




It looks very similar to the SP 500. I think it's partly just a coincidence, because my systems are not trend-following systems.

It's just now, it won't last like this for very long.

Also, on a day to day basis, the correlation is very small. In the long run it seems true that if the markets and the EUR rise, the systems do better. Not much better, but a little better. So there is some correlation.

I suck at formulas unfortunately so I can't understand much more. But at least I got started in this direction.

 

[Yamato]

Work on Sharpe Ratio

I don't really understand the Sharpe Ratio formula nor most formulas, but I will try to make some sense of it, by looking on the web:

http://moneyterms.co.uk/sharpe-ratio/

One useful property of the Sharpe ratio is that the Sharpe ratio of a portfolio does not depend on the time over which it is measured. It will change with time period depending on the actual historic data, but there is no correlation between the Sharpe ratio and the length of time period. This is because the return and the standard deviation both increase with time. Sharpe ratios calculated over different periods of time are directly comparable.

Really? Bull****. Once you have a system, that is always the same, the...

Let me check. Here's the formula I have:
SQRT(250)*AVERAGE(daily_profit)/STDEV(daily_profit)

They're right. 250 stays the same no matter what, as long as it's daily periods. The average stays like that, because it's just an average. The stdev I don't know exactly what it is, but it has do with how distant the daily profit is from its average.

So I guess he's right. This is a major point. Now that I've understood this I am unstoppable.

So let me check. According to this concept these two sequences of daily profits should be the same:

2
-1

should have the same sharpe ratio as

2
-1
2
-1

He says: "there is no correlation between the Sharpe ratio and the length of time period. This is because the return and the standard deviation both increase with time. Sharpe ratios calculated over different periods of time are directly comparable".

Bull****. The answer is 3.7 for 2 and -1. The answer is 4.6 for 2, -1, 2, -1. So this disproves him. If a system keeps performing the same, the longer the period, the better the sharpe ratio. So what the hell is he saying, retarded ****? I have no idea how the stdev... damn... I thought I'd understand more but I am... well, I now realize that i didn't know, so i do know more. I didn't even know how ignorant i was. These formulas really get me confused.

I've also tried to understand the 250 and where it's coming from, more or less. The concept is something like this: it's not fair that you compute on the same scale two systems one measured in weeks and one measured in days. For every weekly profit is likely to be higher than a daily profit without being conversely burdened by an equivalent denominator increase: stdev will not increase as much. So you can't compare the two systems. The daily trades go up and down and make little profit. So the daily measurement has to be compensated with some coefficient and the coefficient is weighed by how many times those periods happen within 1 year. 12 months, 52 weeks, 250 days. On the other hand I don't understand what the sqrt is for. I mean, one could be happy with saying... "let's multiply the monthly measurements by one (neutral), let's multiply the weekly measurements by 4 because there's 4 weeks in a month, and let's multiply the daily periods' formula by 20, because there's 20 trading days in a month. So the ratio between months, weeks and days would be: 1 to 4 to 20. Instead here's what we get:
=sqrt(12)= 3.5
=sqrt(52)= 7
=sqrt(250)= 16
Here the ratio is 1 to 2 to 4. Why? Not clear at all. I don't like this part, but it's standard so i have to use it this way. I mean why are the changes in 12 months getting a coefficient which is one fourth of the coefficient used with the daily periods? There is no way that one month is equivalent to four times one day, nor viceversa.


Other useful links, to be checked out in the future are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sharperatio.asp
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/sharpe_ratio.asp
http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/sr/sr.htm

The Sharpe ratio is a mess. Like all formulas that get too complex. The right kind of formula which I can handle is 1 + 1 = 2. This is a clear formula. That's all I can handle.

 

[Yamato]

time to create more systems

From where I was, on that spanish web site, I found ideas sufficient to create one more good, excellent, system - based on the breakout strategy.

Let's get back to that post then:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/85510-my-journal-2-a-181.html#post1336834

Las reglas originales del sistema de las tortugas (Inglés)
Done

Sistema 1,2,3 (Inglés)
This is next

Ruptura de canales de Donchian (Castellano)
Done, because it's the same as the turtles/tortugas.

Sistema 3 barras + stochastic (Castellano)

Sistema SVBreak -Ruptura de rangos de volatilidad (Castellano)

Estrategia Bandas de Bollinger (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Dinamic Break Out Strategy (Inglés)

Método Lowry de Medias móviles (Castellano)

His web site is here, just in case I'll need it:
http://portfolio-marting.blogspot.com/2007/07/mtodos-de-trading.html

Sistema 1,2,3
He says:

Sistema clasico de rupturas que funciona bien en mercados tendenciales, en el PDF esta toda la información de como utilizar este método y los espacios temporales en los que se puede aplicar.

It's all in the pdf. Let's read it, but first let's find the English version... oh, wait it is in English already:
http://www.trading-naked.com/library/123system.pdf

Discarded after reading 5 pages, because I can't automate it on excel nor on tradestation.

Moving on.

No, for today it's enough. Resuming in the next few days.

Next homework:

Las reglas originales del sistema de las tortugas (Inglés)
Done

Sistema 1,2,3 (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Ruptura de canales de Donchian (Castellano)
Done, because it's the same as the turtles/tortugas.

Sistema 3 barras + stochastic (Castellano)
This is next

Sistema SVBreak -Ruptura de rangos de volatilidad (Castellano)

Estrategia Bandas de Bollinger (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Dinamic Break Out Strategy (Inglés)

Método Lowry de Medias móviles (Castellano)

No wait, I've just read it and this goes out the window, too, for it's too hard to automate:
http://portfolio-marting.blogspot.com/2006/12/sistema-de-3-barras-y-stochastic-day.html

So this is how it will be:

Las reglas originales del sistema de las tortugas (Inglés)
Done

Sistema 1,2,3 (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Ruptura de canales de Donchian (Castellano)
Done, because it's the same as the turtles/tortugas.

Sistema 3 barras + stochastic (Castellano)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Sistema SVBreak - Ruptura de rangos de volatilidad (Castellano)
This is next

Estrategia Bandas de Bollinger (Inglés)
Discarded, because I can't automate it on excel.

Dinamic Break Out Strategy (Inglés)

Método Lowry de Medias móviles (Castellano)

I do realize that a lot of potential strategies are thrown away because they can't be automated, but I can't do everything so I have to maximize my time.