Original Turtle Trading Rules - System 1 Entry

Arbu

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Does anyone actually understand the rules in Way of the Turtle for ignoring breakouts (p. 259)? They are:

"System 1 Entry - Turtles entered positions when the price exceeded bv a single tick the high or low of the preceding 20 days. If the price exceeded the 20-dav high. then the Turtles would, buy one Unit to initiate a long position in the corresponding commodity. If the price dropped, one tick below the low of the List 20-days, the Turtles would sell one Unit to initiate a short position.
System 1 breakout entry signals would be ignored if the last breakout would have
resulted in a winning trade. NOTE. For the purposes of this test: the last breakout was considered the last breakout in the particular commodity irrespective of whether or not that particular breakout was actually taken, or was skipped because of this rule. This breakout would be considered a Losing breakout if the price subsequent to die date of the breakout moved 2X against the position before a profitable 10-day exit occurred
The direction of the last breakout was irrelevant to this rule. Thus, a losing long breakout or a losing short breakout would enable the subsequent new breakout to be taken as a valid entry, regardless of its direction (long or short).
However., in die event that a System 1 entry breakout was skipped because the previous trade had been a winner, an entry would be made at the 55-day breakout to avoid missing ma]or moves. This 55-day breakout was considered the Failsafe Breakout point"

Unfortunately Curtis Faith doesn't really explain the purpose of ignoring breakouts so that makes it harder to work exactly what he means. My guess is that the idea is to ensure you only trade at the start of a trend, not once it is well-established.

Firstly if you get a 20 day high a previous 20 day high may have occurred the day before. How does the 10-day exit apply to that? You don't know if that trade will be possible in 9 days.

My best guess is to ignore the provision to ignore breakouts if they were less than ten days ago and that what he means is the following:

If you have a new 20 day high look for the last 20 day high or low which fell more than ten days ago. Either it was a high or a low:

(a) A high. If the price fell at some point after that high by 2N, then that was a losing trade and it's OK to trade on this new high. If it didn't fall by as much as 2N then don't trade. Really the high that you have now is just a continuation of the trend that was happening then and you're too late to get onto it. Presumably if there was a new high less than 10 days ago then it's considered to be OK to get onto the trade because it's new enough. After all you can't expect someone to get onto the trend the instant there's a new high so there has to be some time period allowed while the trend is considered to be new trend.

(b) A low. If a new low occurred and now a new high has occurred that's a pretty weak argument for there being a new uptrend commencing - you've got conflicting signals. Only trade if the price came up significantly (at least 2N) so that it's clear there was no real downtrend.

Anyone agree with me or have any better understanding?
 
OK, I don't think anyone really understands this, perhaps not even the author. If he understood it well he would have explained it better.

This guy seems to have trouble with it too http://www.tradingblox.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6553. He says that he would have got into the big price fall by using the System 2 (55 day) entry. My reading of the rules would have got you in at the same point as he gets in because the last hi/low more than ten days before (the second highest point) was followed by a fairly big fall in prices so would have been a loser.

I guess the conclusion is that the actual rules don't matter that much, as long as there's some sense behind them. Just having something consistent to get you in and out is what you need.
 
I think what he means is that you need to wait for the "previous" trade to be closed before entering a new one.

For example, a trend system might currently be long of gold. Now, if today you start to trade the same system on gold, you have to wait for the existing trade to end before looking to go long - does that make sense?
 
I've coded these rules up and whilst there are certainly occasions when the pyramid aspect is extremely effective, it can also lead to monster drawdowns. Faith alludes to this in the book when he describes how nine months profits were immediately erased in the wake of the '87 stock market crash.
 
the meaning of the rule is NOT to ignore breakouts but to ignore trades. this means that if you have a 20d breakout and then another one it's still the same trade.

so you wait until the pseudo-trade is finished as a loser only then you can take a real trade. OR, the 55d kicks in.

and mean reversion - faith never used the real rules. he used a set of extremely more dangerous rules. that is pyramiding after 0.5Ns instead of pyramiding every 1N. the difference is that he multiplied the risk he took every trade, while other turtles kept the risk levels bearable.

if you pyramid every 1N and adjust your risk by 1N than you just prolonging the time to break-even. but you never risk more than the percentage of the portfolio you intended to.

I've coded these as well, and they work pretty good.
 
Who is the final word on what the Turtles did or didn't do? In Faith's book, he claims he was the only Turtle that stuck to the rules.. is this not the case? Did anyone stick to the rules??
 
Who is the final word on what the Turtles did or didn't do? In Faith's book, he claims he was the only Turtle that stuck to the rules.. is this not the case? Did anyone stick to the rules??

Faith was referring to the initial few months only.

I think the turtles were also encouraged (after they gained some experience) to improve the rules in ways they thought fit.

The rules were the basic framework, and they could trade them as is.

But as we all know every trader is unique, and if i gave you my mechanical system you would probably tweak it, and if it is robust it could handle a reasonable amount of tweaking without breaking.

Im sure as long as they didnt deviate too far from the orginal rules they would have been allowed to do so, obviously any tweaks would have had to been approved by Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhartd.
 
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i guess you ignore the 2nd BO if the 1st was successful as it would imply you've already missed the boat.

I guess this method needs you to be in a move early where rewards will obviously be greater, especially if the system also gives high draw downs and an average win rate.

As for the point re trading if todays high is a new 20 day high, as was yesterdays high, then again, this means youre a day late. There is an indicator (cant remember the name) that plots bands showing last 20 (or x days) highs lows
 
i guess you ignore the 2nd BO if the 1st was successful as it would imply you've already missed the boat.

I guess this method needs you to be in a move early where rewards will obviously be greater, especially if the system also gives high draw downs and an average win rate.

As for the point re trading if todays high is a new 20 day high, as was yesterdays high, then again, this means youre a day late. There is an indicator (cant remember the name) that plots bands showing last 20 (or x days) highs lows

no...that is wrong.
there is a failsafe of the 55d BO. so whats you're saying is not with accordance to the rules...
the reason is that the shorter system has way more whipsaws, so they thought the odds of a winner improves after a loser (which is of course not the case).
 
Who is the final word on what the Turtles did or didn't do? In Faith's book, he claims he was the only Turtle that stuck to the rules.. is this not the case? Did anyone stick to the rules??

mike covel did a thorough research on that one.
and while we could agree about him being a vendor, i don't think there's a reason for him to tweak the results of the research.
many of the turtles backed his book. most of them say that faith traded a slightly different and more dangerous set of rules.

others traded a much safer and coherent set of rules, and after a couple of years they even notched the risk factor even lower.
 
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