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Well, since I am in favor of funding the government primarily through user fees and tariffs, just about any tax cut works for me. I do agree that some tax cuts don't have anything to do with growth per se, but would remove distortions from the economy which impact real activity.

If "drivel" is too big a word for you to use correctly, you might not be in any position to determine what qualifies as being such. The reason Romer's paper is actually more credible, among other reasons, is that it empirically refutes what appears to be her nominal political affiliation...

Is that because you think winning percentage fluctuates more than payoff ratio? Payoff ratio is in that range, although if you take the strictest definition of "optimizing" it's lower. The issue is that there are a few easily identifiable objective factors which signal to me that the...

Well, I did say that tax cuts could be used for consumption OR investment. I have no problem with a cut broad enough to spur both more or less immediately. The biggest problem with tax cuts is that they can increase short-term deficits because most government spending is in fixed costs and...

I remember reading an article where Romer had come quite close to repudiating her own findings. Ah, the wonders of politics when it comes to intellectual integrity. The primary reason tax cuts actually help economies come out of recessions, from what I've read, is timing. Tax cuts don't...

Yes, while maximum adverse excursions and volatility are important, my question was only about the profit factor, so, as you say, closed trades are the important thing.

I took him to be talking about swings within a trade and how they might impact your ability to lever up if the trade lasted a while. I might have confidence that the trade will ultimately swing in my favor (leading to a positive profit factor), but I might get a margin call in the meantime...

And did the profit factors stay approximately similar if/when you went live? I have considered adding the NQ to my trading, but the way my system works, I doubt that the NQ would give me any signals above and beyond what the ES gives me. One of these days, I will start paper-trading the NQ to...

That's a fair point, but the system in question has a holding period of less than 2 sessions and I can typically reduce risk to a few ES points within an hour. A typical trade is entered in the morning and exited before midnight ET. But, because I sometimes do hold beyond the close of the day...

I would be the last person to say trading isn't tough. But, it's kind of a weird discipline in that it is tough/practically impossible up until the moment you know what you are doing. Then, it merely becomes difficult. Anyway, the system in question is definitely optimized. One half of the...

Was curious at what kinds of very high (above 6, let's say) profit factors people have found backtesting systems of over 100 trades that actually turned out not to work in real-time. I'm thinking that once a system gets over a certain number of trades, it becomes increasingly difficult to...

Right, and my scenario could also be a week or any finite length of time. There are people who have been insisting that the US market is a short since March of 2009. Whether they are actual traders (or still traders) is a different story. They have lots of forecasts to back them up, yet here...

Not only does such a formula exist, I would bet a million of them exist. Which one is correct, that's the question. The second question is, does it matter which one is correct or can you trade without it. Consider this scenario: what if your formula said that a certain stock would go...

I know that most things are possible when it comes to order automation, but I'm curious about this specific scenario. Say I want to go long if a certain price gets hit coming off a bottom, so I set a stop limit order. Is there a way that I could have a list of limit orders waiting so that once...

The rules academics test always seem laughably naive, so it's hard to say if TA has ever really gotten a good debunking.

I can see how any tweaking could turn into curve-fitting. That's one reason why I'm gathering more data and sample trades. I realize that it could be the case that I just happen to be in a "lucky" period for these new markets for values of the parameters outside of the optimal range I've...

That makes a lot of sense to me.

Well, I want to believe that, too, but I can't help but wonder if there are crucial differences between equity indices, currencies and commodities that make this statement false. I am already seeing the potential for a relatively minor difference in crude's dynamics, which would make one of...

I guess that FoF preference developed post-Madoff, eh? :) Seriously, I do see your point and clearly most of the financial world is oriented around the fact that diversification is beneficial in numerous ways. I just think that if you are a retail trader and you've got something that's...

My data provider CQG says the last minute of Euro (6E) trading didn't go below 1.2778, but the Euro close is being reported as 1.2739. What gives? I have only been following the Euro closely for a few months, so perhaps this is common on a Friday close, but it is kind of surprising to me.