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Of course. He talks out of both sides of his mouth, so he is always right on something.

Actually, the more conservative states TEND to have the highest levels of poverty, divorce, high school dropouts, and children born out of wedlock. There are exceptions, like Texas. Compare Mississippi to Minnesota, Alabama to Rhode Island, Maryland to South Carolina. Compare the Deep South...

Ironically, this is contradicted by the very quotation that began this thread on the college education of liberal/conservative states (see page one) To be able to get a college degree, one must first be able to as you say "stay in school." And yet you say that liberals "instead took" another...

I'll ignore your insults and once again ask: Have you seen the FUTURE'S TRUTH study covering over fifteen years? They turn your unsupported hypothesis about stops to dust. The tests FT did were not curve fitted, nor did they contain a large number of independent variables. They prove...

Marketsurfer and/or Reckoner (the same person?): Have you ever seen Futures Truth's study of buying via volatility stops and selling with a variety of stops? The study covers 1983 to 1999 and includes over twenty futures markets. The study shows that stops historically have proven effective.

I chose 'synic' because I chose 'smiling' first. I know the difference. SmilingSynic to me sounded better than SmilingSkeptic. As if this is worth your time or mine.

Define "traditional wisdom." You keep avoiding the questions/arguments I offer, instead choosing to throw out condescending labels. If your arguments were so strong, you would not have to resort to cheap tricks. SmilingSynic=happy skeptic. I value rigor, yet try to avoid taking...

Surfer sets up straw man. Where did I say FIXED stops?

Whom exactly am I "parroting"? Ad hom--weak argumentation.

There are different kinds of stops: dynamic, fixed, time. Fixed stops are among the least effective stops I have seen through testing. Volatility based stops, tested historically, have tested better. Still, that does not change my still unrefuted contention: stops sometimes work...

Once again, you are making claims that you have not supported with evidence. Now how would YOU know how I test? You state that "I ain't [sic] testing properly," but how do you KNOW that? Are you saying that using stops ALWAYS makes a system less effective? If you are, then that is...

Where is the evidence for this claim? Using stop losses sometimes is a "demonstrably losing method," but other times it is not. There is no universal truth here. It DEPENDS. It depends on where one puts the stop loss. It depends on how quickly or slowly the market is moving. It...

ACTIVE TRADER interviewed him a month or two ago. Zanger also shorts big caps when earnings momentum wanes. He blew up a few times before he made it big, and yet kept coming back. He deserves every bit of success he enjoys now. He truly is an inspiration.

The crash did not just happen out of the blue. There was a period of sharply declining prices the previous week. A good trend follower would have been out long before Monday.

Your reasoning is an example of the informal fallacy known as false dilemma. You apparently think that either statistics are extremely valuable or of little to no value, that there is not some in-between. I think that statistics can be used to understand the past behavior of markets. In...

There is no contradiction. I think the Sharpe ratio is a useful tool in measuring the PAST volatility of a trader's performance. But that is it. There is no "objective" way to predict the future with statistics. All statistics do is help us understand the past. Those seeking...

Sigh. If he loses most or all of what he earned over those 29 months, trading-wise, he is a loser. I have never been in a car accident, but some joker on his cellphone may later tonight veer off the side of the highway and smack into my Honda. If that happens (doubtful), then my 20...

As a followup, Be careful about those who claim that "statistics" show that trading strategies, since they were successful in the past, will be successful in the future. It would be wonderful if we could trade last March's corn, or the S&P futures contract from 1993, but those contracts...

In the end, any measure of a trader's past is going to be limited by the fact that (1) the future cannot be predicted; and (2) there is no guarantee that past returns will be reflective of future returns. That said, if the returns of a trader--over the LONG haul-- are highly volatile, that...

Short term trading with stops, imo, would be hard to do on NG. There are some huge gaps on NG, and you would have to take major slippage into account if you were backtesting some breakout strategy. In the long term, though, NG has tended to trend well. Not that it will in the future, but it...