For the statement from your first posting there is no correct answer or every answer is correct. But these answers will be as meaningless as your statement. For the simple reason that the statement misses essentail parts before it can be answered. 10% or 60% success rate does not say anything.
I presume you don't understand what I mean.
Hmm. I tend to disagree because the case is absolutely clear and conclusive.
Imagine this example:
There is a robot (or an assistant) whom you can ask questions, like how the weather will be tomorrow.
You made some notes (statistics) and discovered that this silly thing knows the correct answer
only in 10% of the cases, in all the other 90% of the cases he is dumb wrong.
So, you can turn that consistent stupidness of that robot into your own advantage by simply assuming that the opposite of his answer will be true...
Got the trick now? ;-)
And what does this mean for strategy developers?
If you developed and tested many strategies then you should take into consideration not only
the best performers, but also the worst performers!
You just need to inverse (ie. negate) the worst performers, and suddenly you have turned a worst performer to a top-performer! Maths helps here...
This knowledge is IMO very useful...
IMO another good example is this one:
You make a list of the historical performances of stocks as an indicator for long/short trading.
Then you sort the list. On top are the best performers, and on the bottom of the list are the worst performers.
Top performers means going long the stock.
The worst performers can as well be useful for you: one should go short with these stocks as they are the best for this direction...
Just a simplified example...