Somebody showed up in a chatroom and spoke of Camarilla today, and that reminded me of a basic, fundamental problem I have with anybody who tries to sell a system to trade ES. Essentially, the problem is that if the system is any good, the author can make piles of dough without going through the various hassles of selling it, and watching the system break down as the market learns it's inefficiency.
So, let's see how this works. ES is liquid enough that one could surely trade 100 contracts (during normal hours) without noticeable effect on the market. One could probably trade much more than that, but let's take 100 as our example. Let's say Bill and Ted's (most excellent) Super System (BTSS) generates an average of 2 measly ES points per week, after commissions but before taxes, data fees, Elite Trader memberships
D ) and all that other stuff.
That's $10,000.00 a week! And, if you check out these systems, it's cakewalk (supposedly) to do - easy enough to write a program to do it for you. Then, all you do is play Doom III on your gaming computer while keeping an eye on your trading system to make sure it's running. You're raking in nearly half a million a year, doing very little.
A little down the road, you have a nice bank account. But, you'd like to make even more money. "Give ol' Bill a run for his money," you think. You have a couple choices (assuming you don't want to develop a brand new system) - trade bigger/more positions (either in ES or other contracts, or even other stocks), or sell your information.
But WTF would you sell the info for significantly less than you could make on it? Take Camarilla for example, imagine that you are the dude who created this awesome system. Would you rather sell the calls from it for peanuts to people who jump in and reduce the maximum amount you can trade? Or would you rather scale up to absorb as much of the market inefficiency as you can?
Let's go back to our friends at BTSS. 2 points a day, starting at say 25 contracts. Let's assume they have a max draw down of 2 points and a margin requirement of 1.9k, so that's 50k in their trading account. After 48 weeks, they are trading 243 contracts and have nearly half a million in their account. They are also pulling in over a million/year - they are awash in cash. It's wwwaay more profitable for them to diverge into whatever other investment vehicles their system works on, instead of selling it to you.
On the other hand, if a system doesn't really work, and the creator has to earn another stake to trade - well why not sell the system?
EDIT: Before anybody gets upset, I'm not talking about any discretionary systems, or indicators or any of that. I'm strictly referring to systems that say "When this happens do this, and when this other thing happens do that."
So, let's see how this works. ES is liquid enough that one could surely trade 100 contracts (during normal hours) without noticeable effect on the market. One could probably trade much more than that, but let's take 100 as our example. Let's say Bill and Ted's (most excellent) Super System (BTSS) generates an average of 2 measly ES points per week, after commissions but before taxes, data fees, Elite Trader memberships
D ) and all that other stuff.That's $10,000.00 a week! And, if you check out these systems, it's cakewalk (supposedly) to do - easy enough to write a program to do it for you. Then, all you do is play Doom III on your gaming computer while keeping an eye on your trading system to make sure it's running. You're raking in nearly half a million a year, doing very little.
A little down the road, you have a nice bank account. But, you'd like to make even more money. "Give ol' Bill a run for his money," you think. You have a couple choices (assuming you don't want to develop a brand new system) - trade bigger/more positions (either in ES or other contracts, or even other stocks), or sell your information.
But WTF would you sell the info for significantly less than you could make on it? Take Camarilla for example, imagine that you are the dude who created this awesome system. Would you rather sell the calls from it for peanuts to people who jump in and reduce the maximum amount you can trade? Or would you rather scale up to absorb as much of the market inefficiency as you can?
Let's go back to our friends at BTSS. 2 points a day, starting at say 25 contracts. Let's assume they have a max draw down of 2 points and a margin requirement of 1.9k, so that's 50k in their trading account. After 48 weeks, they are trading 243 contracts and have nearly half a million in their account. They are also pulling in over a million/year - they are awash in cash. It's wwwaay more profitable for them to diverge into whatever other investment vehicles their system works on, instead of selling it to you.
On the other hand, if a system doesn't really work, and the creator has to earn another stake to trade - well why not sell the system?
EDIT: Before anybody gets upset, I'm not talking about any discretionary systems, or indicators or any of that. I'm strictly referring to systems that say "When this happens do this, and when this other thing happens do that."
. Your reasoning is completely wrong : one will never pyramid like you would be doing because of scalability limitation.