Quote from bespoke:
What you're talking about here is called Profit Factor. This would be a profit factor of 10. You are god-like if you can achieve this through a system. It's like playing blackjack and winning 10 dollars for every 1 dollar you "loose".
PF = net won / net loss
It's not just about the end result. It's about how you got there.
Bespoke,
You said:
"This would be a profit factor of 10. You are god-like if you can achieve this through a system."
Could you expand on what you meant in this relative to the market traded: stocks, options, futures or Forex?
Additionally when you said system, what type of system did you mean?
This makes a big difference in the profit potential.
Some common system types include but are not limited to:
1) Chartist - discretionary. A person looks at a variety of chart patterns and decides after thought of a few seconds to much longer that the market is making a move and then monitors each bar for confirming patterns, end of move patterns and such.
2) Chartist - rule based. A person converts their favorite chart patterns into rules that can be automatically executed freeing them form watching the market constantly.
3) Indicator Trader - discretionary. Similar to 1) above except the screen is full of RSI, MACD, Bollinger Band and similar lines.
4) Indicator Trader - rule based. A person identifies relationship between their favorite technical indicators to create rules for trading that can be automated on a trading platform to avoid having to constantly watch the indicators.
5) Quant trader - rule based. A person with a really great statistics background and something like OpenQuant creates rules based on complex mathematical measures of market action as opposed to chart patterns or the common technical indicators although some aspects of these may be incorporated and transformed by the equations.
6) Predictive trader - model based. A more sophisticated version of the Quant trader but with major differences. The person uses an advanced analytics package to create a predictive model of future market behavior... a forecast of say the difference between the current bar and the future 5 bars out. Example the ratio of close price current bar / close of the predicted close 5 bars into the future..
In this case the person makes no real decisions about what will work best but feeds price history and a variety of mathematical measures or variables into the modeling applications and lets it find what can be used to predict future market action as well as make that prediction.
Methods include neural networks, genetic programming, decision trees, MARS, fuzzy systems, CART, Restricted Boltzmann Machines and others.
I agree with your assessment in terms of 1, 2, 3 and 4 above but not 5 and 6
Jerry