Quote from mrmarket:
You guys continue to bash my strategy, please give me your assessment of my last 53 trades, 47 of which have been WINNERS!!
OK. What I did was put your trades in chronological order, best I could deem, so I could get a picture of how you parlay a hypothetical investment of $10,000. Everytime one of these $10,000 investments parlayed through the trades until and if it turned into something you were holding as of 11/10/03, I started a new investment thread of $10,000. It would be best of course to know the actual order of the starting capitals and how they were reinvested. So this is just speculation; it is assuming you reinvested the capital at every turn, and that your sequence of trades is as I depicted.
The results aren't bad, but not great either.
Turns out you average 12.61% per trade, not 15%, in about 113 days (which is 16 weeks) on average, not 4 to 6 weeks.
It also turns out that because you hold losses instead of freeing up the cash to invest in the immediate next 'mr.market pick', you have to come up with more funds from somewhere to add to your capital. I counted at least 14 such injections of monies.
Your average holding period on a loss is 152 days, yet your average holding period for a winner is 104 days.
So remaining unknown is the cost of lost opportunities, the cost of deploying additional funding to new investments and the realization of principal saved by limiting losses. Just to offer an idea of what this means in so far as cost to you, if you're a month into a trade and losing 11%, and 19 months into another trade and losing 23%, and during those terms new opportunities arise, you now need to acquire more capital for the new stocks or forgo them, but if you cut the losses of your worst performers you would free up and could use that capital, and still be able to acquire additional capital for even more opportunities. Maybe there are three holdings currently you'd free up by so doing. Then, instead of holding for 113 days average, your average "hold-to-riches" period would also shorten up a bit, especially given the average holding time you seem to have to go through for losing positions as it takes you longer to have a loss become a winner, and as a consequence of that you may be able to compound the gains faster.