All very good points, you will not find true profitable numbers anywhere (measured against benchmark for Alpha) because it's below 1%. The levels are to do with the money flow and net worth/aum, a person or fund and often institution can only target one level, yes contextual understanding always outranks backtesting because the markets usually rhyme but rarely repeat.
The hedge fund architecture was built over a decade timeframe by some of the best architects in the world who consulted at board level for the largest banks, oil, gas and insurance multi-nationals, it is not possible to build that yourself without C-Suite knowledge, the closest you can ever get is eSignal GET (Elliott Wave) but even then it's only an 80% solution and you need 95% as a minimum these days, I used the system before eSignal bought them out, it was excellent because it was simple and focused, not so much via their integrated platform.
The only option for everyone is to perfect and protect one level (deviation) of returns and limit the losses the rest of the time for a given timeframe set, 1hr/4hr/1dy are usually good starting points, everyone has a solution that works for them with only a fractional amount transferable to someone else, working for a bank and you are the fraction in the ecosystem, the difference is having access to the fintech, to the knowledge base, to the money management, for some it works, for others it doesn't, usually they switch to another bank to maintain access unless they have deep connections to set up their own fund.
I’m kind of between situations the past months, I spent over a year setting up and incubating a hedge fund for someone but even though the wealth managers told them what to do they kept getting corona, and ignoring the consultants requirement to scale back their expectations from 100% to 50% for the fund to limit over trading and limit investor demands, it was their platform after all .
Now I'm in the slow process of fund managing myself which takes a year and more, but am struggling how intensely uninteresting 15-20%pa is as it's close to income, so the wealth managers and architects came up with a pure Alpha approach over benchmark this year to generate capital, however still need to exclude most people via KYC simply because low levels of initial capital (under $10,000s) means the fee on Alpha over benchmark needs to be 50% and above.
The markets are designed to make sure you do not succeed, you can generate income via a single deviation level where everyone calls 1-2% per month over zero benchmark success except it's not transferable to the next person, but it seems like that's not what you are looking for, you want to generate capital (the 2x 5x 10x). That needs you to be able to see the money flow in the markets and then 'tag' the moves layering in to them, we use a database which exchanges themselves use to process the data for the algos in realtime to show the flows before (based on probability) and as they happen on all levels, everyone else will see them at 85% to 100% completion on a single level, that's the difference between capital and income.
Here's a little fact of life, if you try and make it better you will invariably make it worse which is where debt comes in because that's the ultimate goal of taking on debt, it's difficult to service with income and ultimately needs capital, everything you will come across in the markets is to create income (single level visible at 85% to 100% of move completion), I ran family offices for people creating capital using the architecture which dropped the timeline down to months, even with access to architecture and algos it would take you 2yrs to learn how to create capital, on your own it would be up to 10yrs because you have to design and build it yourself (there is nothing publicly nor privately available to help you), income is great to survive, but if you want to live you need capital!
