Can you design a horribly losing system?

Alternately buy and sell anything you can with wide spreads, as many times as possible in as short a time as possible. Bonus points for consistently going against the 1-4 hour trend and never using a stop loss.
 
Designing a consistently losing strategy is as "difficult" as designing a consistently winning strategy. I tried it too. The only way to make consistent losses is with frequent trades and thus transaction costs.

Think about this though: if you can make a strategy that trades rarely and is short-only, then you can be always long except when it is telling you to go short. Just that, doing that makes the problem no less difficult, but it makes it different. Noise, noise, noise...
 
Quote from Nab:

Silly question. This is identical to finding a consistently winning system (as long as the loses do not mainly come from slippage/commissions).
Agreed.



But here is a simple long-term loosing system (at least not cheating with commision or slippage):

Sell short the basket of all Dow constituents.
 
An ET poster named "Marketsurfer" has come up with a pretty bad losing system - something called "The Pile Driver!".

Just kidding, Surfy! :D
 
Interesting idea but doubt its possible.

IMO the traders who consistently lose dont have a system or method

or if they do it is very loosely constructed, and they dont always follow it

they dont lose because they are following the rules of a losing system

they lose because they make a lot of spur of the moment emotional decisions... that are more often than not wrong.

often times they are trading on knee jerk reactions and having a panic any time price goes against them

that stuff is probably mostly random and cant be quantified in any way, so cant be exploited.
 
For my relatively short test period, I had negative expectancy when using a 240 WMA and 21 HMA and taking trades when both slopes lined up.

In order to have positive expectancy (for my relatively short test period) I had to add in another price action factor.

The negative expectancy was due to being chopped out. Obviously there are going to be some massive wins in such a system. I'll see if I can find my notes.

This is an interesting thread. I don't know how one would develop a losing indicator-based system. 1a2b3cppp I know in your journal threads you treat price as if it were random. In such a case it would be quite hard to develop a losing (or winning) system because no matter what you do, price may behave in a way that makes you money. It would be like designing a losing system for betting on coin flips. No matter what you do you'll probably end up around a 50% win rate.
 
Quote from 1a2b3cppp:

I've been trying all night.

A good starting place and good thought exercise is to start with a few of your favorite popular indicators and reverse the signals.

You'll find you still do about the same.

Take something like stochastics that is supposed to tell you when the market is "overbought" or "oversold" and you're supposed to buy or sell there. If you reverse them (for example, sell when the indicator says it's oversold), you'll find that you end up making money during big trends, and losing money otherwise, which is basically the opposite of what happens when you follow that indicator's normal signals.

Neither is profitable, though.

Try to design a consistently losing system.



Define 'horribly'
 
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