Quote from Raystonn:
Your strategy listed as inconsistent is actually highly consistent. An inconsistent strategy would result in a 1000% profit one year and a disastrous wipeout the next. No reasonable trader would use such a risky strategy.
As far as being off the mark, please state where. Nothing I have said so far has been an opinion. It's all fact.
-Raystonn
Discussing stuff in any forum is difficult.
When I said your postings were way off the mark I was not differentiating between opinions and facts. You have expressed both opinions and facts. And, in either case I'm sure you could give references as a consequence of your finding what you state through following the path you have followed to get to the point you are at.
Your thesis: consistency: the measure of success and how you deal with its foundation and development is what I was referring to.
You are way off the mark with regard to each of these three things.
When I express a view, I have reasons for doing so.
Consistency as you describe it and measure it is not a key ingredient to determining success or the degree of anyone's success.
Consistency would not qualify as a determinent of success no matter who devised the way to measure consistency.
Any trader who is concerned with understanding his degree of success would go elsewhere to make that determination. So that is probably OT in this thread.
With regard to consistency of trading success, it is not a constant but varies ever upward as time passes simply because of the broad and pervasive factors guiding it. They fall into two categories: market perfomance and trader performance.
You left out market performance. Markets yield capital to those who trade. The yield varies over time and the variation is greater than what is spoken in ET as the best a trader can expect at an expert level. Let A be the ET maximum performance on record level that is accepted as real by persons like you or posters who have 7000 or so posts. Let B be the variation in yield of the markets. I am saying that B is greater than A.
What you think you are measuring as the best possible is less than the variation in what the market offers over time.
I conclude that what you deem to be success and the details of measuring it , is not in the ball park of the potential a person has for true success. Few persons in ET deal with the actual real levels of success that are possible and are attained by some traders.
I hold the highest possible standard as the standard of success. I feel this standard is well defined, is measurable and has nothing to do with the measures you have posted.
You should use yours, but they are not my cup of tea simply because I am interested in making money and everything subtends this.
I examine what is possible in the context of what the market is offering to traders to take out of the market at any given time.
How does a person determine his consistency? And what is the framework for looking at the array of possible ways to improve consistency? I feel there are 8 categoies and within each category the range of improvement is a doubling of performance.
You measure a trader curve of profits and ignore the variation in the market's yield performance.
I measure the trader profits and how he is utilizing 8 factors to close the gap between the current market yield performance (a major variable).
The trader for stocks sees the current market yield performance through two reduction filters: 1. stocks that qualify to be traded by quality, repeatability and reliability ; and 2. by the rank of the stocks (the unit of rank is: percent gain/day). The standard, then is a curve drawn as a compounding of 240 days in the year (the exponent used) using a daily profit of the average gain of the better stocks whose number is equal to the streams of investment the trader is running. A typical % would be between 4 and 7 %/day. In any interval on the curve (say it is done weekly), there is an impact caused by the market current yield. When long and short trading is considered, the balance of profits per day is affected. Greater %'s make up the short portion of the contribution.
The trader of indexes, intraday, sees the cuurent market yield performance in terms of the daily range and the portions of the day that are determined by the differing potentials as the days goes along. I use four levels of differing potential within the day. The curve of the potential through the year is determined by compounded segments. As a nominal valuation of the curve, I use periodic dumping of profits (weekly) while running 10 to 25 contracts (this depends upon the number of weeks the trader has been running the method) and the base daily profit is 3 times the H-L.
To get to the value of 3 times the H-L, it is necessary to be in the market during all times that the market is offering profits (this is when price is changing). The basis for determining a market orientation is to continually evaluate what the right side of the market is and, further to be in a trade on that side of the market.
This is not a well documented orientation in terms of the historical record of people doing this. It probably is foreign to those who use conventional wisdom as you do. Conventional Wisdom is not going to change soon. Nevertheless, as you say, dealing with the facts of the matter is important and it does require dealing with the yield performance of the markets as the absolute reference for any measures of trader performance.
The conventional wisdom standard for traders is often determined by a relative non functional standard. Your work is an example of this. You are not able to work with any values that deal with things that are going on day after day in markets. Were I you I would not be concerned by my comments. It is way past the time when you were able to consider how things work in markets. You are tied to what you call facts (not opinions) and those facts are a set of facts that relate to a convention that is broadly and widely used.
At 73, I have learned that making money is most closely related to the money that is available to be made at any given time. What is available is the standard which I require myself to use to measure consistency and success.
It looks like you use track records for sometning to draw conclusions about other things. You are not looking at anything related to either consistency nor success.
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