Human Traders Are Trouncing the Machines

[d08]

1. used as an excuse for the last 100 years
2. no master of the Universe has 5 losers in a row

200% correct. 5 losses in a row is proof of a horrible trading plan, or a trader who is, in reality, a loser rather then a trader.

1. I don't care if you think that's an excuse. It's the reality. Do you see Rentech giving away strategies? No, you don't. Besides, this isn't the 90s, we're not making "calls" nowadays.

2. Tell that to all the trend following funds who often have 5 in a row with often a win rate of less than 35%. My results are okay and having 5 losers in a row is no big deal as long as they are within the norms, as they typically are.

Note that it's quite funny when "scheiz" who supposedly is good in math says "200% correct". I bet 3500% of his trades are winners.

i have seen strategies that could not be programmed by +25 years experienced ICT wizards. the wizards were even not able to summarize what exactly should be programmed in an understandable way to start from. theoretically everything can be programmed. however theory and reality are sometimes in conflict, and reality always wins.

so "pretty easy" is at least an understatement.

Then those are not strategies but just a lot of guesswork and trades are taken depending how the trader is feeling that day. Excellent programmers can and have programmed everything by now. You just encountered poor programmers or perhaps ones that have no experience in finance.
You're saying the trader cannot explain his strategy, he's either deliberately obfuscating what he's doing in fear of losing his work or he doesn't have a real strategy.

 

[schweiz]

Tell that to all the trend following funds who often have 5 in a row with often a win rate of less than 35%. My results are okay and having 5 losers in a row is no big deal as long as they are within the norms, as they typically are.

the first step in making a trade is to find a good entry and not get stopped out. if you have 5 or more consecutive losing entries even with a margin till the stop, it is clear that you are gambling and have no clue about trading. or is needing a lot of attempts a proof of skill? a good trader needs three things: a good entry, a good stop, and a good exit.

You just encountered poor programmers or perhaps ones that have no experience in finance.

when working for +25 years for big multinationals as a consultant is not exactly the profile that you described above.

You're saying the trader cannot explain his strategy, he's either deliberately obfuscating what he's doing in fear of losing his work or he doesn't have a real strategy.

I will not respond extensively on this stupid remark as it would lead to numbers and performance. and I saw already what happens then on ET. don't want to waste my time on that. the trader was trading only his own accounts, no fear to lose his job as he has no job. following your magical conclusions he should obfuscate it so that he could not understand himself what he is doing? LOL.

 

[d08]

the first step in making a trade is to find a good entry and not get stopped out. if you have 5 or more consecutive losing entries even with a margin till the stop, it is clear that you are gambling and have no clue about trading. or is needing a lot of attempts a proof of skill? a good trader needs three things: a good entry, a good stop, and a good exit.

You assume everyone is like yourself. I don't really care about one trade, I only focus on stats over thousands of trades.
If I'm gambling then my long-term (10+ years now) results have been amazing and I must be the luckiest man that has ever lived.

Plenty of guys like yourself on ET - "I discovered one method that works and that's the only way to trade, damn it! everything else is useless!". It's really getting old, everything doesn't revolve around you and your method and do you honestly think HFT or even very short term traders always use stops?

A good trader needs only 2 things: a great return and low risk.

when working for +25 years for big multinationals as a consultant is not exactly the profile that you described above.

I will not respond extensively on this stupid remark as it would lead to numbers and performance. and I saw already what happens then on ET. don't want to waste my time on that. the trader was trading only his own accounts, no fear to lose his job as he has no job. following your magical conclusions he should obfuscate it so that he could not understand himself what he is doing? LOL.

I can't imagine what you were consulted on being so limited in your analytical ability. Then again maybe back in the day you were on top of things.

Many smarter people than myself have said that if you cannot explain your trading plan in one sentence then it's too complicated (paraphrasing).
If someone is rambling on and can't define anything then that means they just follow intuition and there is no actual plan.

 

[Grantx]

Excellent programmers can and have programmed everything by now.

There is this saying that comes to mind which applies elegantly to your love for programmers:
In times of change, learners will inherit everything while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

 

[sle]

Interesting how the whole discussion devolved into a shouting match. The reality is, as always, neither black nor white.
First of all, the distinction is very blurry. There is a whole continuum of investment styles, from latency arb where discretion comes on at the stage of instrument selection to global macro traders that make all decisions. You can have a fully systematic strategy that requires manual execution and you can have a discretionary strategy relying on algorithms for accumulating risk.
To be continued...

 

[schweiz]

Interesting how the whole discussion devolved into a shouting match. The reality is, as always, neither black nor white.
First of all, the distinction is very blurry. There is a whole continuum of investment styles, from latency arb where discretion comes on at the stage of instrument selection to global macro traders that make all decisions. You can have a fully systematic strategy that requires manual execution and you can have a discretionary strategy relying on algorithms for accumulating risk.
To be continued...

i start to understand why many posters apparently left ET. will not waste any time on this anymore.
it looks like it that the successful ones leave and the frustrated stay. will test now the ignore button and will see what it will give.

 

[digitalnomad]

ET member Simples quoted this in an older thread in the software forum. It really is the proper line of thinking when coding trading strategies.

“Good programmers code fewer flaws. Great programmers code as few lines as possible. Elite programmers strive to avoid programming entirely.”

 

[d08]

ET member Simples quoted this in an older thread in the software forum. It really is the proper line of thinking when coding trading strategies.

“Good programmers code fewer flaws. Great programmers code as few lines as possible. Elite programmers strive to avoid programming entirely.”

I program and I'd say he's completely wrong. Coding fewer lines doesn't imply the code is better because when you revisit later, it might be too short to comprehend. If you do everything once and never look at it again then yes, fewer lines might be better. You can use very interesting and clever functions to get the same thing done in fewer bytes but can you decipher that piece of code years later? Commenting helps but defeats the purpose.
On top of that, fewer lines of code doesn't mean faster execution as some might think, this is important.
We have plenty of memory to run the code in and clarity trumps the amount of lines every time. Not sure I follow the logic on the elite programmers part, elaborate?

 

[Dragonfly84]

A machine is a dumb thing and for a long time we will be smarter than they. When Deep Blue wins Kasparov, or a calculator does a sum much more faster than a human, what is actually happening is a human with a machine being smarter than a human.
A day will come when machines will be more intelligent than the humam brain, but before that machines need to have more computational power than a brain of a bee - what now they don't have.
(I am not native speaker. Sorry for my english).

 

[sss12]

I program and I'd say he's completely wrong. Coding fewer lines doesn't imply the code is better because when you revisit later, it might be too short to comprehend. If you do everything once and never look at it again then yes, fewer lines might be better. You can use very interesting and clever functions to get the same thing done in fewer bytes but can you decipher that piece of code years later? Commenting helps but defeats the purpose.
On top of that, fewer lines of code doesn't mean faster execution as some might think, this is important.
We have plenty of memory to run the code in and clarity trumps the amount of lines every time. Not sure I follow the logic on the elite programmers part, elaborate?

@d08 do you(or anyone else) care to comment on my question in post #36 ? Thanks