This reply is in response to:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/newreply.php?s=&action=newreply&threadid=38972
Tim Cho was among the most sought after Trading System creators in the late 1990's and early 2000. The positive was that Tim did not just sell you a canned system but actually taught you how to trade.
I found Tim approachable and smart. The remarkable thing about his system that I thought put him far and away above any other system was that he posted his trades AS THEY OCCURRED IN REAL TIME. What this means is that his system results WERE NOT JUST BACK-TESTING RESULTS but were WALK-FORWARD REAL results. Therefore, people trading his system at that time would really make the money that his results showed - or close to it - minus slippage, commissions and fees, which were low because his system was not a high-transaction system.
The FTC filed a complaint against Tim Cho investments, but frankly, disregard that since Tim's system really was different than other trading systems that just showed back-tested results. The FTC's claims did not match what Tim's system was actually doing.
I attended his week-long training and spoke with him at length and got to understand these things in detail. I was a professional trader at the time.
Later in the early 2000's, Tim's system stopped working.
He kept preaching to follow the system but it was too painful. He crashed and burned.
To recover, he resorted to what everyone else was doing - he created many, many systems and posted their back-tested results on his web site. The top performing ones he put in lights on his web site. The problem with the "back-tested best" approach is that you do not know which of the many systems would perform in the future. Sure enough, as soon as you started trading his better-performing systems, it would go into a drawdown and something else would wake up. I finally threw in the towel on Tim.
As for his latest "M2" system, let the buyer beware due to my own experience (above). I still regard Tim with respect and think that he is among the more honest of system-sellers and think he is trying his best but ultimately, he just wants money and people to buy his systems. Whether they work or not is your problem.
WW