Jim Simons Trashes Trend Following

Clearly you are not aware of the shear brilliance of Jim Simons. His intellect goes far beyond the markets--- its best to learn from him rather than think u can chalkenge him in ANY topic. Peace, Surf

This attitude is often used in religion. Allah says...,God says....
It is never good to worship any human being because then you lose all objectivity. That's how we got IS and fundamentalist Islam, and the same problems centuries ago with the crusaders in Europe and the Middle East.
The fact that Jim Simons is a master in some area of trading or investing does not mean he is a master in everything. He is a superstar in what he does, but not at all in what he does not do. Investing or trading involves a very wide spectrum of things.

What you pretend is that a word famous hart surgeon, is also one of the best in brain surgery, kidneys, stomach... That's completely ridiculous.

Your attitude of "how dare you to question what Jim Simons says?" does not impress me at all. I will always have an own opinion and not take over wisdom from others just because they are famous.

PS: brilliance is no guarantee at all for success. If not thousands of people would be like Jim Simons. And this is clearly not the case, showing that brilliance is not enough.
 
Further more, as much as i like Linda-- we are personal friends--- i disagree with her on this statement and can prove that stocks and index futures are more likely to reverse than trend. This is statistical fact.

surf
How much money made Linda?
How much money made you? From trading, not from selling books or articles. None.
 
Simmons clearly doesn't understand trend following. It has nothing to do with prediction.

LBR's Principle One: A Trend has a higher probability of continuation than of reversal.

No need to predict when you can just play the odds.

This is the most idiotic post on ET ever. I think the poster may want to rephrase.
 
Modern trend following funds (aka CTA funds) diversify risk across multiple sub systems and markets. Filtration methods are used to select the lowest risk combination of trades from a large pool of potential trades.

This helps to minimise the effect of chop. Of course, this can never be eliminated and drawdowns - sometimes very long ones - are part of the game.

The debate about whether trends are more likely to continue or reverse is meaningless. Markets go through periods of both expanding and contracting directional volatility; a good trend following system will manage risk well enough to minimise drawdowns during low volatility periods.
 
Modern trend following funds (aka CTA funds) diversify risk across multiple sub systems and markets. Filtration methods are used to select the lowest risk combination of trades from a large pool of potential trades.

This helps to minimise the effect of chop. Of course, this can never be eliminated and drawdowns - sometimes very long ones - are part of the game.

The debate about whether trends are more likely to continue or reverse is meaningless. Markets go through periods of both expanding and contracting directional volatility; a good trend following system will manage risk well enough to minimise drawdowns during low volatility periods.
we had a big day in 1987, now every day is a big day, some call it volatility, I call it a trend. It's a trend if you are maxed out on the right side.

Diversification has saved my ass many times. As a matter of fact I don't think there is a single vehicle that I trade where I am a net winner, but put them all together and it's kind of like Whack a Mole. Something is always poking their head up out of the hole.

they don't leave you much choice anymore. If you can't make it in HFT, then you better go way to the other side. Most are in the middle. And you know what they say about most.
 
Last edited:
That's the most difficult part of "trend following", limit the losses when wrong.
no kidding, I have a million strategies, but they all have one thing in common, keep your losses short and let your profits ride. It's amazing how easy it is to make money trading if you just do that. But it doesn't seem easy when you are going through it. If you get just one little thing wrong, like improperly defining what a "loss" is or what a "profit" is or miscounting the cost of war and you are constantly sitting on the edge of disaster. And since I very rarely get it exactly right, that's about where I sit all the time.

otherwise, If markets no longer trend, why would anybody ever use a stop?
 
Not to question one of the greats, but trend following does have its place in modern trading. It has changed with HFT and the more complex types of operations that funds and banks are doing, but many (almost all in my view) of the governing principles are still in play. It's just the speed with which they unfold and have an effect on markets and individual stocks. I think timing has become more hard, not trend following.
 

as I have been saying for years, trend following is an ancient tactic that has no relevance in today's markets. No matter what its high priests like Mike Covel say:

08 JS: In the old days -- this is kind of a graph from the old days, commodities or currencies had a tendency to trend. Not necessarily the very light trend you see here, but trending in periods. And if you decided, OK, I'm going to predict today, by the average move in the past 20 days -- maybe that would be a good prediction, and I'd make some money. And in fact, years ago, such a system would work -- not beautifully, but it would work. You'd make money, you'd lose money, you'd make money. But this is a year's worth of days, and you'd make a little money during that period. It's a very vestigial system.

10:55 CA: So you would test a bunch of lengths of trends in time and see whether, for example, a 10-day trend or a 15-day trend was predictive of what happened next.

11:05 JS: Sure, you would try all those things and see what worked best. Trend-following would have been great in the '60s, and it was sort of OK in the '70s. By the '80s, it wasn't.
what a beautiful interview. I just watched the whole thing, all 23 minutes of it. And I pay verizon $50/mo for 5 gigs of wifi and ten bucks for every gig after that, so it costs me a fortune to watch these utube videos, but it was well worth it. Not so much what he said about trends, but just to know there is still somebody out there who has been successful and is still curious and has nothing to sell. And most importantly to me, he peaks your interest in math.

ah, DaVinci thought all the worlds problems could be solved by math...I don't know, but it can't hurt and I know I would be a lot better off if I understood more of it.
 
Back
Top