After his recent redesign of his site, it looks like he's saying that he's beaten the market every year of his career. He also includes stats from 2000-2007. Every year is positive and the arithmetic mean is around 33%. The performance link is buried deep in the middle of this section.
http://www.kirkreport.com/aboutme.html
But he doesn't include info from 2008 and 2009, nor does he say that he's been positive every year of his career. That leads me to believe that he was probably negative in 2008.
Ok. So his numbers appear to be pretty respectable. Not exactly blowing the doors off the market, but respectable enough.
Here is where it gets bizarre:
"My personal trading goal is to produce 1% per day, 5% per week of income in my personal trading portfolio after all expenses, taxes, and fees. I meet that target frequently, but certainly not always."
"Certainly not always" is a litotical understatement . . Compounding 5%/week would lead to astronomical numbers. His results in 2005-7 were under 20% for three years in a row, and there's reason to believe he lost money in 2008. When reality and your goals are so far apart, you might want to rethink the goals. The other alternative is deluding yourself, which Kirk appears to have chosen.
Kirk's goal is daily - not monthly or quarterly- profitability. Yet he's not even close, which means he's setting himself up for daily frustration. Maybe daily profitability is not a realistic or practical goal . . . and is leading to overtrading. Back when he published his results, he would make dozens of tiny trades a week which didn't affect his p&l in the slightest. He would do things like buy on a pullback to a moving average.
At other times he would put 30% of his account in one stock. He made a big trade in Baidu the day it came out for a large gain. Same in TZOO when that stock was getting squeezed. Most of his gains in 2003 (up 85%) came from a JBLU long (from $12 to $30) and USNA, two positions he had researched heavily and where he put big positions on. My point here is that 80% of his gains came from 2% of his trading . . . He would have been much better off sticking to the home runs and ignoring the daily scratches where he had no edge. He seems to be like a lot of traders who want trading to be more like a job with a steady income. In the immortal words of the trading god Lescor, just "grinding it out day after day, putting on the hard hat and heading into the coal mines" . . .
