Mr. Williams responds

Quote from Thunderdog:

I made an error:


http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1007920#post1007920

In fact, I have no factual basis on which to conclude that Larry’s own accounts and those that he managed were not segregated. I apologize for this error. In fact, what I should have written is what William Gallacher had written on page 39 of his book, Winner Take All. And I quote:

”…Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) registered with the NFA are obliged to disclose their actual trading records to the NFA when soliciting public funds through promotions. A large part of the NFA’s Complaint had to do with whether Williams ought to segregate the results of his personal trading from the results of the accounts he was handling for others…”

So, it was the results that were not segregated, and not the accounts themselves. My mistake. And it was this misleading advertising that led to the paltry fines that both Robbins Trading Company and Larry Williams paid. Further, this deceptive advertising led the NFA to make the following statement in its Findings and Conclusions as a matter of record:

”There is no question that Mr. Williams's personal trading accounts had a material effect upon his composite trading performance. The record reflects that for the first quarter of 1987, Mr. Williams's composite performance showed a loss of $6,122,281, while at the same time Mr. Williams's personal accounts experienced a gain of $902,599. The Panel finds that the fact Mr. Williams was making significant gains while managed customer accounts were suffering considerable losses would be a material fact which a potential customer would need to know in order to make a fully reasoned decision.”

In the circumstances, I suppose it was the best that the NFA could legally do to warn potential investors of whom they were dealing with.

Even so, and strictly for hypothetical purposes (of course), please bear in mind that the type of unscrupulous conduct I described as a result of the relative time stamp laxity at the time, could still have easily been perpetrated by those with an inclination to do so. In fact, hypothetically speaking, the poor results in the client accounts and the simultaneous outstanding results in his own personal account were not separate phenomena. Hypothetically speaking, they were the essential two sides of the same equation. Hypothetically, of course.
More...

Thank you for posting this. One more of my mythical heroes deconstructed.

Your thread you referenced reminded me of a recent book on gambling scams, whereby they stated that the majority of poker tournaments always seem to have the same group of winners (who are coincidentally part of the contest organizers) rise to the top table, even though the probability of that is close to nill considering the luck portion of poker.
 
Quote from rcanfiel:

You needed to dredge up a 2 year old thread?
More...

Many people get their faith of an afterlife from a 2000 year old book.

If the discussion is still relevant, then it should be revisited.

Williams %R is still on every major trading platform.

If it should not be there, then the elite traders should demonstrate why.

The posts that we make here can be googled, did you know that?
We here at ET are considered the vanguard of traders, believe it or not.

So, if Larry Williams needs to be exposed, or validated, then we are the ones to do it.

I do not use %R, as I understand that it is some sort reverse stochastics, but I do use Larry's risk allocation model when I trade futures, which would have been worth the price of the book.

Best Regards
Oddi
 
I bought his book "Long term Secrets for Short Term trading".

This book contains methods which one can integrate into his or her own style of trading. Larry and Jake Bernstein are friends and reading this book I can see why. They both offer readers useful tools which may not be viable as a stand-alone system but can be integrated into one's own standard operating procedure.
 
Quote from bobbymak880:

I bought his book "Long term Secrets for Short Term trading".

This book contains methods which one can integrate into his or her own style of trading. Larry and Jake Bernstein are friends and reading this book I can see why. They both offer readers useful tools which may not be viable as a stand-alone system but can be integrated into one's own standard operating procedure.
More...

It’s not necessary to read this or any book to find "useful tools" that in and of themselves do not make a trading system.

The steps require a bit of programming but conceptually it's not that difficult:

1) Acquire a Genetic Algorithm engine like PI-Blue or similar.
2) Get 20 or 30 years of price history.
3) Create a concept library of the base elements of technical trading. There are perhaps three dozen: A + B, A - B, A / B, Average ( Ax...Ay), Stdev(), MACD, and so on.
4) Create a rule function to generate rules applied to the concepts: If a >b, if <> max(Ax...Ay)
5) Create a time window function to vary how the concepts and rules are applied in term of the number of bars to use.
6) Set 3), 4) and 5) above to interact randomly to generate many system tools. This will be a combination of concept, a rule and a time window.
7) Turn the GA program loose on the results of these system tools, with the ability to mutate and evolve them.
8) Wait about 3 to 6 weeks, depending on the speed of the PC, while the GA locates the best candidate system tools and evolves them based on consistency and profitability.

In the end you will have dozens of high quality system tools, many never published before.

Refine and combine as you see fit to create an actual trading system.

You'll never need to read a trading guru book again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top