Reality is this: He grossly underperformed the market and cost himself an enormous amount of time and money to do so. If pointing out that his strategy performed exponentially worse than blindly buying the high and selling the low has no merit then I will gladly choose to be unmeritorious. Also bear in mind that every fund that has ever existed has been compared to a benchmark, so while you can feel free to hold on to the opinion that it doesn't matter, please know that you are wrong.
My opinion is that if your trading does not show positive alpha, then you have failed and need to work to improve. I also would like to say that I hope he does improve, and wish him the best.
The benchmark is his trading plan...good or bad. Thus, he can not make the benchmark something he's not using. If you know the specifics of his trading plan, hindsight analysis of someone's performance will have merit because you will then know what the
real benchmark is for factual comparison. This is logical.
Therefore, you're correct, you have just only made an
opinion that you yourself has implied to it as
unmeritorius in comparison to my prior reply considering you have
not provided any comparison facts about blindly
buying the high and selling low. Thus, without facts by you about his trading plan, its just an opinion by you and nothing more.
Simply, I am correct in stating to make a proper benchmark comparison, one must at least know what the benchmark (the facts via understanding the details) that involves that particular trading plan that's being used. I will now assume you do
not know the specific details of his trading plan. Thus, you do
not know if he's performing better than the trading plan or under-performing the trading plan. Yet, to cut you some slack, I will assume the thread OP is a new trader or new to this trading plan. Therefore, its not reality to expect someone to apply the trading plan as designed until he gets more experience in applying the trading plan. In other words, he will make more mistakes in the beginning in comparison to later...that's reality of trading and reality of learning something new.
I wish you the best in your trading too...simulator or real-money.
P.S. If you know and understand the specifics of his trading plan and after he's gained more experience in applying the trading plan, we wouldn't be having this discussion. That's a fact.