There is no excuse for not looking at charts when trading commodity futures. Since there is no "portfolio" per se any risk/reward from 4 months, (when it has really been over 2 years), is not relevant, and I don't need to mention if you were to base a good trading history on 4 months and 10 years of unbacktested trading and sporadic live account history that would never stand the test of any audit that there is no actual history of what is being represented here throughout the years on ET.
Any excuses as to whether consideration for the current price and volume isn't whether one or the other is more relevant, but just as quanta the volume contracts and shares traded act in concert with where price eventually moves. No, it is not random in the sense that a dumb microcosm of illegitimately researched studies about overloaded data mines filled with these stupidly ridiculous and simplistic AI machine learned ideas that if we modify a few parameters in the most common technical analysis maths then that should prove capital efficiency?
Give me a break. I'd bet there is nobody in the world that could have written a statistical arbitrage program for futures on the first crack seeing nothing but data, 5 minute bars, and being told that techniques such as quadratic projection do predict profitable opportunities. First try with a model? How'd he do it? Well, besides the fact that he's a genius from Stanford with a math PhD, how about reading the years of elitetrader drivel and sifting through the most important parts, particularly a discussion about linear regression analysis in trading, and how to use it.
About 80 lines... and pretty much all you have to do is tell the quant: "Hey, look: we need a statistical arbitrage program that day trades and is flat by the end of the day. Using genetic algorithms, optimize a strategy that uses linear regression analysis to use as a trading strategy..."
So, which one of us is the genius here?
After adding a standard holy grail of 40 lines of risk management to the code, you get so much money that it's stupid for me to exaggerate. Billions, and fuck if it weren't for PFG there would be 8 figures on my dinner plate right now.
There are systems that only account for beginning and entry prices, but as far as the drawdowns I've seen here they aren't possible to estimate without some idea of the size of the portfolio. It appears to just be trading fixed lot sizes, when as far as I'm concerned, if you go from 1 unit to 15 units in 3 months... if it took a 40% drawdown for a 1,400% return annualized at some stupidly high rate, trading like that isn't really comparable to investing in stocks, but quite similar to options.
There is no disclosure about how a future might appear more attractive to his models, but, either way, I don't want to see anybody lose money. It's just the arrogance of belittling gateways to a better understanding of market fluidity is unnecessary.
On this site, there is a misunderstanding about the process one must go through to become part of the industry, and even if you're still an individual being part of the industry is still true.
In other words, most of the profitable traders are identifiable by what they mention as relevant to their trading...surf appears marginally profitable by the way, and appears to run a news event headline reading engine that if it were automated would be quite impressive but it may just be google alerts for key search terms and subjective timing of placement of commodity futures trading in YM mostly.