Quote from Brandonf:
Ok let me qualify what I said. I always reserve the right to be wrong and I don't know everything about anything.
I have no personal experience with mechanical trading systems. I'm not an engineering type, and so it just never interested me. I do have several friends who are though, some of them are very successful. By what I have seen most mechanical systems have a limited shelf life. That's not a bad thing, if something makes you a million dollars in the four months that it works that's great, and it gives you a lot of capital to hire engineers and programmers to find the next system that will do the same thing over the next 5 or six months. So, please understand that I'm not knocking mechanical trading as a method of making money, actually the most profitable people I know all trade mechanically...so that's not the issue. The issue to me is that most people do not understand the limited shelf life that a system has..and the final issue is this: Most of the people who are looking for "Done for you" type of "red light/Green light" trading sytems are not going to make it, even if they do find a system that works. Aberations is an example of a commerically available system that actually does make money...but I know very few people who have been able to actually stick with it through the drawdowns it has. Human nature being such as it is, since they don't know the logic behind the system, when it has a drawdown they assume its "broken" now and stop using it. Of course this might be the case, but it also might not be..but the only way you know this is if you are the one who created the system.
Anyway I did not word my reply well. If you have created a system that has produced profits for several years without having to be changed you are doing a great job. It's probably not impossible, but I don't know of anyone that has done it, or if they have they just have not told me.