And you heard it here in "elitetrader" kiddies....
Michael B.
Michael B.
Quote from MartinD:
I bought a set of three of their programs quite a while back... quite expensive and didnt find it to be any use at all to be honest - the projected moving average would appear at 1st glance to be good as it does seem to realiably predict up or down trends when it crosses above or below the actual moving average - but it also crosses above and below during chop - and of course there is no way to distinguish between whether the market is starting to chop or starting a new trend... It looks and works just like a bog standard moving average crossover system with all the same faults and failings.
Just in addition to my previous comments, I should also point out that their claim of "up to" 80% accuracy - this only pertains to their indexing system which is an oscillator that goes from 1 to zero, 1 being if vantagepoint expects the market to make a top in the next two days, zero being a bottom. Sounds good in theory, but in practice proved to be utterly useless for me. In my discussions with other traders, I've come across four other traders who have purchased VP software in the past and all of them like me had ultimately found it useless in their trading.
I am not sure what the *actual* accuracy of this index oscillator is, it would seem rather difficult to corroborate. But some of the other data output, such as predicted high and low for the following day is usually wildly innacurate.
IMO Market Technologies are likely making an awful lot of money selling something that is targetted at every traders 'wish lists' - dont get caught up in all their marketing spiel, this is no holy grail. They offer no performance guarantees or money back. And VP isnt a strategy either, its proprietary charting software and it doesnt give buy or sell signals, thats up to you at your discretion if you base a trading decision on their data output.
If you are interested in their software, my advice would be to get them to fax you the data output for the markets you are interested in, and see if you could realistically use the data in your trading - get them to do this for several days or weeks on the trot if necessary before shelling out several thousand dollars. Do your homework, i wish i had.
There has been much discussion of this system in the tradestationworld forums, and the fact that their supposed "inter market analysis" produces the same results even if data if missing from the extra markets.
One of the programming buffs wrote an easylanguage indicator that plots a projected moving average in an identical fashion to the one the VantagePoint plots - so if you have any idea that this VP software would benefit your trading, try this indicator first, because the one in VantagePoint (presumably the projected MA forecast is the indicator most people are interested in) is basically almost exactly the same.
The Easylanguage is here:
Input: DampFactor(.3), MALength(5) ;
Vars: ProjMA(0), Mid(0), MA(0) ;
Mid = (High + Low)/2 ;
ProjMA = Mid - (DampFactor * (Mid - ProjMA[1])) ;
MA = Average(close, MALength) ;
Plot1 (ProjMA, "ProjMA" ,cyan, default, 1 ) ;
Plot2 (MA, "Avg", yellow, default, 1 ) ;