drprotrader,
It seems to me you are combining two things that need to be looked at separately. Those two are the records for guru/chat rooms etc on the one hand and the records for posters here on the other.
It is very reasonable for you to expect performance figures from the first group, and your skepticism is warranted in most cases. Even the published results of some of these vendors will not stand up to scrutiny, as they frequently resort to tricks such as picking the best possible exits, ignoring stops on trades that ultimately go to a profit and reoptimizing trading systems then presenting the backtested results as accurate, even though they used different parameters then.
Most posters here are not willing to publish their records for understandable reasons. Many are not impressive, others regard it as unseemly and others do not want to be bothered by PM's from people looking for advice. There are journals posted that do reflect some traders' results.
Your best course of action is to invest in some backtesting software and data and test various approaches for yourself. I wouldn't take some stranger's word for their results and risk my money on it.
It seems to me you are combining two things that need to be looked at separately. Those two are the records for guru/chat rooms etc on the one hand and the records for posters here on the other.
It is very reasonable for you to expect performance figures from the first group, and your skepticism is warranted in most cases. Even the published results of some of these vendors will not stand up to scrutiny, as they frequently resort to tricks such as picking the best possible exits, ignoring stops on trades that ultimately go to a profit and reoptimizing trading systems then presenting the backtested results as accurate, even though they used different parameters then.
Most posters here are not willing to publish their records for understandable reasons. Many are not impressive, others regard it as unseemly and others do not want to be bothered by PM's from people looking for advice. There are journals posted that do reflect some traders' results.
Your best course of action is to invest in some backtesting software and data and test various approaches for yourself. I wouldn't take some stranger's word for their results and risk my money on it.
.