funny! i see you never read mandelbrot completely. another evidence of the true believer only reading the scriptures that match beliefs and ignoring the ones that do not.
Why do I see "Trends" in Randomly Generated Data?
- Thread starter Rahula
- Start date
funny! i see you never read mandelbrot completely. another evidence of the true believer only reading the scriptures that match beliefs and ignoring the ones that do not.
http://www.amazon.com/Mis-behavior-Markets-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0465043550
http://www.amazon.com/Fractals-Scaling-Finance-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0387983635/ref=pd_sim_b_title_1
I do not advocate blindly following the writings of anyone, just to let you know. I do advocate taking the information they provide and formulating an environment where you personally can verify and confirm either the usefullness or uselessness of that information. If you personally can not find value in ANY informtion, it is worthless to YOU and that is all that counts in the end.
Some of the structural information Mandelbrot talks about is quite useful in creating trading charts. Other information he discusses is marginal. You won't know until you apply it or research it.
Quote from marketsurfer:
funny! i see you never read mandelbrot completely. another evidence of the true believer only reading the scriptures that match beliefs and ignoring the ones that do not.
Read my response to Corey.
Someone like yourself that does blindly follow what he reads instead of doing your own research and testing can't fathom what can be gained by applying a variety of problem solving techniques.
These aren't actions of a "blind true believer" that is the action of someone that believes absolutely NOTHING until he can prove it to himself (me).
Unlike you, I ignore almost nothing, I likewise believe nothing till I can prove it, without a shadow of a doubt, to myself.
All I can say is that the greatest minds and money have come up with systems to do just that (RAND corp for example). And over and over again they are wrong (very wrong).
There was the modern prediction corp, that created a neural net to predict markets. Although they were bought out and their results went private, if you read their book (the predictors) it shows that they had huge problems with very small scale errors in the data. This is the same as chaotic systems extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and divergence. The upshot is I doubt their system was even close to 100% predictable.
That being said, what you did was useful. You attacked it the way we should attack random data, you compared a mechanical system to one which is random. I showed you how to continue to test this to show it's validity. Far too many books out there that come up with great systems, only run them for 5 yrs or so (which is another form of cherry picking or curve fitting). Ultimately if your results are much greater than a monte carlo of random data (outside 95% confidence interval), then it is a worthy system to pursue and over time it could win. The most important part IMO is bet sizing, because as gaussian modelers know, the markets are not strictly gaussian and fat tail shocks do happen.
Now do I believe all participants have the same access to information and thus their edge is random? No Way.
Take a look at medallion. While they smile and tell all the cameras that they are studying moon cycles (TA disciples immediately see this as gospel), the reality (according to Belopolsky and Volfbeyn uncovered in a nasty lawsuit) is they are amongst other methods, reverse engineering POSIT order books, which violates security laws (as they are designed to keep institutions intentions invisible). I've made it a habit over the years to scratch beneath the surface, and try to find how winners really did it. However, you can take someone like zanger, who really did use pure TA and fundamentals, even massive leveraging and made a mint. I haven't seen anything that says he had an information edge. He happened to be in the right place at the right time and fortunately for him, didn't have any major fat tail events in the overall markets during that period. I haven't heard that much about his methods recently.
Lastly there are other variables to look at besides price that put the odds in your favor IMO.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aHfkhe8.C._8&refer=home
``No self-respecting statistician in finance is using Gaussian statistics,'' interjects Lord John Eatwell, an economist and president of Queens' College at Cambridge University, who's sitting in the back. ``All models are Bayesian,'' he says, referring to the theory derived from 18th- century British mathematician Thomas Bayes that allows for data to be constantly added to calculate probabilities.
Taleb shoots back: ``Bayesian is necessary but not sufficient.''
``No self-respecting statistician in finance is using Gaussian statistics,'' interjects Lord John Eatwell, an economist and president of Queens' College at Cambridge University, who's sitting in the back. ``All models are Bayesian,'' he says, referring to the theory derived from 18th- century British mathematician Thomas Bayes that allows for data to be constantly added to calculate probabilities.
Taleb shoots back: ``Bayesian is necessary but not sufficient.''
"Predictions about the future based upon similarities to the past are worthless"
Edward Allen Toppel
Zen in the markets
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