Quote from Trader666:
Wow... between flying your GROB 109 (where the gliderport gives you free tows for some reason); dining at the Princeton Inn; driving your 12 cylinder cars; working on your golf handicap of 12; connecting with Equis, Worden Bros, and IBD; considering offers from the "coast" on doing productions; trading 100,000 share lots; mentoring your legions of toadies (all of whom are making money on a level I haven't conceived of) etc., it's a wonder you have time to respond to lowly me. But somehow you managed to and I'm humbled and eternally grateful! I'm clearly not in your league and could be wrong about all of this but here's my take anyway...
Unfortunately, you're the sad victim of incorrect thought with respect to many of the points you make. Psychology and the mechanics of execution aside, the components of trading are very simple. Determine a set of tradables, decide when to enter and in what size, and decide when to exit and in what size. You seem to need to hide behind complexity and holism to avoid objective assessment of your "methods."
It is within the above framework that I've evaluated elements of your "teachings." For example, in a rare moment of clarity (Fri, Jun 21 2002 12:57am in misc.invest.technical) you described "rockets":
"To find a rocket you only have to have your quality universe (they are very high quality stocks with EPS and RS at 80 to 90 percentiles each. The only indicator that is significant is the Stochastic (5,3,3). What you look for on your daily charts are the stochastic rising deliberately to the 80% line and overshooting it and then critically damping on the line; perturbations will cause it to look entwined on the line. There you have it."
This one's on my "to do" list but here's how I'll proceed. Take the set of tradables (stocks with EPS and RS at 80 to 90 percentiles each) and evaluate what happens when the daily Stochastic (5,3,3) of stocks in this set overshoots the 80% line. I'll stress test by evaluating how these perform in bullish, bearish and trading range market conditions, how sensitive the results are to changes in parameters, etc. I'll quantify to what extent, if any, "rockets" perform better than random. If I detect a distinct, quantifiable edge, then I'll look at "rocket" variations... the possibilities are endless. Then and only then would I combine them with other system elements.
As for holism, of course all parts of a system are interdependent and sometimes in ways that aren't intuitive. But if you want to create complex, Byzantine methodologies from components that have no edge and use the magic of holism to make them profitable, have at it but that sounds like Grobian voodoo to me. I personally prefer to combine components that do have a quantifiable edge. In other words, I don't try to make good wine out of bad grapes. But that's just me and unlike you, I've been wrong before.
