Quote from satchel:
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your edge is just a performance metric proven over time
are you profitable at the end of the week consistently? well then you gots 'edge', now quantify it.
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I believe that there is a thread called something like "system trading with acrary" somewhere here on ET. On that thread, there were a number of discussions as to how one could be making a profit for a period of even as long as a few weeks and it would not necessarily constitute an "edge".
Without reconstituting the whole discussion by folks who know a lot more than I do about this stuff, it could be explained with the following example: If one could imagine that you wanted to trade the imaginary "coin toss" futures market (similar to scalping forex -- just kidding) and in the middle of 10,000 coin tosses, you happened upon a sequence where heads were occuring more often than tails and you decide to buy whenever you see a head. Then, through extraordinary circumstance, you get 15 heads in a row. Should you conclude that not only do you have an edge, but you are a genius? Not necessarily, since that sequence will happen once or twice in 10,000 coin tosses.
The point is that you need to distinguish between an edge and plain dumb luck. The fact that a system is profitable for some period does not mean that it has an edge. How you determine an edge has been discussed on many threads here on ET.
humbly yours,
hightech

