We made a fundamental error in calculating the returns in our last article, and many thanks to one of our readers who was on his toes and caught it. Some of our calculations were based on dollars per trade and others on dollars per share—clearly a case of pineapples and pomegranates, along with doing the calculations much too late at … Read More
Great Expectations
The next step in building our casino so that we have the house odds in our favor is to look at the edge, or in system trading terms, expectancy. Let’s take a look at the house edge in a few casino games: Game House Edge Baccarat 1.2% Blackjack 0.8% Craps 1.6% Roulette 5.3% So exactly what does this mean? Let’s … Read More
Less Is More–Usually
Less is more—most of the time. In my early days, I started out with almost twenty different indicators in a single system—and why not; the computer was going to do all the work. I figured that if I combined enough techniques, I could find the perfect entry signals—I hadn’t even thought about the importance of exits back then. Well, needless … Read More
System Writing Without Trading Skills
Every now and then we receive emails from new traders seeking capital to trade their systems. Their academic backgrounds are impressive. They all have worked very hard at fine tuning their strategy based on historical data. They tend to be avid technical analysis students. Most have crunched statistics on their systems to support their claims. However, most lack the trading … Read More