Traders' Roundtable

to see his returns go to www.iasg.com

The last 5 years his TOPS program has returned just over 13% a year, it's a decent return for the amount of money he manages but the risk/reward isn't for me, to achieve that return you have to sit through a 40% plus drawdown.

Isnt Bill Dunn in Market Wizards? I cant remember.

I was reading market wizards again recently and I was struck by one thing. Most of the guys in there tell us the story of how they began trading with a small sum and built it into a fortune. Some of them, not many, are trend followers who have employed consistent risk and had consistent returns for many years. But there are many traders in there who made enormous sums in very short spaces of time. Now, at the risk of sounding heretical, could someone please tell me exactly how they can be classified as market wizards? The only way they could have made such killings on individual trades is by completely ignoring risk. In which case you can never really know if they were great traders or just got a lucky run at the start. Livermore always struck me like that. How can people say he was a great trader when he went bust numerous times and had to sell his wifes jewellery to get another trading stake? Don't get me wrong, Im not saying I know more about trading than those guys do. Im still a novice, but I know that money/risk management is the most important aspect of all trading over the long-term and so I fail to see how traders who dont employ risk control can be called market wizards. There's probably 100 times as many traders who had just as much trading knowledge as those guys but who hit an unlucky streak right away and lost all their capital. Of course those guys did not later appear in market wizards.

Hmmm, I like cynicism as much as the next guy, but my recollection was that most of the Wizards got banged up pretty good before they eventually came across a successful formula.

i've always thought an updated version of those books with performance updates since publishing would be very interesting.

dunn has a great interview in the book by Art Collins.