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.

I find Reuters Datalink to be very good and a very good value also.

I also had plenty of problems with their service and also cancelling their service. Definitely not a great organization.

Here are some of the things I used that worked for me:

That type of system can work well if you add a market trend filter, test it and you will see.

Ahhh. You are looking for certainty. The backtest would involve a statistic comparing many distributions of returns.

Not certainty, just hard and fast rules.

When you get multiple signals choose siganls at random and create a baseline. Then implement a chooser later.

This is not a completely mechanical trend following approach. I am talking about something that can be backtested. If you choose your signals at random, how can you backtest this? How do ...

While researching some of the famous mechanical trend followers of the last 30 years I quickly noticed that none of these guys trade in stocks ... namely Richard Dennis, John Henry, and Bill Dunn.

I asked myself ... why is this?

It would make sense for a trend follower to trade any product that ...

IBD does not give traders access to their database which makes backtesting next to impossible.

The main reason why I believe O'Neil is so successful is because he does an excellent job of sizing up the overall "MARKET" trend. Once he knows the market has followed through and entered into an uptrend ...

Hi c.f.:

I am researching different stock market trend following systems.
I have yet to find any that are completely
mechanical with simple and easy to understand rules, for
learning purposes. I wonder if you could give me an example
of a system/strategy that would give me a base to work ...

Bullets and forward conversions are great tools but more suitable for scalpers and day traders. You shouldn't really have a problem getting short in a longer time frame

1) You can trade NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX with ECNs, NASDAQ is the most liquid market for ECNs ... there are a few that don't trade NYSE/AMEX

2) YES

Now the stock markets trend no more I find my focus back in the futures arena but stocks I think have a void in good long term systems.

Tradingcoach,

Funny that you wrote that, over the last six weeks I have caught one of my best uptrends in the stock market in the last 3 years ... I now see ...

My experience has shown that emulating an index does occur at some number (of positions).

Putting on a basket of 20-30 leading stocks from the top industry groups is working well for me. This diversification must come with proper position sizing. The signal of when to buy or sell is very important ...