No rush.  I'm not sure I want to see your results.

That's really funny.  Comes at a good time.  

And I respect yours, Tom.  Thanks for airing it.

I agree with you Tom.  But, to be fair, the knife cuts both ways.  Part of the burden that the owner of a black box system has to assume is that his subscribers will feel more lost during down periods than if they knew the inner workings of the system.  It's the owner's responsibility to keep from getting too emotional when bombarded with the same questions over and over again.  It's the price for keeping a system's code proprietary.

Just a reminder:  the system doesn't have "historical performance."  Backtested results are a fiction.  That doesn't mean that the fiction can't match reality, and in this case I hope that it does, but it's not the same as reality.  The only "historical performance" that we have is since the system went live in April.

I meant "SPY" system.

As a scientist, Matt knows that for an experiment to be legitimate, it must be falsifiable. For those not familiar with this term, falsifiability doesn't mean that an experiment has failed, it means that for the experiment to be legitimate, the scientist must specifiy what kind of evidence or data would result in the experiment's failure.  In other words, if an experiment can't fail, then it isn't science.

It would be useful if Matt could apply the concept of falsifiability to the SPT system. Specifically, what would have to happen for the system to be deemed a failure? 

With the way the futures are behaving, some gallows humor wouldn't be a shoddy idea.

Susan,

That's hilarious.  You may go down in history as the inventor of the root canal indicator. Just be sure you don't curve fit the tooth's exit rules.  

And sorry to have to correct you, but I believe there is such a commandment. Somewhere in Leviticus, if memory serves, near the bit about seeing your father's nakedness.

Alex

You're right about giving it a few more trades--more than a few, imo--but we should be vigilant about the system.  So far, its realtime performance hasn't come close to its backtested results.  Could be just one of those periods, or could be the system won't work that well in realitime.  Only time will tell, but caution is prudent, especially for those members who simply assumed that the backtested results were real.

As far as I'm concerned, a system has to be trusted until it proves to no longer work. What might be worrisome about the SPY system is if its performance since going live starts to be worse than during its backtested period.  Until that happens, no meaningful information can be culled from a couple of trades.  

However, as I've said in the past, it is not a good idea to take backtested results as if they indicate the true value of the system.  We will have to get extensive realtime results before we can evaluate the system.

Thanks, but those statistics are for just buying and selling the SPY, they're not for the SPY system.

Market on open.  I was trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

The problem is if you choose to trade options and you're unavailable around 3:00.  I understand Matt's point about this being a SPY system, but I would like to know how much profit is sacrificed if you buy MOO the morning following a signal.

Excellent question.

I had a meeting at three (CST), so I could only wait until the close.  And I'm buying options, which only trade for fifteen minutes after close.  

Again, it's not a huge problem, but it does add another layer of uncertainty to the system, at lease if one is trading options.  

It's not a huge deal, but there has to be a better way of doing this. I was at my computer, on my IB TWS, and, at market close, SPY was below $128.75 by several pennies.   Again, it's not a major issue, but it is annoying.

It's really very simple.  You'll notice a bar on your TWS that indicates whether shares are available to short (bright green means they are).  If that is the case, then you simply sell the number of shares you want to short.  If you're flat, and you want to go short 10 shares of XYZ, then you sell that many.  If you're long 10, then you sell 20, etc.

47% of Americans pay no federal income taxes.  But federal income taxes aren't the only federal or other taxes Americans pay.  So this number is misleading.

I'm not Matt (clearly), but my thoughts are that there will always be reasons not take a trade.  You either follow a system's calls or you're engaging in discretionary trading. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but you have to ask yourself if you're going to do better over the long run that way.  I know that I won't.