"People should be allowed to vote anonymously and obviously each registered user can only vote once. "
Since C2 allows someone to register as often as they want without proof of ID, that is hardly a clever way to decide an issue. It is called “stuffing the ballot box” Anyone for or against could easily put 15 votes in with an hour’s work
"Ask yourself the question if APD is such a superior statistic, why is no one else using it and why aren’t there nobel prizes handed out? "
Ask yourself, if someone asks stupid questions like yourself, how can you be expected to be taken seriously? Is Matthew’s realism or Keep after slippage peer reviewed - did he win Nobels for them? Did anyone ever get a Nobel for winning percentage or profit factor or per unit average profit? Why wasn’t Sharpe and the Black-Scholes model available used before they were invented. Were they a waste of time?
but the car is still broken.
great, then you are stepping up to the plate to prove it is broken? No one else has, but plenty of rants and theories abound…
because my dear simple-minded one, the more you post, the higher your ignore climbs. Jules has 28 or so % ignored. What did he do controversial?
Hi Fanus, welcome back!
I agree that anynomous voting is better. But I don’t expect that Matthew is going to implement that shortly. The next best alternative would be if people could send their vote to Matthew by e-mail. The instruction would be like “send an empty e-mail with title X Yes of X No to …” However, I am not sure that this would work. It requires that voters are very disciplined. I have some experience with this kind of instructions and what you usually get is that people send you a lot of e-mail with the wrong title, a long argument and no conclusion. What I saw in this thread confirms that pattern. I asked people to vote simply yes or no, but most people write what they think, which is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’.
So I think there presently are no realistic alternatives for a voting process. I would not call our attempt arrogant, though. In large groups it is usually observed that only a few persons actively participate in the debate, but nevertheless this process is commonly called ‘democratic’. Also, the fact that votes are publicly visible is usually not viewed as a lack of democracy in informal groups.
I do agree that our mudslinging habits will scare people away and this threathens the validity of the poll.
I do not agree that our ignore percentages threathen the validity of the poll. I suppose that if we would know the ignore percentages of Obama of McCain under American citizens, these would be sky high too. Does that make the elections undemocratic? No, because it is the voter’s own decision to ignore. It would be different if I or Ross could force people to ignore us; that would be undemocratic.
I do not agee with your three options. It is my opinion that voting should always be about two options, not more.
"If someone is sophisticated enough to figure out if the statistic is valid in his specific case, then he do not need the statistic to begin with."
I don’t agree with that. I believe I am sophisticated enough, but I still consider the statistic convenient because it saves me the time to go through all the trades in some cases.
"Ask yourself the question if APD is such a superior statistic, why is no one else using it and why aren’t there nobel prizes handed out?"
Every other statistic has also been in a stage where only a few people knew about it. Most statistics were not rewarded by a Nobel prize. Sharpe invented the Sharpe ratio and he received a Nobel prize, but I don’t believe this was only for the Sharpe ratio. He developed CAPM too. Also, consider this quote from the Wikipedia article about Sharpe:
"He submitted the paper describing CAPM to the Journal of Finance in 1962. However, ironically, the paper[2] which would become one of the foundations of financial economics was initially considered irrelevant and rejected from publication. Sharpe had to wait for the editorial staff to change until finally getting the paper published in 1964."
So even this was not accepted for two years.
For what it’s worth, in my opinion the suggestion that Ross might ever get a Nobel prize for APD is totally absurd. I certainly hope not. Imagine what this would do with his character.
Forget the vote. People will stuff the ballot anyway. Just look at the slap happy "None" most interesting notes we used to have from someone registering multiple times.
For what it’s worth, in my opinion the suggestion that Ross might ever get a Nobel prize for APD is totally absurd. I certainly hope not. Imagine what this would do with his character.
Aren’t you just a little bit curious how horribly bad an average fund manager would score in this category?
For what it’s worth, in my opinion the suggestion that Ross might ever get a Nobel prize for APD is totally absurd. I certainly hope not. Imagine what this would do with his character.
I don’t know, we might see it sometime in the future. Debating about why it’s not a good measure seems pointless these days.
I vote YES to revising the wording.
I think we can take that to Matthew, since we’ve gotten as far as we can on the topic. He normally doesn’t allow a thread to accumulate past 100.
Hi Jules
Thank you for replying in a non confrontational, non attacking and reasonal way even though you disagree with some of the things I have said. I agree with some of the things you say and I disagree with others, but I don’t feel the need to personally attack or question your motives.
You are right that a poll might be better off with only two options, but I still would think this is a valid to have removing APD as an option and several other people on this forum also expressed this opinion. I don’t understand why there is such reluctancy to have this as an option. If people really find it useful, they will vote for it.
I think this is safe to assume that most people on the thread at least agree that the current presentation of APD is misleading/flawed/incorrect, then I would suggest the two options should be:
1. Change the description to more accurately describe it’s uses.
2. Remove APD as a statistic.
I was not aware that Sharpe has to wait for two years to get his paper published, but at least he had a paper that he submitted. In APD’s case, after two years there is no study and no paper to submit, but people are argueing about the wording to describe it when there isn’t even a thorough study available to show that it is even a really valid statistic. There are many logical sounding arguements about APD and its validity, but there are many things which sound logical, but doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny and until such a study, it is all just unproven theories.
Without a thorough study, any kind of description would be at best a guess as no one really know it’s strengths, weaknesses and thresholds.
Besides, no statistic should be accepted based on a democratic voting process. It should be based on fact and prove. Imagine submitting a paper for publishing and your prove for it’s validity is that people voted for it.
"Without a thorough study, any kind of description would be at best a guess as no one really know it’s strengths, weaknesses and thresholds."
Exactly, and that is why with the new wording we are also making people aware of APD’s limitations. Until proof either way of it’s validity exists that is the responsible thing to do.
I think this is bs. We have plenty of proof from the systems on the site. 0.2 is the mark to beat.
I understand your view but that’s not the kind of proof I think Fanus and others are referring to, that’s what I’m responding to, they mean having a paper published etc, not anecdotal evidence.
I have been reading these thread(s) about APD without paying too close attention, but let me voice my opinion. Please don’t drag me into the usual flame wars going on in here.
As as subscriber, I say give me every stat and I will choose for myself which ones to pay attention to, and what each of them mean. If you want to include a system’s correlation to moon phases as a stat, go ahead. I will pay no attention to it, of course, but it doesn’t bother me. Vendors, of course, don’t like stats that don’t benefit their systems. Any poll, etc. will be heavily skewed towards vendors’ opinions because they are the most active participants and the ones who more strongly feel about these issues. A stat that is preventing a vendor from getting 100 subscribers at $200/month will mean much more to him than to a subscriber browsing systems and seeing that stat among many others.
As for the description, just tell me exactly what the statistic shows (a formula or whatever), and I will decide whether that fits my investment style, risk tolerance, etc. Right now, many of the statistics on C2 don’t have a clear explanation as to how they are calculated. Precise formulas and definitions are much more useful than “user friendly” explanations such as good/bad or “it should be above X”. They also encourage potential subscribers to educate themselves as to how to interpret each stat, instead of relying on a 2-line description.
Just my 2 cents. Again, keep me off the flame wars, be civil.
I think ironcito’s thoughtful post is a good place to pause and take a breath.
I’m going to close this thread, because I think we’re at the point of diminishing returns. I am inclined to follow a two-step process to move forward:
1) For now, we’ll leave the APD stat in place, but provide a more detailed explanation of what it currently means. This explanation will incorporate much – or perhaps all – of the consensus wording proposed above.
2) Over the longer term, I’d like to investigate a more expansive statistic / algorithm – one which reveals truly risky system behavior, but which does not unfairly penalize longer-term systems.
More soon.
