Are my systems too conservative for C2?

Hello everyone,

I´m asking for your opinion - are my two systems too conservative for the C2 population?

We can observe the high-flyers that do 100% in 1 month get all the hype and subs just before burning everyone´s money. But literally no one seems to be seriously interested in capital preservation. At least that´s my impression.

What do you think? Is it worth the effort to publish conservative strategies here or should I just continue to trade my and my family´s money privately? What do you dislike and what do you like about the 2 strategies?

Thanks in advance

If you ask me Portfolio Trader has only been around for a little over a month what did you expect? lol…

And as for Volatility Invest it had a 5% annual rate of return. I think we can get that kind of return just from etf’s and other conservative dividend bearing investments that pay 8% annual returns at least.

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Agree with all points. Although “conservative dividend bearing investments that pay 8%” - I wouldn’t consider too conservative. If something is paying 8% dividend or has an 8% yield there is nothing conservative about it. At least with spreads where they are now.

Portfolio trade is just too new. Maybe need 6-8 month track record before I will study it.

Volatility invest is just blah. Not saying you need to be a high flyer. But it’s not even keeping up with s&p. If your annual return is 10% you prob need a drawdown less then 4%. There is nothing wrong staying conservative, but 15% annual gain is prob what I would look for.

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I think there is a very small market of people on C2 that want truely conservative strategies that are well diversified and without leverage. In other words there are few people looking for another mutual fund. I think there is an even smaller number of people looking for conservative if it doesn’t outperform the S&P 500. To me it seems the more aggressive you strategy is the easier it is to get initial subscribers but harder to keep them. The more conservative your strategy is the longer it actually takes to get subscribers but the easier they are to keep.

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If you can do it you could publish a conservative and aggressive strategy.

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That´s what I was thinking about aswell. To get high yield I need leverage so either trading futures or long options are the way to go. It´s not that I wouldn´t be capable of doing it, I just don´t really like to trade that aggressively because the drawdowns would inevitably be large at some point. I personally don´t want to see my portfolio drop 40% at any given time no matter how much return I´d get. I went through this a few years ago and I didn´t enjoy it although it was quite a good year in the end. :smiley:
It just became my investing nature to be more protective than greedy - perhaps because I understand compounding. :wink:

Anyways, probably I should just go ahead and trade an aggressive demo futures strategy like many others do. In the end it´s up to the subscriber if he values his capital and can stand the drawdowns or not.

Thanks for the feedback. 20%+ is actually what I´m aiming for but in case of the volatility strategy it didn´t work out last year. It should work at some point though when the market regime changes. Lets wait and see.

Too conservative for most people on C2.

My impression is that lot of people trade only futures; ES, NQ and CL.
Daytrade margins are really cheap (500 per ES) and fast profit is just too tempting for people to pass. You see people trading ES with only 5 K in account (sure path to disaster, simply underfunded).

I think you should continue to publish your trades, but question is will that give you lot of
subscribers. Think that just people want futures, since it is faster.

And just my 2 cents, but best would be swing trading in stocks; with good diversification.
Again, not sure how many people would follow that.

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Whatever happened to “LongTermGrowth” - your old “100% TOS strategy” that you promoted a year ago?
I don’t see it in your profile anymore. Somehow hid it. Very clever marketing.

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Very nice detective work there @DogZebra_Investing!

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@DogZebra_Investing It was not worthwhile to continue so I killed it to allocate the funds to cryptocurrencies. Which was a pretty solid move as you can imagine…
The system had open positions at the time of being killed which was at the end of october. If you look at the chart, you see that I had a whooping -2% loss at that time. The rest is not coming from actual trading but simply because C2 continues to account for open positions.
I don´t call -2% a disaster and “I would have made up the loss” but I actually trippled my balance with cryptos instead. Which is way more lucrative than to wait another year to get subs. lol

@Aaa123 is telling the truth anyone can verify it at this link: https://collective2.com/public-activity/106313319

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Yes they are there. But when you click on the Developer from the strategy page, which most people do, it says “TRADING STRATEGIES CREATED (6)” but then only shows 2. Leaves out the failed ones. I find that very odd.

@Armenelos thanks for the interesting link!

@DogZebra_Investing Of course I only show the systems that are open for subscriptions and which are actively managed.
The others are:

  1. “placeholder” which is really that. It is an active placeholder strategy that holds the connection to my second IB account so I don´t have to set it up again if I want to manage a second TOS strategy sometime in the future. It´s not ment to be public anytime.
  2. “TechnicalWorkaround” doesn´t have a single trade and was originally created to contain my TOS volatility strategy. But the setup took too long so I created Volatility Invest anew and changed the name.
  3. “LongTermGrowth” which I discontinued due to the reason mentioned before
  4. “TestXIVhedged” which was exactly what the name describes. After some testing and research I abandoned that one.
  5. “Volatility Invest” which is active, 100% TOS and shown in my profile
  6. “Portfolio Trader” which is active, non-TOS and shown in my profile. non-TOS because I´m heavily investing in cryptocurrencies and don´t have all the money of the world so I have to decide where to allocate.

I hope that clears things up.

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Conservative or not, every system should be able to beat the market, other wise whats the point of paying someone, might as well put your money in the SPY.

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@TT40 Both systems have beaten the S&P in this year in terms of performance. Both systems have better risk-adjusted performance for the lifetime. Both systems didn´t get damaged in the recent market turmoil and instead made profit.

If flat performance is all you care about, just go all in on SPXL, you´ll outperform the S&P for sure. Until your account gets demolished in a crash or bear market… That´s exactly what my systems DO NOT hence they are conservative. For me buy&hold the index is not conservative. It´s just lazy.

@Aaa123, you realize you can buy puts on the SPXL or most other ETF’s to hedge just for the sole purpose of the underlying crashing?

you are assuming everyone on c2 is buy and hold, and none of us know how to trade. I’m on c2 to find better traders than me. We only suggest you to beat s&p because you need to stand out from the crowd. You can be conservative with 10-12% return a yr, but you better be 50% or 70% less draw down than s&p. If you get my pt.

I have an advisory account with an local firm, avg s&p gain past 13 yrs =-2% with half less draw down than S&P in all 12 yrs including 08-09, brexit, yuan crisis, election, and this Feb. but they have 13 yr track record, you only got a few months. In the end just keep up what your doing and your performance will speak for it self. I know it sucks that conservative strategy might take 8 month to over a year to get on a radar on c2. But if your intention is here to make subscriber fees, they usually never work out for the leader in the long run. You rarely see any good strategy on c2 have longer track record than 2yr, 3yr or 5yr. there is a few out there. 2 yr mark is like the breaking pt most trend riding strategies dies or martingale strategy finally has a bad streak.

just trade your TOS account like you do, if you get a subscriber thats great, if you get 20 subscriber is just gravy. Do what you do, dont let subscriber come and go dictate how you invest. when u do well, subscribers will find their way to you!

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I feel like no one gets this. They continually beg for subscribers on the forum instead.

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Doing “good” is highly individual. For me it´s good to have better risk adjusted returns than the broad stock market over a lengthy period of time, combined with a high probability to also outperform the market in absolute terms. For others “good” start at 10% gain per months. So lets not get into that discussion, it´s pointless.

Anyways, I started the topic because I was wondering if conservative systems like mine have a place on C2. What I extract from the comments is “yes, wait 2 years to build a track record, pay the fees and then maybe you get some subscribers so you can recover your fees within the next 2 years.”

That´s pretty much garbage from a business point of view. :wink: I´ll have to reconsider if the building of a track record has some value for me other than getting subscribers. Maybe I can use it if I decide to apply as a trader for a hedge fund/prop trading house later that year, that would make it a reasonable investment in the end.

Thanks for you comments everyone.

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