All,
The performance chart for my system contains an element that I don’t understand. Instead of having one green line and one dashed blue line it has two green lines and a dashed blue line in between them, with the rest of the area in between them shaded light green. How does one interpret this?
thanks,
-K
Kevin,
the two green lines represent current account value with a) "closed profit/loss" and b) "open P/L".
The green line shows performance with broker commissions and subscription fee taken into account.
The blue line shows performance without commissions and subs fee.
The green line has upper and lower bounds representing the intraday range of system equity. The area between the day’s high and low is shaded. The blue line is just end of day points joined together.
I don’t quite get it yet… Aren’t these two different interpretations?
-K
Erm,… yes it seems Rene and I have a difference of opinion there. However, mine is the correct one of course 
Perhaps we need a third?
The blue line is before commissions. I’m not sure whether it is EOD or intraday sample. The two green lines are after commissions and represent intraday high and low. I’m not sure what time interval is being used.
It is ridiculous that this is being discussed. C2 should publish what their statistics mean instead of its clients guessing. Where is the outrage??
Dean’s answer is exactly correct. He wrote:
The green line shows performance with broker commissions and subscription fee taken into account.
The blue line shows performance without commissions and subs fee.
The green line has upper and lower bounds representing the intraday range of system equity. The area between the day’s high and low is shaded. The blue line is just end of day points joined together.
…
And to add a little gloss to the above, we take system snapshots of marked-to-market equity throughout the day. We draw a line containing highs, and a line containing lows, and we shade the area in between. When there is enough data on the x-axis, the area looks reasonably like a line. In new systems, without a lot of x-axis data, the area looks like… well, like a mess.
We plan on upgrading the charting on C2 in the near future.
Matthew
The best thing to do is personalize the chart. It allows the following:
- Investment amount. Big difference between $100k and $5k.
- Subscription fees
- Commission’s costs
- Custom pricing.
You will be surprised. I’m going to use TOPAZ as an example just because of its popularity.
If you set the account to $5k, in 3 years it wouldn’t even outperform S&P 500 and in August this year you would have lost all your money. $100k account, a different story.
That personalization feature just doesn’t work well enough to be of any real use. In the example you give, look at how the monthly returns change when you switch it on.
For example: Topaz system without subs fee shows minus 3% for September. Now turn on Personalize (with $100k start capital) and that flips to plus 2.9% for September after factoring in subs fee. Plainly wrong!
