DogZebra FF Shutting Down

C2 price hike and other trading issues have not made it worth the time to run it on this platform.
Best of luck to all.
-DZ out.

p.s. And remember kids… stay away from martingale/volatility selling strategies. They WILL blow up!

Best wishes, but I would certainly NOT put martingale and volatility selling strategies in the same category! Just make sure to always use protection! :slight_smile:

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Agreed - they aren’t in the same strategy, but each are very dangerous and there seem to be alot of them here!

In the long run, most volatility strategies–if they are any good–should have both large drawdowns and large gains. Coming up with a pretty good volatility strategy is not that hard, but coming up with one with both high returns and low LONG-TERM drawdowns is exceptionally difficult.

The reasons that most volatility systems here make money (so far) are that:

  1. Most of the time, shorting VXX or UVXY (or going long XIV) is extremely profitable. If you doubt that, look at a multiyear chart of UVXY or VXX. For example, UVXY is down 63% this year and 95% over 12 months. The compounded 5-year av return for UVXY is -88% a year. For VXX, it’s “only” -57% a year. In other words, the odds of making money by shorting volatility are much better than the opposite.

  2. The last year (in particular since the Nov. election) has been among the best periods for shorting volatility ever.

  3. Most of the volatility systems here have not faced a tough period during their time on C2. When that happens, expect very big drawdowns. But I think that most won’t “collapse” (except in the sense that they will lose most of their subs) and most developers who stick it out will fully recover to new highs after a year or two.

A very good system may be able to predict and avoid perhaps 2/3rds of the volatility spikes, but the last third–that come out of the blue–can be brutal, often going down 12-16% in one day. If you are leveraged 2 to 1, the one-day drawdown can be double that. Even setting trailing stops is not as easy as it would seem. In my backtesting I found that setting stops at 5% or 7% daily XIV losses actually increased maximum drawdowns in the long run (because of serial entries and exits after drops).

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I just looked at your strategy. It looks excellent.

Sorry to see you go!

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Strategy looks nice. Returns are low to compete with short term high flyers. But if you would make a year track with the same pace, then it will be another audience and another group of strategies to compete with. For that group stats are really good.

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  1. Quantitative Easing.

Putting martingale and volatility in the same risk??.. I am trading volatility almost 5 years now and I can tell you that if you have strict money management you can expect to achieve great performance and LOW DD at the same time. Most of the developers do not take it seriously enough and as a result they put their subscribers under unnecessary risk…
The last jump in the volatility show who has risk management and who hasn’t… :slight_smile:

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@RobertPeterson I agree with you for the most of your comment except that the recent rise in volatility was more of a bump than a jump. It wasn´t anything special that could prove anything for vola systems, unfortunately. The real selection will happen sometime this year probably.

Other than that I find it… interesting… that the creator of OP goes on about vola and martingale systems while his particular system takes losses that are about 25 times higher than his normal winning trades. I´m 100% sure anyone who posted in this thread can come up with a nonsense system of that sort within 5 minutes “developing time” and get good key statistics for a short time like the 7 months DogZebraFF has.

@RobertPeterson . I agree with AlexanderG - since your system has been around there hasn’t been a REAL VIX move. I’m talking 2008, 2011, or even 2015 (briefly). Go through one of those unscathed and we’ll see. Backtest to 2008 too. The data is there. I did it with the volatility products. You have to really understand them and mine the data from CBOE to recreate their performance.

@Aaa123 - “I´m 100% sure anyone who posted in this thread can come up with a nonsense system of that sort within 5 minutes “developing time” and get good key statistics for a short time like the 7 months DogZebraFF has.” -Then why aren’t you doing it? I’m sure if you spent 50 minutes (10 times the amount you mentioned) you could come up with something much better. :smile:

Yes my losses are bigger than my wins. But that is how the system is designed. Losses are not held for weeks or added to until they become winners (martingale). They are held for a specified amount of time and closed. The system moves on. I’m leaving C2 due to the poor execution I seem to get on here. I am faring better in my own account and really there’s no need to share this strategy any more. It works.

I’ve been on this site for 5 years or so. Seen a lot of hot shots think they can do it all and talk like they are the smartest guys in the room for a couple months. VERY few last. I would advise people to only invest in systems that are old enough to at least have gone through Aug 2015 or Jan/Feb 2016, if not much longer.

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I´m not wasting my time with implementing such a system because I trade the systems which I offer with my own money. https://collective2.com/details/106654155 and https://collective2.com/details/110612319 I´m not going to put real money into a system that I know is going to fail at some point. But yeah, I can come up with something better and it still only takes 5 minutes. Standard RSI on daily chart EUR/USD with target 100 pips, stop 2000 Pips (just to keep the ratio of your trades) → 100% win rate for the last 2 years. There you go. It´s still nonsense to trade it.
You say you trade your own system in your broker account but no TOS badge is there to verify. I´m sure you have your excuses but that really doesn´t matter to me. Either it´s proven or it´s hot air.

People who live in glass houses shouldn´t throw stones.

You ask for backtesting so I add it here… This is a live trading and backtesting since 1.2009.
The existing data from 2008 is not enough for my strategy…

The results here is ONLY from one strategy out of 40+ strategies that I run at the same time…

Of course you never know what will happen tomorrow but the point is to walk in this unknown field… slowly when the dark is in the horizon and fast when the sun is back again…In between you have to close your ears to the noise outside and let your strategies running together with strict money management…

Last thing… It is very easy to make money from volatility…But it is also very easy to bring it back to the market…So managing the risk is much important than the strategies after all…

Performance for this strategy: more than 100% per year
Max DD in open positions: 17.9%
Max DD in close positions: 14.8%

Sorry for the marketing :wink: but volatility was calm in the last months until the beginning of April when the volatility start to spike… Now the contango is back and if you thought to try volatility strategy then this could be a great timing to start…

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That’s not a spike. a move to mid 20’s-30’s would be considered a spike. This has been a normal, dare I say, quiet period for the VIX. Good luck with it bro.

AlexanderG - I’ll stop back here in a year or two and see how you have dominated the rankings. Can’t wait. Wish I was as smart as you.

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The VXX jump 20% in 4 days. For investors this is absolutely a spike! It looks like you never developed volatility strategy :wink:

Anyway, good luck with your decision to stop run your strategy here :thumbsup: