Wanting your thoughts on Dow2Gold strategy. I have been reviewing and is interesting. Have you subscribed and willing to share your experience? Have you reviewed and decided it was not for you, would you share why? Thanks for your thoughts.
On the plus side, he has a year’s worth of data with a low drawdown given the profit he’s achieved (annual return ~8-9X max drawdown). No signs of martingale – averaged down a few times but appears to have been in control of the trades throughout. 66% winning trades show he’s not afraid to lose. Shows the same results since auto-traders joined in early January of this year, which is very good. No scalping – looks like the results are very realistic and what a subscriber would expect to achieve.
On the negative side, he’s tried this before and failed miserably: https://collective2.com/system93902632
I have this on my watchlist but will wait another year to see if the new system avoids the fate of the former.
Oh and I see that David Stephens just subscribed, so that’s another big vote of confidence LOL.
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And I should add on the negative side that we all know 170% annual return is impossible to sustain … 30% is the best we see on C2 for systems > 5 years. So since the system is just now gaining some attention, it’s inevitable that just as you subscribe, the system is likely to take a big hit. Survivorship bias is alive and well and has smacked me in the face more times than I want to admit.
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I wouldn’t consider this a negative. Every trader/investor has lost. It’s part of the learning process.
I agree with Scott.
Are we going to say a chess world champion is a fake champion because 2 years ago he failed to win the champion?
looks like a nice strategy for the time being. The leverage is quite large though.
He was holding onto a russel future through brexit which is not a good habit in such a small account imho (caused 34% drawdown which was partly compensated by other trades so the maxDD is 22%). These kinds of actions can easily be handled by subscribers themselfes so I wouldn´t weight it too much. But you have to be aware of it in the scope of future events.
As others pointed out already, this is a high yield strategy with the associated risk. Therefore I personally wouldn´t trade it but it´s certainly possible if you know how you want to manage your portfolio risk.
I have posted my personal portfolio approach which is focused on risk control and I think some of you may find it useful when trading these high risk strategies. So if you haven´t really dived into portfolio building feel free to look it up: Follower guide to consistent profits
Thank you very interesting. Some really good thoughts.
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Scott. I think the question is what has he learned and changed from the first failure. I will email and ask him what is being done differently that so far is making it a success. thanks
“This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl”
It is she not him :)))
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Well, I think the question is incorrect. The correct version should be:
Are we going to say a chess world champion is a fake champion because 1 year later he failed to win the championship?
Can you name which model that qualify for your criteria please beside your models
The history of this trader is a bit more worrisome than I thought, actually. Looks like (she?) killed off another system before launching the third: https://collective2.com/details/97554833
I disagree Scott. C2 is not a place where you come in to try out an idea, fail, blow up the system and launch another one. The mark of a successful, confident trader here is someone who gets it right the first time because they had a mature, well thought out strategy to begin with. I am most impressed with developers who have just one system that they keep going for 4, 5 or more years and see no need to start another one (let alone dozens which I’ve seen here in the past).
I like that Matthew insisted from the beginning that ALL a developer’s systems, whether killed or not, be available to view by potential subscribers. That’s their track record and gives important clues into the vendor’s motives, mental/emotional fortitude, and level of confidence and maturity.
I like how everything here is scrutinized. Maybe potential subscriber should put these 3 strategy charts together and draw his/her own conclusion. I wish I can be a child whole my life, but unfortunately I’m changing. Also as strategy subscribers, we still are traders. We invest/trade strategies short or long term depends of different aspects. It is no a crystal ball here. As long strategy is TOS, not martingale, it has history, avg winning trade > avg losing trade, DD is under control, has “right” statistics, correlation with other strategies in portfolio - everything else is subscriber fear and past bad experience (in most cases as result of greed and not following criteria above).
As I understand, that third strategy is the most important thing leading to his current successful strategy.
It is not that you want to be a mature trader, then come to C2.
You never be a mature trader, whether you are at C2 or other place.
That means you always have many many things to improve, whether you think so or not.
There will never be a mature trader, because developers are improving consistently.
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@BBTC I haven´t analyzed all systems here and you may have other criteria for your filter process. But sure, I can tell you what my analysis yielded to this point. (which again isn´t complete because I´m not actively following others on this site (yet), for personal reasons. Please double check for your own prerequisites.)
As defensive “base” strategies I´d choose
Additional as a solid profit driver I´d take
To finish off the Portfolio with a nice performance booster I´d take one of the following volatility strategies:
-
Volatility Trader
or -
Smart Volatility Long
( I had also listed Volatility Returns but then noticed that he leverages too much for my taste. So I removed it.)
The last one wouldn´t fit my 20-60% p.a. criteria. However, I allow myself to modify some of the rules with common sense and this is one of these “soft rules”. So if I would decide to trade that system I would scale it down 50% after all the calculations I mentioned in that other thread I linked above. That way I´m still somewhat protected but get very nice performance if this low volatility environment prevails. (carma stocks also doesn´t fit in with avg. 13.5% but it´s easy to leverage and still has low drawdown so I´d be ok with that also.)
Btw it´s interesting that 4 out of 5 potential systems are TOS… I really have to disagree with people saying that TOS systems don´t have a better chance of being profitable in the long run.
ON TOPIC:
Even in the recent model account she is trading risky as I mentioned in the scope of the Brexit trade. At least she didn´t do anything wrong by going short afterwards but indeed the market provided good tailwinds with low volatility.
We don´t know how long that will continue. So the chance is there to gain significant profits in the short term but it´s essential to control one´s portfolio risk i.e. have an exit plan.
On the other hand I assume you will have larger gains with some volatility systems if the current market phase stays stable.
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Thanks Alexander, I am sure with those combination, most likely people can achieve profitable by the end of the year. I will assume since you are risk averse , would you put more size in defensive models and might be 10%-20% to booster models. Will you remove the model if all sudden drop 20-30%?
Regarding this topic, this model will become TOS but it will take sometime in the transition. Please double check with the developer. In my opinion, I am ok with his style because this program follows the trend n using gold n treasury as a hedge. Other points, this system doesn’t use martingale, has solid positive return for 1 year, DD is acceptable n there is no suspicious transactions. As you know, some developers are using crazy transactions n high leverage to attract subscribers but not in this model.
If people argue how lucky this model during Brexit while the outcome is positive, subscribers can always turn off the model for temporary because it is common sense to not involve during unpredictable event that has significant impact in the trading.
I am just wondering for people who comments that this model is very risky because the developer created some other models in the past n perform not doing well. I would like to know what models do you think has a solid performance n pass your criteria.
Thanks for the appreciation, it´s rare enough to come by in forums. 
Sure I´d put more size into defensive models but not in the way you suggest. The increased size derives from my calculations which use maximum drawdown in relation to what I´m willing to loose on any single system. (it´s the second step in the guide) Also the fact that I´d only choose one higher risk volatility system opposed to 3 solid systems with long track records provides a natural overweight of capital allocated to defensive strategies. But I don´t overweight single systems. In the end they are all on the same risk level for my portfolio. Of course you could assign even more risk to a defensive system but that actually increases portfolio risk because you then have a larger lump risk. Even defensive systems can tank some day.
I can´t say a fix 20% or 30% drop would be the exit point but I described my method of managing systems in the third step of the guide. Generally I exit when the historical maxDD of a system is extended (even when it´s only 0.1% more) so it really depends on the system. But in the event of an exit it would always cause me to loose roughly the same % amount of my portfolio because of the calculations in step 2.
If you have any further questions or ideas on that matter I suggest we move the conversation either to the thread of my guide or to pm. It was not my intention to derail this thread so much. 
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The volatility strategies AlexanderG recommended skip high volatility period. That makes them more problematic than Dow2Gold.
Since Nov last year, there came out quite a few volatility strategies at C2 that had high return and low DD.
That performance stats have not been tested by high volatility time, as market entered low volatility and high growth period since Nov last year. I have reasons to suspect it was this low volatility and high growth market made these strategies outperforming, not these developers are smarter than others.
For the same reason, since Jan 2016, market had been in a relatively low volatility and high growth period. Look at XIV chart, you can find it entered smaller DD and higher growth period since Jan, 2016. The two volatility strategies AlexanderG recommended all fall in this period.
I mean if these two strategies started from Jan 2015 or Jan 2014, they would had much higher DD and lower return.
While I think Dow2Gold will be less affected by high volatility equity market, as it trade mostly commodities.
On the Dow2Gold RUT futures 34% drawdown AlexanderG had mentioned , I think you can’t look at one position only.
At event such as brexit, Gold had opposite direction with equity.He had both RUT futures and Gold futures entered on the same day, so Gold futures was meant to be a hedge to RUT Futures. So his problem was the two positions were not perfectly hedging.That was quite different from holding an one side position in high crisis period.
And he could solve this problem in later trading by adjusting both position size. I mean it is easy for him to not repeat the same mistake.
Selling volatility is not a strategy , anyone can sell vola , not rocket science , if there was an inherent advantage in selling volatility it wouldn’t be priced that way or otherwise its free money then , same goes for selling options premium . All systems selling volatility in C2 are epic fail and should be void like a plague .
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Again thanks everyone for their thoughts. Thanks AlexanderG for sharing. So the question that I would like to get your thoughts on is it a good thing that the system has failed twice and the third one seems to be profitable based upon hopefully lessons learned in the two prior strategy’s or is this a negative and the third time will surely blow up since the first two attempts did. I look at my own life and sometimes I have failed several times at something before realizing I needed to do it different to succeed. Once I made the change then I was successful. But on the flip side we all have those friends that are so hard headed they continue to do it the same way and they get the same results.
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