Driver Balanced comments

I would love to hear from anyone who is in this strategy and on auto trade. It looks good to me. No crazy stops or martingale.

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Only has a couple subscribers so not sure if they’d be on the forums.

Looks ok. Winners 2x losers. Even TOS, which is rare in futures. Reasonable fees.

One interesting thing is that he used a bit more leverage in his big January month. Hasn’t used that much since. Without that leverage the returns still would have been good, just not insane good. Long only, however has fared well the past 3 months, which is impressive. Would be curious how this differs from his other systems that have not done well.

Could certainly do a lot worse here on C2.

I’m in this strategy with real money. It’s done well so far. It’s very mechanical. It’s a long-only breakout strategy in the three major indices. On big up days, it will go long one contract, place a stop (size of the stop seems to be volatility-based), and let the winners run all the way to 15:45 EST. The developer doesn’t interfere with the strategy and he lets it do its thing. Overall, I like it.

This system seems to have what everyone says they want - high return, low drawdown, low fee, TOS, prudent leverage, and over a year’s history. Yet it only has two autotrade subscribers. What do subscribers really want or expect? The Leader has over 300 trades, yet the simulators apparently want more.

This doesn’t look good for the future of Collective2 or their Trade Leaders.

I can’t explain why it doesn’t have more subscribers. Other strategies with comparable Sharpes are more popular. He has a website where you can look at his backtest and live trading history. The long term edge of the strategy is about 0.28 if I remember correctly, which looks reasonable and doesn’t raise red flags.

Maybe it’s not popular because of its mechanical execution, which could be boring for some. There have been a few times too where the strategy had sizeable unrealized gains and then lost the profits and stopped out for losses in the last hour of the trading day as the market suddenly reversed. I think for some subscribers this kind of thing is frustrating to see. The developer tells me however that his backtests and trading history show its best to let the trades run until the end of the day or stop out for a loss - no moving of the stop levels.

If you look at the backtests on his website, it claims his long term average annual gain is somewhere in the 30% range. 2018’s performance was an aberration due to a huge up month in January. This is a long only breakout strategy so the repeated surges in the market that month were like manna from heaven for this strategy. It was probably a 1-in-100 kind of month.

thankyou for the responses, I too cannot figure out why this does not have more subscribers.

as far as the returns, that all depends on how much $ we are allocating to the strategy. This strategy made approx $36,000 in 12 months. I would think that $45,000 - $60,000 would be adequate for the number of contracts traded. so using that math the returns are much higher than 30%.

anyway, I know this will be an autotrade strategy for me soon. I like the low draw down and know from experience with other strategies that is really important to me.

Huge day today for Long Driver. Over 6% gain. Days like this are where this strategy shines.

In choppy markets or reversal-prone markets it will take a lot of small losses. I’ve seen as many as 14 in a row That’s probably another reason why it doesn’t have many subscribers - I suspect that most people are psychologically uncomfortable with long streaks of losers.

2018’s returns were unusually high. I don’t think you should expect that in the long run. Like I said, his backtests show more like 30-35%, with an occasional 15% drawdown, if I remember correctly (his website is down right now so I can’t check). That’s still good enough for me, given that the strategy 1) will be out of the market on large down days and 2) uses fixed stops.

I agree… are the stops adjusted as the trade works out? or just left at where they are?

The stops are left where they are. There are only two possible outcomes for a trade: it stops out for a loss at the initial stop, or it gets closed at the end of the trading day.

http://quantraders.com/Long_Driver.html