Matt, please add P&L per unit as a column in The Grid. The reason is very simple: there are too many systems in C2 with a P&L per unit <$10-15. As the cost of trading (commissions, fees, etc) is about $8.5 per unit all these systems with a P&L per unit of $10 would not be profitable in live accounts. Non expert subscribers may be lured into these systems due to a beautiful equity curve and otherwise good stats. A simple custom filter of P&L per unit in the Grid would solve this very easily…
Thanks in advance for looking into this…
OR…how about using an industry average commission when calculating returns? I believe it would add to the integrity of the entire C2 website…
Excellent remark.The Grid displays the number of trades,but not the number of contracts traded,so the potential subscriber may be misguided.Obviously,one would (or should) customize the performance of every system before subscribing,but such an addition (p/l per unit) would immediately give a much clearer picture.
Should the Grid take into account commission costs,then the rankings would change dramatically.
Just be very careful with this though, before people naively rush to unfairly judge systems because of one metric they need to understand that the P/L per unit is calculated per trade and then averaged, it is NOT Cumu $/ Total number of units. That is an important distinction.
And understand that there is nothing wrong with that per se - it reflects what would happen if you traded with one unit in all trades - BUT for a system trading several asset classes in multiple sizes (single units of futures and then 1,000s of shares in stocks) it is rendered fairly meaningless and completely discounts the benefits of position sizing.
I think we can add both stats: P/L per unit (averaged over entire system), and P/L per unit per trade (the average of the number calculated on a per-trade basis). I’ll add it to the queue.
Very much appreciated
