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Teller Outlines Trend Following Philosophical Foundations (Though Not His Intent)

Teller writes:

The most important decision anyone makes in any situation is “Where do I put the dividing line between what’s in my head and what’s out there? Where does make-believe leave off and reality begin?” That’s the first job your intellect needs to do before you can act in the real world. If you can’t distinguish reality from make-believe—if you’re at a stoplight and you’re not sure whether the bus that’s coming toward your car is real or only in your head—you’re in big trouble. There aren’t many circumstances where this intellectual distinction isn’t critical.

It was not his intent, but what a great explanation for why trading price is so smart. He continues:

Let’s take what magicians call a force, where the magician gives you a false sense of free action by giving you an extremely controlled choice…When I go to the supermarket, I have a choice of dozens of kinds of cereals—all made by the same manufacturer of essentially the same ingredients. I have the gut impression of variety and freedom, but in the end, the only real choice I have is not to buy.

Mutual funds not really a choice? Left/right politicians not really a choice? Correct, not really a choice.


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Too Much Data Is Toxic–Trend Followers Get This Terribly Important Principle Deep in Their Gut

An excerpt (source):

In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects —data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.

More:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal —which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.

More:

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.

Trend followers tackle the issues raised by Taleb by making their trading decisions off the market price. Boom–one piece of data for all of your trading decisions–price.

Article Source: Ritholtz.com.


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Wise Price Trading Words from William Eckhardt

From William Eckhardt:

“An important feature of our approach is that we work almost exclusively with price, past and current. One reason for this is that to make any progress in the early stages of quantitative investigation you usually have to reduce the relevant factors to one or two crucial variables. Price is definitely the variable traders live and die by, so it is the obvious candidate for investigation. The other reason is that in a system that’s making good use of price information, it is very difficult to add other information without degradation. Pure price systems are close enough to the North Pole that any departure tends to bring you farther south.”

Bill Eckhardt trader
The TurtleTrader Bill Eckhardt. Photograph from TurtleTrader.com

More from a conversation never heard on CNBC:

“Many systematic traders spend the majority of their time searching for good places to initiate. It just seems to be part of human nature to focus on the most hopeful point of the trading cycle. Our research indicated that liquidations are vastly more important than initiations. If you initiate purely randomly, you do surprisingly well with a good liquidation criterion. In contract, random liquidations will kill the best system.”

More from Pricetrader Bill Eckhardt can be found in my 2nd book.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
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Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
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About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

The Markets as ‘The Truman Show’

An excerpt I like:

“The Truman Show is a 1998 American comedy-drama…The film chronicles the life of a man who discovers he is living in a constructed reality soap opera, televised 24/7 to billions across the globe.”

Constructed reality soap opera? Our markets today!

Bottom line, from a trend trading perspective — price is king and follow it. But from a “what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-the-world-today” perspective — it is ‘The Truman Show’


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

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Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Close Enough to the North Pole

An excerpt from my Turtle book that I like:

No matter what ‘price’ is the variable that the great traders have lived and died by for decades. Making trading decisions more complicated than the simple heuristic of ‘price’ has always been problematic. Eckhardt knew it was hard to do much better: “Pure price systems are close enough to the North Pole that any departure tends to bring you farther south.”


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
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Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Trading Numbers, Not Markets

An excerpt from my book The Complete TurtleTrader:

Richard Dennis’s friend Tom Willis had learned long ago from Dennis why price, the philosophical underpinning of Donchian’s rule, was the only true metric to trust. He said, “Everything known is reflected in the price. I could never hope to compete with Cargill [today the world’s second-largest private corporation, with $70 billion in revenues for 2005], who has soybean agents scouring the globe knowing everything there is to know about soybeans and funneling the information up to their trading headquarters.” Willis added [when talking about trend followers], “They don’t know anything about bonds. They don’t know anything about the currencies. I don’t either, but I’ve made a lot of money trading them. They’re just numbers. Corn is a little different than bonds, but not different enough that I’d have to trade them differently. Some of these guys I read about have a different system for each [market]. That’s absurd. We’re trading mob psychology. We’re not trading corn, soybeans, or S&P’s. We’re trading numbers.”


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.