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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Jagernauth who wrote (6321)	11/29/1998 4:06:00 PM
From: Jack Park	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18928

Hi Jack Ought not to say that, lest some airport guard see it :-) I am most definitely not saying that FTers lose money, though on reflection, that does appear to be implicit in what you quoted. Don Bell, for example, was making lots of money and, so far as I can tell, still is. As you recall, he perfected a switching strategy based on a moving average, and just between two different funds. One of them, Fid financial, did well during the bull all by itself. I built a spreadsheet and ran his algorithm on nearly all the funds in the FT database and it seemed to only work on that fund. Not a very robust approach, but if used properly, seems to work well. I have observed friends using FT, swapping schemes, and always changing strategies just in time to lose money. It does seem that if one is fairly rigerous, if not religious, about finding a strategy that works for you, it really is possible for FT to make lots of gains in funds. Among the many words of wisdom in the books about trading wizards, I especially see failure in the area of consistency. On that point, it would seem that AIM lays out, as Tom rightly says, a business plan; one you can afford to stay with. It is, however, my guess that it is a business plan that does not guarantee 25% gains each year. That's because it violates one of the other points of wisdom: let your winners run. AIM trades that for a bit of security in the sense that it enforces a timing strategy that sometimes is great, and sometimes tosses money away. So, one might axe <gg> "how does one avoid tossing money away?" Tom has answered that one by suggesting being slow to trade (say weekly or monthly), which is a great way to let the winners run a little bit longer. I have been curious, and intend to try one of the approaches used in TA, oscillators, to suggest if it is still safe to let a winner run. Eventually, you might see all your previous buys go into the profit zone and you can then begin to unload them. Who knows? It's just a little curiosity of mine. Perhaps there's already wisdom on this group that could shed light on the idea. Cheers, Jack