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by thunky 1381 days ago
> Vix Futures came out in 2004 but the earliest intraday per-contract data publicly available is in 2009

According to https://firstratedata.com/i/futures/VX, VIX intraday is available starting 5-Aug-2008. But your chart starts April 2009, which is the exact bottom of the bear market.
1 comments
pyrrhotech 1381 days ago
Right, but as it mentions there, "Continuous data is from 5-Aug-2008 , Individual contracts start with VXF09 (March 2009)". To calculate the Vix Futures curve, our models need the individual contract intraday breakdown not just the intraday data for the front-month contract. I'm sure this data exists somewhere but I haven't found anyone willing to sell it to me. If you do, please let me know!

I can assure you that there's no conspiracy to start the models right at the start of the last bull market, and I'd be elated to get my hands on the data for this as well as a couple other indicators that don't stretch back as far. Though there is no guarantee, market volatility, bear markets and general downturns are actually the conditions that enable the models to outperform. During buy signals which can be quite lengthy in periods of low volatility during bull markets, the returns are exactly equivalent to buy & hold.

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thunky 1380 days ago
You must just be really lucky then because I see this at the top of one of the posts you shared (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pyrrhotech&next=3012...):

I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual return

April 2020, the exact bottom of the covid bear.

Not saying you're lying, and I don't know enough to be smart about the subject and I haven't read through your material, but it seems like a magic trick...

Your performance chart is misleading, I think, because it looks like it's showing hypothetical growth of an investment made in 2009 like we would normally expect from any other fund performance chart. Your site event says "$100,000 invested in the model at inception would have grown to $39,196,370". But your model was not investable until very recently. So it's essentially untested. The real performance numbers aren't anywhere close to that.

For this reason I think it would be fair call this out and to distinguish between the two types of trades shown on the chart: backward vs forward looking. Of course everyone would expect the backward looking trades to be impressive. The forward looking trades have already shown signs of weakness. It will be interesting to see how it does in the next few years.

Bottom line: this seems no different to me than someone producing a model that uses Jim Cramer recommendations as input to predict stock moves, fits it to produce near perfect historical trades", and then promotes their 60% CAGR as if it was real and actionable.

Good luck to you anyway.

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