[bko]

I'm very skeptical of systems that claim to help with trading signals. Primarily because if you had a system, then you would use it yourself. Trading is pretty much a zero sum game especially when it comes to signals. If you had a profitable signal and you publicized it, it would disappear almost immediately.

If your performance is correct and you're getting 200% per year, why sell the sauce for $20 a month?

I would just post the historical and open trades. Charge a subscription if you want to get exactly when you're selling them, otherwise release them on a few week lag to incentivize subscription. But give the rest away for free as you want others to pile in to your trade.

[wolfman1]

This is typically true for day trading signal services. I'm very skeptical of them too. I've tried many of them and none worked for me. There are a lot of scams.

The best model I tried was from The Technical Traders. They offer a trend based model for SPX/QQQ and they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now.

We were inspired by their service and wanted to take a modern spin on trend based models with a more affordable price point (they charge $2500yr).

Trend changes don't happen all that frequently. Therefore, they wont disappear immediately either. Timing trend changes correctly can make a huge difference.

[fasthands9]

Even then you have to be careful.

It would be trivially easy to build an algo that beats the market 90% of years but 10% has huge losses. Just construct a slightly levered portfolio, with some protection against minor losses, but totally exposed to big losses.

If you sold that, it would appear like its working for awhile and you'd probably have lots of trusted customers by the time it fails.

(I'm a bit cynical, I worked in finance briefly, and I realized the fund we were selling to investors was essentially this)

[ImPostingOnHN]

> The best model I tried was from The Technical Traders. They offer a trend based model for SPX/QQQ and they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now.

- Has that been independently verified?

- Have they only been trading for 10 years?

- How do we make sure this isn't a case of chance + survivorship bias?

[wolfman1]

Not sure, but I personally used their service for 2y and they're the real deal. Looks like they've been around since 2008. So almost 20y now. The main guy that runs it (Chris V) is top notch. I'm not affiliate with them in anyway but I would highly recommend their service to anyone.

[ImPostingOnHN]

- From where, then, did you get the info that "they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now"?

- What does "they're the real deal" mean?

- Two years is not enough to test a strategy like this. 20 years would be better better, but it sounds like they already did that and the strategy fails half the time (hence the 10-year claim)? Does it fail randomly, or did they market a strategy that worked for the first 10 years, then didn't, and now have a new strategy with the same claims?

I'm asking these questions because people usually work hard for their money, and when someone makes (or relays) a claim that they can consistently multiply it better than expected, skepticism and scrutiny is imperative.

[wolfman1]

They're the real deal means they're not a scam.

I don't know everything about their business. I recommend just looking at their website. They've been in business for nearly 20y and have consistently outperformed buy & hold.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> they're not a scam.

Nobody explicitly said it was a scam, just that the claims are questionable and unverified. There's certainly no shortage of people on the internet who claim to have a get-rich-quicker-than-average scheme with claims exactly along these lines. Obviously those claims should be verified.

> I recommend just looking at their website.

A random website can't be trusted as an unbiased source about itself. I did check their website, but couldn't find anything there regarding your claims that was independently verified.

> [Chris has] consistently outperformed buy & hold [for 10+ years].

This is literally one of the most common hook/marketing lines from investment advice "businesses"/scammers.

---> Where did you learn this? <---

---> How do you know it is true? <---

^--- These questions should be answered if one wishes to avoid scams, just as a general life rule.

> They've been in business for nearly 20y

If Chris has been in business for 20 years, and Chris' strategy has worked for 10 of those years, that means Chris' strategy works 50% the time.

Thus, even if the claims of beating the market for 10 out of 20 years were true, that could be easily explained by random chance.

[IAmGraydon]

Of course it’s a scam. The product they’re selling is hope, not actual trading intelligence.

[wolfman1]

Care sharing how you came to that conclusion? We've been completely transparent about everything we've built since the start. And our trades are transparent as well.

[IAmGraydon]

This is simple economics. As someone else stated, if this worked at all, you would have poured all of your resources into investing your own money or starting a fund to manage others' money. If you could beat the market by just 5%, you would be a billionaire within a very short amount of time as everyone would bring you their money. Instead, you decided to build a website and sell it to others for $20 per month. Surely as someone so knowledgeable in markets, you realize that selling something so valuable for so little would not happen.

I stand by my statement - your product is false hope and is a scam, as all of these systems are. Some sucker who doesn't understand that the best move is to just buy the broad market an hold reads your marketing, buys it, and pays you. What you've sold him is certainly not the ability to make more money. You and I know he won't do that unless by pure luck. What you've sold him is a sense of hope that he will make money, and the ones who often fall for this do so because they've gotten themselves into financial problems with trading and want to believe that this is the system that will fix it all for them. That hope is a very addictive drug that will last as long as he can hold on to the lie.

If you're ok with that being your business model, that's your right. It isn't illegal. In my opinion, however, our society is completely overloaded with people who take advantage of others while adding zero value.