Hedging models are either long or short and DO NOT add to positions as they unfold as is the case with Speculation

Trading v Socrates

Posted Dec 14, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Marty; All of these Robo trading plans are simply a flat model. Socrates is forecasting short and long term rather than just trading a flat model. Am I correct?

PT, Canada

ANSWER: Correct. The approach to modeling is traditionally flat. It will take one market and attempt to create a buy/sell model on that market exclusively to the exclusion of all other markets. This is the reason these flat models will blow up even such things as the Black & Scholls, which won the Noble Prize before it created the Long-Term Capital Management collapse in 1998. That is the subject of the book titled – When Genius Failed.

The flat model approach is a disaster. They will work for a while and the blow up BECAUSE they are incapable of grasping the wildcard contagion. That is what happened in the LTCM collapse. The illiquidity in the collapse of the Russian market led to the selling of all other markets to raise cash. There are plenty of people who are soliciting money claiming they have “mastered” our model. That is absolute nonsense because they are interjecting their own OPINION and that will be a guaranteed loss down the road. This requires NO OPINION and the fact that someone will try to supplement by writing reports on markets shows they are basing their trading on opinion.

Here is the Euro traded by Socrates just using Reversals without cycles from a pure hedging perspective. There is a huge difference between being more active using short and long-term Reversals. Hedging models are either long or short and DO NOT add to positions as they unfold as is the case with Speculation.

The Speculation models also differ depending upon using just the long-term Reversals and if you use both the Short and Long-Term.

In both instances, this is using the Weekly Level of activity. You can step back and use just the Monthly level. The trading performance will vary differently depending on what your objectives are.

Obviously, anyone soliciting model trying to claim they are using Socrates are just not telling the truth. They will inject their own OPINION and that will override everything.

We are reviewing REPUTABLE firms that will use our model WITHOUT interjecting OPINION. During the 1987 Crash when the Brady Commission investigated what they thought was caused by computer trading, the discovered that the computers were right, the traders did not follow them.