Postcard From the Laboratory

Place looks like a pack of wildebeests got loose. Printouts, charts, and poison dart frogs everywhere. Finishing a dangerous experiment putting the mellow into some fast signals. Final version of CMI just around the corner...yeah, I said final. Less appears to be more; reduced trades by 70% over last three years with best annual results ever. Backtesting can be a fickle beast so re-re-rechecking all data and forward-testing as I write. Putting finishing touches on a Coppock curve update for September in my spare time. Still can't understand why they don't spell Xanax with a "Z".

Temp agency sent over some help...



I'm scared. I don't think she likes monkeys.

Switching to de-caf, stat.

Take care,
Sig

There's a Monkey on the Wing

Not really. Since you might see an occasional "thinking" monkey in the left sidebar, it just reminded me of that Twilight Zone episode where that gremlin-monkey was scaring the spock out of a young pre-Captain Kirk.



What's a thinking monkey doing in the sidebar? Since the CMI is focused on a non-existent, long-term trend right now, and paying the price, I thought I would mix and match several of the indicators just to see if I could coerce the CMI to 'go with the flow' occasionally instead of stubbornly holding firm (which, unfortunately, is exactly what I wanted it to do a few months ago) .

In doing so, it occurred to me that the short term signals, the ones that are considered noise, were outperforming the rest. Makes sense in this type of market. To flatten the noise spikes (false signals), I combined a long indicator with a short indicator, in two places, using four indicators, and then scrapped the rest.

These four indicators are required to sit in a quiet room and discuss the path of least resistance until all agree on a QID or a QLD.

The raw results were good enough to peak my interest. I didn't go back in history very far, and won't clutter the page with reporting backtested results for now.

So without changing the current method mid-stream, I'll quietly track these results in the sidebar under the AlphaMonkey area for the next few months starting at the 6/27 buy signal.


I once spent an entire day trying to get an apple out of a jar by sticking my hand in there only to find that, with apple in hand, my hand would get stuck in jar. Finally, I learned that just by tipping the jar upside down, the apple would fall out.


Just in case you are wondering what the numbers below the monkey profile are...

QL062711/8341/141/141
070711

QL or QI = QLD or QID
062711 = date of signal
8341 = price of opening buy of QID or QLD ($83.41)
141 = gain or loss of current trade (14.1%)
141 = cumulative gain or loss (not including current trade) since the beginning of the year.***
070711 = last update

But that's just between us.

Note: ***- Update 7/29/11 after conducting backtest for year 2011.