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Re: Waiting for the big one



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In a message dated 6/11/99 10:25:31 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
markbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

<< > Remember the thread earlier this month where people thought you should
 throw out the extraordinarily large gains when assessing a system's
 performance? I don't think you should. Those are the elephants you're
 hunting. If they never occur, you've got a system/tradable with no real
 upside potential.
 >
 > John >>

One of the problems with systems that depend on the big winners is that these 
winners are fairly rare in the historical data and that makes it too easy to 
curve fit a system to capture them.  However I would not fault a system that 
happened to capture some big winners while still being profitable without 
them.  

A good trading system should be able to survive by taking what the market 
happens to offer at the time, big or small.

When fishing, a smaller hook might catch big fish as well as some smaller 
ones.  If the smaller hook is strong enough to catch the big ones, why build 
a system with a hook that is too big?

Chuck

Chuck