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iSigma Systems Home FAQ Search Contact Us About Us Free Trial blank About Home Client Services Why We're Different Faq Search System Trend Analysis Money Management Fractal System System Performance Forex Signals Resources Article Archive Links Books Contact Info Free Trial Email Us Mailing Address Order Now              Welcome to iSigma3 Jan 2005, New Article: Why Not Fundamentals?The financial press is once again confused about the direction of the USD. The same news outfit released this and this only a matter of hours apart. Two stories, two sets of fundamental data to explain two different directional guesses, in less than five hours. Did the dollar's fundamentals really change that much in a matter of hours? No one knows. We don't pretend to know or care what fundamentals were influencing the dollar during the course of one morning. Instead, we rely on a system that focuses in on what is actually happening to the price of the dollar. News stories may be of interest to economic hostorians, but they play no role in our approach to trading. Click here to view article.27 Dec 2004, New Article: Common Misconceptions in TradingWe can't begin to list every possible error that traders might make, but certain misconceptions continue to resurface again and again. This article describes money management errors, misapplication of statistical measures such as correlation and covariance, problems with pyramiding positions, and commonly overlooked opportunities for diversification. Click here to view article.16 Dec 2004, New Article: Which Fractal System?Visitors to this site may have noticed that there are many other systems around which call themselves fractal trading systems. We don't deny that these systems might have some feature which justifies calling them fractal systems, as opposed to just being another set of techniques for technical analysis. But is any of this stuff any good? Click here to view article.21 Nov 2004, New Article: The Perfect System?If a trading strategy works well, this will motivate so many people to use it that the potential for profit is arbitraged away, right? Not even close. Most investors are influenced more by emotion than by a pursuit of absolute returns over time. If the returns to a particular trading strategy have a high level of near term variability, the traders using the strategy will be too few to exhaust its profitability. Consider the following quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "There is a structure of payoff on Wall Street and in this city [London] as well that has nothing to do with the true process, the stochastic process, only the perception of the stochastic process." Click here and scroll to question number three to hear the quote in context. Despite the forbidding mathematical terminology, Taleb is right on point. If a method doesn't bring in money every day of the week, the big firms won't touch it no matter how good the absolute return.Master trader David Druz has expressed a similar point of view. He writes, "The more robust a system, the more volatile it tends to be! This is because robust systems are not optimized to particular markets or market conditions. The converse is also true. You can design systems with excellent returns and low volatility on historical testing, but which work only for given periods in given markets. These systems tend to be curve-fit or market-fit and are not robust." This quote comes from his article available here.When ads for systems boast of low variability of returns, that ought to be seen as a caution light, at least. Countless vendors advertise "holy grail" systems with nearly perfect records of identifying market turning points. What would happen if there were such a perfect trading method and why don't the same kinds of things happen to profitable but imperfect methods such as ours? Click here to view article.5 Nov 2004, New Sample Alerts, USD/CAD In The NewsA new sample newsletter is available here. Be sure to check out these sample newsletters often, as they are updated regularly.CBC News and the Montreal Gazette are reporting the surge in the Canadian Dollar versus the U.S. Dollar, confirming the content of the Aug 17 edition of our forex newsletter.Meanwhile, the Barclay Currency Traders Index is improving due to the new trends in several currencies. A few months back, the index was down by more than 4%. Now that number is closer to 3%, providing hedge fund investors with some hope that the recent drawdown is nearing an end. Subscribers to the iSigma newsletter, on the other hand, are currently sitting on open profits of more than 30% and with the hard profits from current trades, the last 13 month period has been a profitable one. 8 Sept 2004, Another Nail in the Coffin for EMHIn this article from the Mises Institute, economist Stephan M. I. Karlsson adds to the growing body of insights debunking the ever popular efficient market hypothesis. This article couldn't have come at a better time, reminding systematic traders to stick to their guns despite the frustrations associated with technical trading during the recent uncertainty in the markets.4 Aug 2004, New Article: Volatility and ProfitsSo many times, the financial press makes ridiculous remarks about volatility. Consider this example from a nationally syndicated columnist. He writes,If $100 gained 30 percent in even years and lost 10 percent in odd ones, it would grow to about $480 in 20 years... If it grew 10 percent every year, you'd end up with about $673.Volatility is bad.We beg to differ. Click here to view article.2 Aug 2004, Financial Press Confused AgainOnly a few weeks ago, the financial press was reporting that rising oil prices were the cause of falling prices in the U.S. equities markets. Now it seems that even if oil is making new highs, stocks can continue to rise so long as Verizon can post impressive earnings. The point? That no one should take this stuff seriously. All markets, stocks, bonds, options, commodities and currencies move up and down. When prices change, analysts at all of the major news agencies try to speculate after the fact as to what caused the move. And they are nearly always wrong! Even so, countless investors trust these same analysts to predict before the fact how prices will respond to news. At iSigma, we have a different approach. If anything important is happening in the market, our system lets us know what to do, including the point at which we'll take back our position and the size of the position we'll trade. A few weeks after that, we'll see the story hit the news along with someone else'e guess at why the price just moved.29 July 2004, New Article: Staying on the SidelinesIn order to make money in the market, you have to be in the market, right? This article discusses the importance of staying on the sidelines from time to time as well as different techniques for determining whether to be in or out. The key to success in trading is to work from models that keep you out of the market whenever appropriate but get you in when the time is right. Click here to view article.15 July 2004, New Article: Skeptical?From time to time, people make comments expressing doubt about our approach to markets, technical analysis or active trading in general. We can't possibly begin to address all of the different arguments we hear from these skeptics, but some of these ideas have been in circulation so long that people have begun to take them as fact. Just to keep things in perspective, we'll take a closer look at some of these skeptics' own claims. Click here to view article.12 July 2004, New Article: Avoid the ScamsIt's an unfortunate fact of life that there are scam artists in every industry. While the actual products of the scam artist are never very good, scam artist marketing pitches are always of the highest quality. This article explains several common scams and how to spot them. Click here to view article.9 July 2004, New Sample Alerts, Performance DataA new sample newsletter is available here as well as performance data comparing the iSigma portfolio with some other popular investment vehicles. Be sure to check out these sample newsletters often, as they are updated regularly.3 July 2004, New Article: Why Fractals?All trading is based on some kind of model and the ability of that model to explain market behavior is the determining factor of trading success. At iSigma, our approach to the markets comes from a model based on fractal geometry. Why should a trading approach be based on a fractal model and how should that translate into a practical method for trading? Click here to view article.17 June 2004, More Fed Talk, Swiss Nat'l Bank Raises RatesThe Swiss National Bank has made what the financial press is calling an "unexpected" move to adjust interest rates. What's so unexpected? The CHF has been making strong gains against other currencies recently. Traders who were long the Franc, as was the iSigma portfolio, made money. What better indication could there have been that some change in the fundamentals was taking place but hadn't made it to the presses yet? Analysts following the Fed are still trying to get their story together. Now the consensus seems to be that Greenspan will be raising rates, just not as quickly as expected due to optimistic data about price inflation. Of course there's really no need to read the financial news to figure out that there is uncertainty regarding the USD. The only significant price movement in the dollar pairs has been from other currencies undergoing strong moves of their own. 14 June 2004, New Sample Alerts, Performance DataA new sample newsletter is available here as well as performance data comparing the iSigma portfolio with some other popular investment vehicles. Be sure to check out these sample newsletters often, as they are updated regularly.6 June 2004, If At First You Don't Succeed...Remember about a month ago when all the analysts were sure the Fed would raise rates? So they were wrong, but who could blame them? Making accurate predictions is hard. Fortunately predictions are reusable. You just keep making the same prediction until you get it right. Meanwhile, the Australian Dollar has been taking quite a plunge while the Swiss Franc posts new gains. Guess how the iSigma portfolio currently stands on these currencies...10 May 2004, All That GlittersIt wasn't all that long ago that there were ads for gold everywhere. Magazines and radio stations were filled with advertisements from dealers selling gold coins, sometimes at several times the market price commensurate to their weight. Of course many people were willing to buy gold at a premium because the marketing hype said that the price was bound to go up during the coming period of long overdue inflation. A lot of those ads seem to have disappeared recently.As gold continues to make new lows, we at iSigma can only begin to imagine the disappointment now facing those who bought in to the hype. We have no idea how far this trend will go, but in all likelihood, there are still countless gold "investors" hanging on to coins and bars purchased when gold was trading at more than $400. As the market falls to their pain threshold, they'll sell off too, driving the price further downward.The real lesson to learn from all of this isn't that gold isn't as shiny as people once thought. It's that there are no sure things, just realistic expectations and sound methods of managing risk. As gold falls, the dollar continues to rise yielding further advances to the iSigma forex portfolio. And unlike the gold hype, if this trend should reverse itself again, subscribers to our newsletters will already have a plan in place to deal with that as well.5 May 2004, No Change From FedAs this article describes, the Fed elected to keep rates where they currently are for the time being, contrary to the expectations of many analysts and investors. Since rates didn't actually change, this may seem like a nonevent. However, there are two lessons to be learned here. Number one, nearly everyone who makes a living looking at financial data seemed sure that the Fed would raise rates. Considering that even the most talented analysts got this one wrong, is it really wise to risk one's money on strategies which involve trying to predict fundamental data? Number two, the Fed carefully chose the word measured, to describe its intended future plans. In other words, Greenspan and Co. intend to continue the practice of using month old reports which summarize several months old data as the basis for their decisions, the same strategy which provided the economic conditions conducive to the 1990s NASDAQ boom, the subsequent bust and the inflationary trend in the dollar. Let there be no doubt as to what sort of strategies will best take advantage of the chaotic markets ahead.1 May 2004, New Sample Newsletter AvailableA new sample newsletter is available here. Be sure to check out these sample newsletters often, as they are updated regularly.24 Feb 2004, New Article: Money Management TrapsSound money management strategy is a vital component to a successful trading endeavor. This article discusses several common misconceptions surrounding the issue of money management, as well as reasons such practices must inevitably fail. Click here to view article.22 Jan 2004, New Article: Implications of a Random WalkRandom walk theory (RWT) proponents believe that if the RWT is correct, it would be impossible to trade profitably based on price data. In this article, we suspend our questions regarding the RWT to question the conclusion that the RWT implies that trading based on price data can not be profitable. Recently updated. Click here to view article.19 Jan 2004, New Article: Are Markets Efficient?By far, the most popular theory in the study of capital markets is the Efficient Market Hypothesis. For almost half a century, the EMH has been used as a starting point for studies on investment management, diversification, and risk control. Is the widespread acceptance of the EMH justified? Click here to view article.15 Dec 2003, Fundamentals Contradict Technicals Re: EuroThe fundamentals just aren't looking good for the Euro lately, with the negative outcome of recent talks. See here for more details. No doubt a lot of speculators will be getting into bearish positions on news of instability. Our response: the system is currently long the Euro pairs. We follow the system.28 November 2003, Buffet and Soros See It Our WayAccording to this article, celebrities Warren Buffet and George Soros have recently taken short positions in the US Dollar. We're glad to have them with us in this trade and hope that their war chests will offset the effects of not establishing the position when we did, two months ago. Just another case of the markets predicting the news.22 September 2003, Yet Another Mutual Fund Scandal. Yawn.Mutual funds are the safe way to invest, right? Wrong. Scandals so far in the mutual fund industry: too many. Scandals so far among iSigma subscribers who manage their own trades: 0. Note the date of the Reuters report and the date of the Time article it refers to. Seems like the industry watchdogs can't even report a scandal without some cooked numbers. |
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