Hi again
One thing that stood out to me, from mingling with the other attendees during the breaks (I guess there were around 150 maybe), was what stage people were at with their EA trading. It seemed a high proportion of those I spoke to (maybe a dozen or so) had not progressed from backtesting strategies to live trading. It seemed to me there's a psychological barrier there for many - maybe a confidence thing to take that next step.
Rick, yes the 3rd presenter spoke at length about the trade-off between number of variables and degree of optimisation versus robustness across markets and over time - the more variables and the more robust, the more specific the EA becomes to certain market conditions, which is fine if you also have a filter for those market conditions but not fine if you don't.
Zest, a common theme was risk and trade management targeting consistency of returns over maximising returns. As a result, from what I could see we are certainly not talking annual returns of 100's of %, it's more like 100% annual returns probably looks like an upper limit for consisent returns. I would say that excludes compounding - with compounding returns it can certainly be more - but they did touch on that and advocated some level of taking profits / dividends (again out of risk management) versus fully compounding returns. In terms of drawdown it was clear they were all targeting single digit figures, so 10% is an upper limit there.
Cheers, Sharks
