And as expected, both of my 2 young kids went all out making cards, drawings and wrapping gifts. It was a great day.
At some stage during the day though, we got into a tickle fight, because they wouldn’t admit I was the best dad in the world (jokingly of course!).
I asked them if I was the best dad, and when they replied ‘No’ I tickled them non-stop for 5 seconds.
Under the arms. On the ribs. On the neck. It drove them crazy.
They were laughing out loud, wriggling and screaming, and begging me to stop. So I stopped for a few seconds to see if they agreed I was the best dad. When they replied ‘No’ I tickled them again for a few seconds.
That happened a few more times until they couldn’t take it anymore and finally agreed. And once I heard them say yes, I pretended not to hear them and gave them a final double-dose of tickles before I stopped.
It was torture, but they loved it!
Unfortunately, a more serious form of torture is used by traders every day when developing strategies.
They have an idea for a trading strategy, so they test it out.
It doesn’t give them the result they want so they add a filter and try again.
If it still doesn’t produce the result they’re looking for so they add another filter or optimize the filter parameters and check the results.
This can go on and on until either 1) the tortured strategy gives the trader the answer they’re looking for (the father’s day strategy!), or 2) the trader finally gives up torturing the strategy to death and moves onto something else, only to continue the torture.
Have you ever done that? I did, early in my trading career. And I think most traders are probably guilty of it too, often unintentionally.
So how do we stop the torture?
What can we do to make sure we find truly robust strategies more likely to work in the future than a strategy we’ve tortured to death?
Well, there are a couple of ways, and in the Oct 2020 issue of “The Empowered Trader Club” newsletter, Tomas shares an approach that isn’t so well known.
It’s called “Parameter-less filters”, and they’re special types of filters that can reduce the curve-fitting (torture) of trading strategies because they have NO input parameters to optimize.
Unfortunately, lots of traders don’t know what they are or how to use them, so Tomas shares his top 3 “parameter-less filter” techniques with “The Empowered Trader” club this month, including code and before vs after backtest results.
If you’re already a member of “The Empowered Trader” club, look out for it in the next few weeks.
If you’re not a member yet, join here to secure your copy now.
Andrew
PS: When you join “The Empowered Trader” club, you also get these free bonuses:
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But it’s about to close. You can get more details here.