Traders Roundtable: Maximum Compounded Return Versus Fear of Drawdown

In a recent traders roundtable discussion on the subject of balancing maximum gain with risk management the question was posed how to reconcile these two issues. A few definitions for the purposes of this essay are in order.

First let’s consider maximum compounded return to be defined as a system that is traded at every viable opportunity at the maximum level of acceptable risk with profits that are rolled into the total portfolio and with maximum acceptable risk in leveraging the markets money. This definition allows us to stay within natural risk limits but operate the machine as close to the red line of sustainable performance as possible.

Now let’s consider the fear of drawdown to be defined as the natural human response to operating power tools or heavy equipment in a dangerous setting as close to the edge as possible with full recognition of the consequences implied of potentially catastrophic failure. The human mind is capable of creating shades of distinction between various perceived levels of risk and these degrees of perception vary by individual. Some people are fully physically capable of walking within 5 feet of the edge of the balcony where as others can go right up to the edge and peer over and still remain in full normal natural control of their reactions. For each person though there is a line beyond which you judge that you are in dangerous territory in that extraordinary measures of protection and care must be taken because of the increased risk.

I am certain that there is a lot of evolutionary biology involved inside our brains which had to face this exact challenge on every front in prehistoric times or more technically, in the era of evolutionary adaptation. Even the most primitive caveman was certainly capable of appreciating the pay off of killing a mammoth for the future of survival needs of the tribe. And yet that same caveman was fully aware of the danger to himself that he took by stocking the huge beast. Sharpened by fear and hunger in the visions of a plentiful tomorrow, each caveman had to reconcile distention in some fashion and the successful ones passed on their adaptations to countless generations. This manifests itself in modern times in any place where risk and reward are brought together and we asked humans to make a balanced trade-off decision.

In every significant situation, and by significant I mean where impactful money is being rest for an impactful reward, the brain is flooded with chemicals which trigger flight or fight responses and invoke millions of years of stored up collective unconsciousness which shape and color our decisions and effectiveness of implementing those decisions. Trading is no different.

My sense is that for long-term safety and survival and given a trading system that generates a significant number of opportunities that long-term survival should drive us towards finding the minimum level of risk with which to trade to meet our specific financial goals. For those whose goal is expressed as maximum compounded rate of return, I suggest they are more likely than not to push it past the red line and come crashing down.

Without an appreciation of the real cost and friction associated with long-term trading in multiple market conditions that require constant adaptation is too easy to extrapolate the results of a few successful trades into next taxation that is far from being achievable. These false expectations are more likely than not to add to the level of stress and further degrade performance. My sense is that minimum risk levels rather than maximum risk levels are appropriate place to begin your inquiry into long-term trading as a potential career.

Therefore, I strongly suggest that you start with ways to use part-time small position sizing trading and learn to supplement your current income at your current standard of living and proceed in small stages, and getting larger only when supported by the evidence of long-term performance. It’s an incremental approach, it does not generate lottery size winds, but it will keep you in the game while you’re learning and keep your feet planted firmly on the ground.

Testing the Word 2007 Blog publishing template

This is to see how things come through when written in Word 2007 and pushed to the blog site.

Here is a sample picture:

 

Am wondering how tags and categories are handled?

Traders roundtable discussion: the issue of optimization in research

We were having a traders’ roundtable discussion on the topic of researching potential trading systems and the issue of optimization came up. This is a very important topic for traders who want to apply a systematic approach to trading markets. Here are some of the highlights of that discussion for you to consider as you prepare your trading strategies.

Typically when we think of optimization for a trading system we are looking at a process that incorporates multiple variables, parameters with different settings possible and perhaps a number of market filters or conditions which taken together with an exit strategy give us a multitude of ways to trade a particular concept or idea.

It normally begins with an idea the trader has based on insights fromtheory or from reflective practice where he believes the system gives a persistent advantage compared to the average market return  of simply buying and holding. It is also possible however that the edge may come from a brute force data mining operation that finds a statistical edge in some combination of market conditions. In other words, the insight comes from the result of massive computations and not from an intuitive or academic insight.

In either case , what we have is a system of multiple components, each of which can vary, and on an initial pass through with middle-of-the-road parameter settings we find a persistent edge in multiple markets with a statistical significance. Human nature being what it is, we would want to start testing different parameter settings for each component in order to determine the best mix for the most robust return and to find which of the parameters seem to have the most power when it comes to influencing the results. In statistics, this general approach is called factor analysis or principal component analysis.

In theory, you would want to find the absolute maximum return by finding the absolute optimum setting for each of the possible parameters and then take that into the market to begin trading. Taken to an extreme, this can produce a phenomenon of curve fitting or over optimization. What you can end up with is a system that would be perfect for the unique set of data conditions of the test. The problem of course is that the future may not ever show you that same data set again in your over optimize system will under perform much to your surprise.

The usual response to this phenomenon is to conduct testing with out of sample data. In other words designing the system on one data set and refining it to a certain degree and then testing it on a completely new set of market data to see if the edge persists. If you were systems development practice find you always discarding your systems after the out of sample test, it probably occurs as a result of over optimization.

In practice then, we want to find the trade-off between robustness of performance in multiple market conditions with out of sample testing that yields a persistent advantage in multiple market conditions but without trying to overturn the system for ideal conditions.

A way to keep this systematic approach in tune is to continue to monitor performance in a feed-forward approach that examines actual trading results to see how the performance results compare to the test and confirmation performance curves.

The bottom line: the more you rely on automatic trading systems, the more important your research and validation process becomes since you will not be using inexperienced traders override protocol to keep you from going off the deep end.

The future of education in a net-centric world

reinventinglife.org 

Surveys of CEOs and futurists alike all agree that the future is calling to us with a need for open systems, open thinking, collaborative organizations, workplaces and attitudes.  Net-centric  democratic education,  public and private movements for social justice, moral and honorable business enterprises,  and cross cultural communications all place a premium on skills, tools, and attitudes that encourage and multiply the network effect.

Doctoral research should reflect this same willingness to push boundaries, and encourage the use of collaborative teams of researchers and practitioners to explore collaborative theory and practice. If collaboration works in practice, there needs to be a theory of collaborative action, and the research in support of that practice should reflect the same principles as the work itself.

Like all new movements, there is a bootstrap problem when you try to go beyond conception into first action.  How do you create the initial conditions to generate the spark of collaboration which can ignite the passion and energy of research teams? The words sound good, but we need a place to try it on for size; We need supportive yet challenging places to discover, invent , develop and propagate the  best practices and techniques of collaborative knowledge creation.  We need places to test our theories, tell our stories and plan for the next cycle.

Dr Alana James’ growing community of practice at reinventinglife.org, centered on the principles and techniques of Participatory Action Research, is just such a node. It serves as an incubator for researchers and doctoral students seeking to develop the net-centric research effect. It goes beyond dry academic reports of practice, by being a live and vibrant laboratory for discovering, applying and reporting on the “theory-in-use” of open education.

It is a combination of challenging questions, a tool repository for new applications of digital learning and research, and is creating a circle of multiple competencies that will support  spin-off collaborations in a variety of settings that will propagate waves of change throughout the network like waves in a pond.

Dr James’ leadership in this area is paving a way for new approaches to research and practice and is exactly the kind of practice which needs support and recognition. She has the vision to imagine revolutionary positive changes in the world around her, the moral courage to invest in encouraging the Voices of students and co-researchers as we work to define and realize that future, and the skills to lead and encourage that change.

when post-positivism meets uncertainty

I am thinking about trying to figure out how to conduct research “properly” in the regions beyond the boundary of post-positivism.

Think of a farm that now borders the deep dark woods.

In the beginning we have a farm, surrounded by other farms, and over time, we haved figured out through trial and error, what works, even considering how variable the weather may be. The trial and error has been so successful that we have codified it into formal science and our success grew by leaps and bounds.

our farm now has expanded and on the border we encounter a deep, dark forest, whose boundaries we cannot see, only glimpse, and in whose depths we can see only shadows.

The farmland is the land where positivism and post-positivism excel. We are able to reduce and analyze problems and rely on the rules of cause and effect and the power of math to find answers and produce reliable solutions. It’s a land wherein all things are knowable.

In the forest, however, things change so much that our old rules don’t seem to apply. Things change faster there, unpredicatably, sometimes as if by chance, and at other times by rules that only sometimes seem to make sense, and the ruules seem to change as soon as we write them down. There are plenty of things we don’t yet understand. There seem to be things that are essentially unknowable. This is the land of complexity and chaos, where new rules sets are tentative and unproven. William Poundstone has written powerfully about these kinds of paradoxes in his book Labyrinths of Reason. The Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico researches this area in a scholarly manner.

It turns out that the epistemology of the farmland breaks down in the land of the forest. At the same time, the emerging rulesets of the forest don’t perform as well when you bring them into the farmland, because they are too tentative and uncertain, and in the farmland efficiency and certainty can be achieved and are rewarded.

People who would explore the forest know a lot less about that region than the people who explore the farmland know about the farms, and sometimes they talk past each other because they are coming from 2 different epistemologies, which in turn can create a disconnect at the ontological level itself (ie the nature of the world).

My sense is that in the “forest” of complexity, chaos and uncertainty, that mixed methods are going to be absolutely essential when it comes to developing an understanding of how to stay alive and thrive out there.

As we grow in knowledge we are able to push the boundaries of the farm out into the forest. everything that is coming out of the study of the science of complexity and uncertainty and chaos, however, suggests that there is some vast amount of forest that must remain out there beyond our ability to “domesticate” with the power of post-positivism.

This doesn’t disrespect post-positivism and all the good that it can do, it only says that the world is stranger than we CAN imagine so far, and that in the forest a different world view is useful.

The Sante Fe folks have a combination of pragmatism and constructionism threaded throughout their work, while at the same time having a deep and abiding respect for science and scientific method, as evidenced by the Nobel laureates they have on staff

what's your judgement on the state of the farm vs forest discussion? i pick #2

reflecting on the forest past the boundary of post-positivism

Creswell talks about the 4 worldviews that shape the  research goals, objectives, methods, interpretive measures, and sense making of researchers.  I inherited a post-positivist outlook from my formative years working in a machine shop with designers, engineers, craftsmen,  and other shop rats. My years of experience as a planner in the Army helped me appreciate the pragmatic worldview, which drives you to focus on results by any means necessary and without an overly strict compulsion to stay committed to a particular method, at the cost perhaps of sacrificing deep understanding or the pursuit of Truth.

I have rejected advocacy as a legitimate worldview for most of my life, with the exception of the values of freedom and democracy, as I am unwilling to committ on faith to untested beliefs, and have witnessed how advocacy can lead people to distort findings and spin results.

Constructivism seems more and more useful to me as I investigate social situations and complex human problems and opportunities.

The doctoral program is really helping me examine my beliefs and knowledge claims, and I have seen the positive results in my teaching that have emerged fron the cycles of reflective learning.

I have hit a tipping point where I must begin the convergent writing and thinking that will result in the dissertation, and it is with some sadness that I recognize that I have to put some of the divergent thinking aside in order to focus on task accomplishment.  This part of the journey wont be as much fun. I wish I could just push a button and get thru it and get back to scouting new knowledge areas which is how i prefer to spend every waking moment, in order to feed my dreams.

an exercise in “sense-making”: grappling with “design” and “planning”

a number of faculty and officers gathered around a whiteboard to try to create their own practical sense of the distinction and relationship between design and planning.  The series of diagrams reflected in the image unfolded over a discussion of several hours as we tried to connect the doctrinal and scholarly terms to our own words and experiences, to forge a link of meaning between doctrine and practice.

New feature: indexed links to Youtube videos

I should have done this a long time ago. I created 2 new pages on the blog to collect an indexed list of the videos of mini-lectures for my doctoral research and my Army classroom professional stories. These will be a more organized way to layout a menu of choices for students and interested parties to view my stuff in the areas of force management and force sustainment.

I have probably a hundred refined little speeches I tend to give in various classes that reflect my best practices from my active duty service, but also some things that have emerged as refinements in the schoolhouse through engagement with the great officers who share their perspectives of the war and discuss theory and practice.

I find myself in class hurrying at times to squeeze these in, out of a sense of duty. It’s not always good pedagogy and it would be nice maybe to let the students know about them ahead of time so that we can engage in dialogues of their choosing based on their needs instead of always doing what I want to do.

Time to relinquish the mike a little more? here is a way to offer my humble “greatest hits” and let them follow their interest.

There maybe some value add for my fellow instructors too on my areas of competence, since our faculty are responsible for a wide range of areas; so wide in fact that they don’t have direct personal experience in all of the fields.

Example:our faculty teach sustainment lessons at strategic, operational and tactical levels of war; they cover maintenance, transportation, supply, medical, personal, explosive ordnance disposal, band, finance, personnel, contracting, and all elements of force management; design, plans and operations; Joint and army support operations; plus whatever their elective course specialties are. faculty development programs are an important area of concern for us.

that’s a pretty full plate, so perhaps these videos can be of some help to them as well.

Lifting our voices: a reflection on Voice in curriculum, in doctoral research, in life

“Lifting our voices” by Ken Long     (PAR journal entry J20090724.doc)

In this essay I will describe a construct we are calling “Voice”, my background, my research, and some implications for the doctoral research process in general and how it is affecting Dr Alana and me in our mentor-mentee relationship.

I am a retired Army officer, in my 7^th year teaching at the US Army Command & General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth KS. In a series of  Participatory Action Research (PAR) cycles, we determined that our most interesting question was; “What happens when we increase “Voice” in the college?”

We defined “Voice” as a construct that encompassed all manners and methods of formal and informal dialogue with respect to the curriculum, the environment, the policies, procedures and classrooms of our college by any member of educational community. It includes what is said and implied, the reactions, the dialogue, the consequences, and the effects on infrastructure and policy.

We are interested in this question because it affects more than just students and faculty, but many people in our society and in our Army; it touchs what we teach, how we teach, and how we decide. It evokes powerful archetypes and icons of our culture like freedom of speech, speaking truth to power, “speaking out”, raising our voices, “testifying”, story-telling; it tests our assumptions about our strong traditional military hierarchy and the nature and process of educating leaders for work in the modern complex, uncertain world. In short, it is an intersection of many interesting cross sections of our layers of society and speaks to who we are as people in various roles. It puts the question to us: How do you respond to the Truth of others?.

The seed crystal for this concept emerged from the  earliest mentor- mentee discussions between Dr Alana and me, beginning with the idea of Personal Learning Environment movement and the uniquely suitable PAR method of helping students and faculty define these PLEs in each situation. As a new concept in open education,  I started looking at the ripple effect of this concept unfolding from  the center of PAR discussions into the widest reaches of the college, and eventually the construct of Voice came into being as a result of ongoing PAR discussion and inquiry.

One of the PAR outcomes for me was to document the change in my own 1^st person teaching practice, which has a tradition in the AR community  as outlined in this post at my blog, which includes extensive footnotes and references: http://kansasreflections.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/a-reflection-o…s-of-knowing-p/

The more I explored my own Voice, the mor ways I looked to make myself accountable and accessible to the wider community through writing, speaking, recording and “performing in public. My sense of communities of interest widened to include groups of students, peer faculty, senior Army leadership, Colorado Tech faculty and peer students, students in Dr Alana’s mentoring group, broad communities of interest accessible through the web through social networks, twitter, Youtube, my blog, etc.

My own practice is becoming a daily reminder of DR Alana’s promise of the revolutionary power of PAR.  That by shipping out your ideas to other nodes in the network of interest, the ideas will seek and find a place where they may be implemented. So its necessary to keep pushing the frontier even in ideas that may not be feasible in your present circumstances.  You give back to the world by sharing all your ideas, nit just the ones that are practical for you today.

This leads me to the video of my research process and current status Dr Alana has uploaded. That is me being open and accountable for my actions with an invitation to the world to discuss and dialogue, where I can inform and in turn be informed.

An outcome of that video, seen by several hundred people in the 10 days since I published it is that I have new contracts interested in my work within the college, and I used it as a “listen-ahead” before my meeting with the college Dean to get permission to conduct my research within my college. It establishes a an opening statement in a dialogue that will shape and refine my research and my practice, and also the college itself as it has ideas that are of interest to the Dean and senior Army leaders.  Voice changes us through the actr of speaking, and listening and engaging.

As an artifact between Dr Alana and I in our mentor and mentee relationship, we have a touchstone here, an artifact that marks the story in this time and place. I see it as part of the ongoing defense of my dissertation, which I interpret to mean the “discourse of my dissertation” because I frame this as an opportunity for growth and knowledge creation which will unfold in cycles, in the same way that PAR evolves and unfolds in cycles to find the most important things to work on.

In practical terms, it is a way for Dr Alana to shape this lump of clay in the doctoral way and to shape the final dissertation defense  through this phase of preparation. It’s a great rehearsal for me to unpack and express my complex thoughts. It is said that writing is thinking, and I would extend the idea to that of “presenting” to incorporate more than just the written word. I highly recommend you try the technique as it has a tremendous clarifying and focusing effect on you as you hear the ideas come forth. I knew more about my research proposal at the end of making the video than I did when I first began to sketch out the slide. As an artifact it will continue to pay me back for the investment in creating it.

Additional references:

My background, outlined at LinkedIn.com http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ken-long/9/294/293

My blog with plenty of doctoral writings and narratives : http://kansasreflections.wordpress.com

Our departmental blog at Command & General Staff College: http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/BLOG/blogs/dlro/default.aspx

My Youtube Video channel, which includes doctoral narratives, and mini-lectures that are used within classes that I author and teach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtIEL-gn0l4

A great guitar instrumental with 3 legends of the guitar:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdJ9RS_Xubs

Supporting graphics:

Reflecting on theory and practice, and how research questions connect them; part 2

A continuation of the reflection on theory and practice in our doctoral cohhort discussion.

Weick (1995) talked about the continuum from mature, accepted dominant theory to the first conjecture arising out of some anomalous observation.

There is a continuum between the generalist inquiring into the purest of theoretical distinctions, and the pragmatist seeking to add theory to help resolve/improve a wicked problem that matters to people right now.

I suggest that people find themselves on that continuum of theory-practice as a function of their passion and the initial question that motivates them enough to act.

I am a pragmatist who wants to make a difference in the world around me right now. Actually yesterday.

To perform at the doctoral level includes an unusually deep appreciation of the theory-practice continuum, plus all the other continuums we will experience; an appreciation of different schools of thought, of world views, of theories of action that link theory to practice; an appreciation of traditions of research methodology that link world view to research to practice, each with their history of practice/  Those “best practices” are connected to the theory that drives that method, but they are also connected to the humans socialized in that tradition. Bets practices are an intersection of the theory and the practice.

In the world of manufacturing there have been any number of approaches to improving quality that are mutually exclusive. The approaches derive from an idea about how best to improve quality, which are connected to theories of production.

Quality circles and independent Quality Assurance departments are 2 distinct approaches to quality control which are informed by separate theories; Quality circles invest in the idea (the theory) that quality improvement comes at the moment of production from educated and insightful worker teams who know best their own process and can make the adaptations required.  QA departments way that we must separate the inspection function to highly trained and specialized teams whose only focus is on conformance to specification.

These 2 theories, in turn, are connected to the Theory X and Theory Y ideas of motivation and human nature.  Your support of Theory X or Theory Y, whether conscious or unconscious, will bias you to favor either quality circles or QA departments.

Researchers with a passion for understanding human nature independent of circumstance are drawn towards the theory end of the theory-practice continuum. Researchers who re looking to improve production in this plant, in this country, at this time, with this culture and these workers and this line of business are drawn towards the pragmatist world view and seek to quickly find, adopt and adapt “useful” theory quickly.

Without both, and without a bridge between the specialized worlds of the pure theoretician and the pure pragmatist, we suffer from lack of communication.

I see the rise of the scholar-practitioner and practitioner-scholar, and programs like ours, as an adaptation to the need for the bridges between knowledge groups. If you believe the world is increasingly complex and interconnected while knowledge is expanding within each specialty, you can prove mathematically that “connective-ism” and communication are needed more than ever, and will lead to competitive advantage as well as improves integration of human knowledge.

I’d say “appreciate the other person’s point of view, because they must know things that you cannot yet know. There is just too much to know anything.

Find your passion along the continuum, and appreciate the whole continuum.

Weick, Karl E. (1995) What theory is not, theorizing is. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3):385-390.