No. of Recommendations: 17
I ran a lot of the complicated MI screens for a long time.
I *think* I was one of the more active traders around here (have not been since the pandemic).
My goal was to reproduce the GTR1-reported daily start results for the five or six screens I was using, usually 15-20 picks.
Those screens were so-called "high flyers" with great CAGR in backtest and relied on relatively low liquidity picks.
I needed to split up my portfolio into smaller chunks to be able to invest in those kind of stocks.
For 4-5 years at least, I would trade every day, probably 50-70 trades/day.
It would take a few minutes per day:
- run Powershell script which would in turn run GTR1 for all the screens and generate the daily picks;
- paste that list into Yahoo for a quick check for obvious problems
- paste the list into FolioFN and use "update and exchange" to rebalance that chunk to the new picks (using both morning and afternoon trading windows).
I could even do this all on my smartphone. Lol.
I had some great, great years, exceeding 60% return. But I did have trouble stomaching the downturns.
In particular, 2018 was very bad. This year appears to be a repeat of that.
(IMO there is something about the unpredictability of POTUS that destroys momentum-based screens).
At the depths of the pandemic bottom in 2020, I had enough and converted to mostly mag7 picks and a lot of BRK-B.
That has not at all been a bad decision, in hindsight.
I have tried (and come close) to reproducing all of this at Interactive Brokers, since FolioFN went belly up. (GTR1 was gone for a long while too).
It's more work at IBKR, with some spreadsheet processing required. It might take me at best 10-15 minutes to prepare the day's orders, which is too much for me.
And it's a little too manual, meaning mistakes happen more.
So I essentially have not been actively using MI, but I will get motivated once in a while and fire up the scripts and spreadsheets - they still work!
I have an affinity toward the mechanical, algorithmic nature of MI. GTR1 is simply amazing, but has a steep learning curve, and is not always up to date these days.
Most folks here worry a lot about curve fitting, but I'm really not one of them.
The screens I was using have continued to outperform over longer time periods, but they can have very bad stretches of several years in a row.
It is almost impossible to deal emotionally with those long stretches of underperformance compared to the market.
To be clear, everyone's implementation is different and YMMV.
