No, you can’t have my trading system

People ask Dave and I all the time if they can “have” our trading systems.  Some want the swing system, some the intraday stuff, some the trending stuff, but the answer is always the same.  No. I wanted to make this post to answer the question once and for all so I can just link to it whenever we’re asked.

What people don’t understand is that Dave and I have literally spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars developing these systems. The time was used testing, retesting and testing again. The money has gone to software, data sources and money used to experiment with different concepts in live trading.

We’ve proven time and time again these systems work in real time.  For examples of the swing system, look at Dave’s old blog.  He ran the swing system for a year live, giving every signal before the open.  Here are the results, up over 40% in 12 months.   Also, anyone who’s been in the chatroom these last 2 weeks has seen Dave make over 10K on live trades with predefined entries and profit targets.   I’ve read alot of different stock blogs and have yet to see one where people are as bold as Dave and put out real trades w/ real position sizes and real tickers and real exits and real profits or losses.  If anyone knows of some, please send them, we’d like to read them.

Our combination of systems is not something we just threw together one night and started trading, it’s the result of lots of work that called on Dave’s 10+ years of trading experience and my 10+ years of software development. The combined result is our intellectual property and is not something we’re willing to just “give” away anymore than one of you would “give” away something you’ve worked on for years that has tremendous value to you.

Which brings me to why we even have this site and our systems on collective. When we were learning to build systems, we did find many good resources online and now that we’ve learned to do it, we want to help other people do the same just as people helped us. We also want to keep people from being scammed by people out there trying to sell systems or services for thousands of dollars that don’t even work. Some people think these type of sites generate lots of money but nothing could be further from the truth. The revenue from our website has yet to pay for the hosting costs and all the money we’ve made from collective won’t even buy Dave a plane ticket to fly down to Austin so we can drink some beers. We’re not asking for money, the cost of hosting this site is trivial and if the ads cover it, so be it and if they don’t it doesn’t really matter.

We want to help traders by sharing some of our knowledge, but we very much believe in the “give a man to fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”.   I am more than happy to help readers with questions on systems, debugging, suggestions etc. but only if you have actually taken the time and effort to acquire some backtesting software, load up data and at least attempt to write a system to do what you want.  I’m not interested in doing backtesting for people who are unwilling to take even these small steps.  But if you do have a real system your working on and want some honest feedback or help, feel free to click the “Email Us” link in the top left corner and I’ll be happy to help out.

If you feel that backtesting in any form is beyond your ability or you do not have the time to dedicate to it, you can always subscribe to our two collective systems the stock swing portfolio and the futures swing portfolio.   If you think $40 per month is too much for a stock swing system, I’ll point out that I pay $30 a month just for the data I use to generate the signals so even if I did give you the system, you’d still be spending $30 a month to run it properly.

Anyway, this post turned out longer than I anticipated, but it needed to be said.  Being a successful systems trader is hard work and if you’re not willing to put in the time then either subscribe to a system you trust and follow it religiously or save yourself a lot of money and frustration and just go with these guys.   Because I know from my days at working at active trader brokerages that  90% of active traders won’t beat their returns in the next 12 months.

-John