Documentation
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Quick Start
If you have at least one trading account and you are already an investor you can skip to Introduction.
- Open a trading account with an online broker. Good broker reviews are here: Top 10 Online Brokers. If you are confused go direct to Option House and open a trading account.
- Credit the account with over $1000 and you are ready to go. Now you can place trades in your trading account.
- If you want to use this site for free you should go on the Free Tab and see what the Free System holds. You should duplicate this trade in your trading account buying the currently held asset with the amount of money you decide to risk for this new adventure. You'll find there the ticker of an asset, for example: UUP, EWZ, TLT, SPY. Go in your trading account and buy that asset by placing a trade.
- Each Monday morning visit this site and if the Free Surfr Trading System changes its holding duplicate the trade in your trading account. This means: 1. Sell the old asset and 2. Buy the new one. This process will happen around 6 times a year.
- Now you should read the Warning section.
- Your minimalistic interaction with investment world could stop here!
If you made money and decide that you have to reward us for that, please use the PayPal Donate button for that. Good words via email are welcomed too.
If you would like better performing strategies, you can analyze various performance information posted and if you like any of them you can order them from the Order Tab.
Introduction
This site is all about making money by investing in various assets. The attractiveness of different classes of assets varies according to complex market forces and our goal is to forecast which assets will be in demand.
Surfr™ strategies try to rotate high return assets and predict what people will buy in the near future and then to take a position in that asset.
If you are new to the world of investing or if this is your first time here, you can start following this scenario:
To learn about the various assets' performance over time, you can go to Bench. Stats tab. You’ll find here many complex tables. Try to focus, for the moment, on a single table describing the performance of one asset. The first bright number under CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) is telling you how much your money would appreciate each year if you had invested in that asset. You will discover, for example, that for many years, keeping your money invested in Gold, Brazil, China, India, would have returned handsome profits. Surfr™ strategies choose one asset to stay invested at each moment in time. This asset can be: Bonds, Dollars, Gold, Broad Commodities or some Broad Equity.
Now you can go to the Strategies tab and compare the average 20% CAGR in the best assets with our strategies' CAGR.
Your journey can continue on the Performance tab where Surfr™ strategies and Benchmarks' trailing performance is displayed for various time periods.
Signals tab could be next. Here you can find current holdings and their performance for each strategy. If you decide to follow one of the strategies, you should take a position in the held asset if there is a new signal or strength is bright green. We don't push any hard rule on you when to take a position, make your own judgment. These are long term strategies generating signals lasting often, for months.
If you get curious to learn more read the rest of this documentation and explore the rest of the tabs.
Good luck and have fun!
About Tabs
This site can be navigated mainly using the tabs at top. The tabs are organized like this:
| Tab Name | Detailed |
|---|---|
| Home | The landing place intended to don't scare and confuse the potential visitor. Are plenty of tabs down the road to do that. |
| Documentation | This page with some documentation about SURFR Trading Systems™. |
| S1..Free | Information about various strategies. Signals, performance, charts starting with 01/01/2006 and trailing for last year. |
| Signals | Here are aggregated all the current signals with their length and performance. |
| Performance | Trailing performance for strategies and benchmark assets over time. |
| Strategies | All the systems' performance. |
| Benchmark | Some classic assets' performance for a buy&hold comparison. |
| Charts | All the charts starting in: 01/01/2006. |
| Charts(1Y) | All the charts trailing last 1 year. |
| Order | Here you can place orders and buy systems that are not free. |
| Support | Some contact information, information about what version of the product was used and when the signals were issued. |
About Statistical Data
In many places you'll find statistical data. We compute various statistical metrics to better asses the systems' or benchmarks' quality as an investment vehicle. The meaning of various fields in these tables is:
| Metric | Expanded | Detailed |
|---|---|---|
| Period | Time Period | The time is split according with a criterion in periods and an asset is chosen for this period. |
| CAGR | Comp. Annual Growth Rate | The year-over-year growth rate of an investment over a specified period of time. We like values over 50%. |
| GSD | Geometric St. Dev. | Describes how spread out are annual growth rate using geometric mean. We like values under 30%. |
| Turnover | Turnover | How much of the money are reinvested during a year. We like values under 1000%. |
| MaxDD | Maximum Drawdown | Is the measure of the maximum decline from a historical peak in some variable. We like values under 25%. |
| UIx | Ulcer Index | A measure of volatility, but only volatility in the downward direction. (Return - RiskFree) / UPI |
| UPI | Ulcer Performance Index | A measure of volatility, but only volatility in the downward direction. We like values over 3.0. |
| Sharpe | Sharpe Ratio | Is a measure of the excess return per unit of risk in an investment. We like values over 1.5. (Return - RiskFree) / StandardDeviation |
| Efficiency | Efficiency | Measures how efficient a strategy is at predicting the future. 0% the worst possible, 100% perfect. We like values over 70%. |
| $1Becomes | Growth of $1 over time | $1 growth without fees or slippage. We like HUGE values here. Product(1 * (1 + %DayGain)) |
| %WinningTrades | % of Winning Trades | The amount of wining trades. We like values over 70%. WinningTrades/TotalTrades * 100. |
| R(2003), R(2006) | Robustness | Altering simulations' parameters in various ways we try to quantify robustness. We like values over 4. |
About Charts
The charts represents the value over time of $1 invested in the analyzed strategy or S&P500. The maximum at a given moment is drawn as well for a better understanding of the drawdowns. The charts uses logarithmic scale for Y axis to represent at the same scale information.
With transparent gray is represented the distance between current and current maximum to depict the drawdown.
Clicking on any chart will show a bigger resolution of that chart.
Are present two types of charts:
- Since inception 01/01/2006.
- Trailing one year.
About the SURFR Trading Systems™
Inspired by William Dirlam's excellent Decision Moose, we decided to experiment with various ways of predicting the future preferred asset class. In the spirit of Decision Moose, the signals for one of the systems are and will remain FREE! The other signals are free of charge until 09/01/2010 (September 1st) after that they will be available from Collective2 or other way for a fee.
The algorithms use special methods of integrating the price / volume / volatility movement in the hope of best guessing the future-to-be asset in demand. You should try to play at least 3 systems with 3 different turnovers and shape of the deeps for some protection! Unfortunately at the time of major crash assets' movement tend to correlate themselves and often not even this sort of "diversification" can help. Being weekly rebalanced strategies the drawdown occurred can be big!
The strategies are not momentum in the classic sense (versus prior price movement) they are momentum in their integration function space. This means that classic concepts like value, pullback, sideways, unusual volume, unusual volatility can become valid momentum functions in the integration space! We would prefer to don't use terms like: momentum, value or pullback because they could bring misleading connotation into the mix due to their common use.
The assets basket is variable and can change too according with what kind of orthogonality (lack of correlation) in assets is predicted to happen. Usually the strategies holds [5..15] assets in their baskets at each given time, this can be: US Dollars, other ForEx, various Bonds, SP500 Eq., Brazil Eq., China Eq., India Eq., European Eq., Sector Eq., CommoditiesInGeneral, Gold, Silver, Energy, Softies, Hardies, etc. The assets used MUST be decently traded by a nonleveraged ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) that has decent volume to avoid slippage problems.
Signals have a Strength parameter at end. This parameter doesn't forecast how much money the system will make it just tries to estimate how strong that asset is in the position and tells if is a chance to be replaced by another asset soon. In general weaker and rising strengths are signs of making gains.
About the Chosen Strategies
We trained our strategies for: [01/01/2003 - 01/01/2010] period in time and we paid attention to various statistical data and charts. We run probable, billions of cases, mixes, Monte Carlo variations to increase systems' quality and hundreds of nice looking strategies were discarded for quality and stability reasons.
We should mention here that [01/01/2003 - 01/01/2008] is an uneventful period for markets and [01/01/2003 - 01/01/2006] is a period when less than 30% of assets currently used, where represented by decently traded ETFs. We strongly encourage investors to pay special attention to the behavior of various strategies during the [01/01/2008 - 01/01/2011] period in time when sudden big moves had happened and various assets had started to trend rapidly.
In general, all strategies have medium to long term (kind of) momentum behavior. This is the reason why they have reasonable low turnovers.
The signals are issued in the last trading day of each week and should be executed as soon as possible. The simulations will assume that the trade was placed in the last trading day at close.
This website is automatic generated by our product called: FinancialTools and is updated automatic each week. The systems are called SURFR Trading Systems™ because were designed in sunny and lovely Florida.
To prepare this site we use
| Type | Enumerate |
|---|---|
| Software | FinancialTools, MS VisualStudio, MS Excel, MS Word, Notepad++, Tortoise Hg DVCS, GNUPlot, XMLLint, HTMLTidy, TotalCommander, 7Zip, SnagIt, Paint.NET. |
| Languages&Formats | CSS, HPP, CPP, JS; CSV, TSV, XML, HTML, XHTML. |
| Libraries | C++ libraries, Boost, STLPort, Doug Lea Allocator. |
| Websites | finance.yahoo.com, www.w3schools.com, www.w3.org. |
| Web Browsers | Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer. |
| Operating Systems | Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7. |
A word of warning
!WARNING!
Past performance is no guarantee of future results! These forecasting techniques are based on tuned algorithms for [01/01/2003 - 01/01/2010] period.
We do NOT assume any responsibility for misuse or money lost! USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!
The Surfs signals are for individual use only! It is explicitly forbidden to post, share or sell them. They are copyrighted by Dr. Dan Micsa This web site, subscription emails and Collective2 subscription are the sole sources for signals!
At this moment in time SURFR Trading Systems™ strategies are largely medium term momentum. For a better diversification and risk control you should invest at least 30% of your money in some pullback or value strategy too!
If you would like to enjoy in full this website (corner radiuses, shadows, etc) please use any modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari). Internet Explorer V8 and older don't render properly all elements used!
This site is still Under Construction and we reserve the right to change the content of without any notification!
Miscellaneous
For the vertical collapsing version of this site please use the following link. It offers better understanding of the systems, bigger charts but requires bigger screen resolutions and has a steeper learning curve!
Please don't hesitate to contact us in any regard at: support.surfr@gmail.com.
More information about us at: www.dmicsa.com.
If you consider that this site helped you, donate using the PayPal donate button. The recipient is my ex company named: BillaSoft. Thank you for your donation.
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