Well Done Mr. Lee
A little history. I wrote this post re: leaving the blog aggregators because I didn’t want to contribute to a place that was promoting less-than-savory characters.
As should have been expected, The Fly writes this compelling piece and my email and twitter and comment section blows up with such well thought out rebuttals as “Fly is God”, “Fuck you”, and “You’re racist against Asians” (that last one is hilarious for anyone that knows me…I wonder if I should let my Japanese Grandmother and Chinese/Taiwanese fiancé know).
But then Mr. John Lee, whom I probably too-crassly labeled “that guy”, writes this.
Ignoring all the chest pounding and fifth grade antics for a second, I gotta’ say I’m a little impressed.
Not necessarily impressed with the track record (yet) mind you, it’s still short to judge performance relative to claimed performance, but damn it’s a step in the right direction.
You see, you get to pound your chest and be a big shot when you can prove your returns, and over this very short period of time, Mr. Lee did just that. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s what this industry needs.
Next step?
Keep maintaining that track record (and if it’s not too much to ask, post all the track records). Make them front and center in what you do (don’t wait for some third-tier blogger to call you out on them). Don’t let them conveniently disappear when times get tough. Let investors monitor your performance good or bad as it happens. I speak from experience when I say that at the end of the day, it might drop your status as an untouchable trading god just a bit, but it will raise your status in the eyes of investors and financial professionals who drive real money.
Well done Mr. Lee.
Happy Trading,
ms
P.S. Mr. Lee’s post brings up good questions about Timer Trac – I’ve asked TT repeatedly to clean up that verbiage because we’ve had similar questions from third-parties we work with. Mr. Lee forgets that Timer Trac tracks leveraged mutual fund traders like us so as long as the email, phone call, whatever is time stamped prior to the fund cutoff time, you know exactly when the order is executed (i.e. this isn’t intraday trading). I would suggest contacting TT directly if any of that is in doubt.
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Filed under: Random Stuff | 31 Comments
From MarketSci [moved to top]: for future posterity, I won’t be moderating comments on this particular post regardless of how lowbrow they become. I expect these comments to speak for themselves. michael
I’ve got to say this comes across as smug and condescending. You’ve been giving the guy a massively hard time and he has kicked you to the kerb. You owe him something better than this post.
Yeah, you owe not only an apology, but an explanation of your hypocrisy. Why did you scrub te past performance of YK?
As I wrote to John, about you. You have ZERO credibility, and rage out of self loathing, and jealousy.
John,
Why waste your time and energy on a troll? Don’t let this bastard get under your skin, ignore this piece of shit, and focus on what you do best. You are young, so it is early in your career. You will have many odd balls and psychos envious of your talent, and with out a life of their own. Do not establish a pattern of confrontation with these social outcasts, it is such a waste of time and feeds their sick minds.
As a sick dog oftens comes back to lick up it’s puke, so do these psychotic attention starved, clinically insane trolls, They read the filth they have spewed and enjoying again, in their sick perverted minds.
Do not let this sickness or negativity enter your mind for even a second.
Jealousy is a negative emotion that plagues weak minds.
Really should have just paper traded his posts pretty much any hour of any day and you’d have known. It wasn’t even close bro.
When you’re in a hole, you should stop digging.
Michael,
You’ve raised quite a stink here. Unfortunately, it’s only shed the spotlight on yourself. My biggest issue with your website is twofold:
1) You sell a black box strategy to small investors in the same way that you hate on iBC for doing. No one can truly verify your results because of the suspicious third party auditor you use (where you can input your own data) and no one can verify whether your trades are actually repeatable. For instance, you say that you day trade in the YK strategy in a $39MM mutual fund. Any serious money manager knows that your strategy is impossible to achieve on any sort of grand scale. Yeah, it’s great that you can do it using 100K, but how can you pawn yourself off as a money manager if your strategy isn’t viable using a large asset base. Do you plan on always have less than a few million in AUM? This alone nullifies your past performance in my opinion. It is no different than what Tim Sykes did when he turned 13K in 1MM, but when he tried to repeat the strategy managing other people’s money on a larger scale he flamed out in spactacular fashion.
2) Your scrubbing of YK is about the most hypocritical thing I have ever seen. If you have been running a hedge fund last year you would be kicked out of the business and likely prosecuted. The losses in October were astonishing to say the least. Yet, you conveniently tweaked the strategy after the fact and then started all reporting of YK AFTER the massive losses.
All in all, you are exactly what you’re hating on – Dishonest, hypocritical and far less talented than you actually believe.
I believe you just got owned Michael
I don’t follow the The Fly, as i’ve seen him act like the tazmanian devil on crack once too many. If i’m not mistaken, MarketSci is not the first and won’t be the last of the ‘quant’ technicians that he has targeted with his vitriolic vomit. Frankly, consider him similar to monkey + dartboard + darts. In a bull run, just throw the darn thing and pound your tiny fly chest. He should bow down to Dennis Kneale for making him a ‘star’ among the many drones that roam the blogosphere.
That said, i do believe the quant technicians at times fail to acknowledge and give respect to ‘the strong bull’ – at some point, your models have to NOT be such a closed black box that it compleletly ignores this rare type of environment we are in- such times are where technicals are more proned to fail.
But that is not the point. It’s about that numbnuts, the fly, who sits there tickling his balls, finds a sticky scab, throws it at is dartboard and calls it a buy. This environment won’t last for ever, and when the market settles once more, the fly will have to move to another shit pile.
Now the rest of you fluffers need to to get up off your knees and realize what the quants have to offer.
see?! i told you…
Interesting how there’s such a tight correlation between the vulgarity and inarticulateness of a commenter and the likelihood that they support iBC.
I for one am not impressed by Mr. Lee’s performance. There are several traders who are tracked by Covester who would seem to have mind-boggling returns at first glance, but careful inspection shows that the game is rigged. These guys tend to play in stocks that are small and less liquid. They trumpet their wins and try to build up a huge following, because many of those followers will mirror their trades, moving the price of their stock picks much further than they would have normally gone.
It’s just a modern incarnation of the oldest stock scam in the book: the pump-and-dump scheme. The pumper wins big, and some of his followers win modestly (the ones who are the fastest to make the recommended trades), but most of his followers are just suckers who think that an amazing trader is generously giving them his hot stock picks, but who in fact are just being used.
We should not be surprised that these guys have huge followings. After all, they do have independently audited results proving that they DID make all that money, and people are greedy. They want to believe they can achieve results like that too.
Maybe Mr. Lee really does have superior stock-picking skills. The world will never know, since his every move is reinforced by a horde of fawning sycophants hoping to make a quick buck.
Even Woodshedder (dare I say it?) is enhancing his returns to some degree by publishing his moves after he makes them for others to follow, although it is impossible to know how big of an effect his followers have.
I believe that it is not the TimerTrac model that is broken, but the Covester model. The traders who point to their Covester record should be viewed with suspicion unless they trade in highly liquid equities or commodities.
I post every trade to be made no later than 9:00 a.m. the morning it is to be executed, buys and sells, for the PD system. This system makes up 90% of my trades, right now.
If anything, I am de-enhancing my performance by increasing the slippage from having X numbers of traders all place the same order for the open.
There are times and systems that I trade other than the PD, but I do not typically write about them, except maybe to say, “I’m short the SPY.” I think if you go back and look at my record, a large majority of trades, 95% at least, are posted as to what I will be doing, the night or the the morning before I act on them.
My mistake. I should have known better than to lump you in with the others. Thanks for the clarification.
do you really thing “Mr. Lee” can ramp up the price of AIG stock with his 2,600 followers??? Really??? The company trades 125M shares a day. I guarantee you neither he nor his followers are responsible for even half of 1% of that volume.
And I follow many of his trades on twitter just to see what his performance is like. I would say, from direct observation, that he does not have any “follower” effect on low volume stocks either. If you really pay attention, he is about 50/50 on microcap stock calls. Maybe 60/40 correct. And btw if they are low volume he drops the trade anyway, so that goes against your claim as well.
Now mind you, I don’t know this guy from anyone else on the street, but you all are making ill-directed claims here so I felt it necessary to lend a little bit of reality to the discussion.
Certainly what he is doing is no different from any newsletter writer hack or hell, even any investment bank that issues a “buy” call on a stock. Except Lee is doing it LIVE on twitter, hanging his barely 20-something year old behind out there for all the world to criticize.
And he’s probably making way more money than any of you.
So look past his youthful vocabulary and give the guy some props. Just imagine how seasoned an investor this guy could be when he’s is in his 40′s.
*think
3J, read the post. He was not talking about AIG, he was talking about illiquid stocks. Geesh.
You are a real sack of shit for not posting my comment. You and I both know it totally discredits you. If you were even half a man you would have posted it and at least attempted to refute it. Coward.
From MarketSci: on Asia time at the moment and shutting down for the night (did I mention I also live in Asia a good part of the year?). All further well-thought out positions et al. will be approved and posted when I get back to the computer. michael
You have failed, miserably, again. Read my Twitter, if you can figure out how to do so.
die in a fire.
i find it hard to believe that you’re not moderating your comments when mine are not appearing.
Michael – one thing that’s not clear is: how do you timestamp a letter, if that is the method chosen of reporting to timertrac?
Also, why do you not respond to questions submitted through your site (several weeks ago) regarding the 5 month drawdown you are currently in?
Tom
RE to Tom: I’m not sure (don’t know of anyone personally who’s done that) – maybe they use the time they receive the letter. Remember that there’s still a lot of enormous newsletter businesses (from the old-school pre-internet days) that still do physical mail. Let’s ask TT together (I’ll cc you on the email).
What 5-month DD are you referring to? In the RH program? We get a lot of correspondence. If something got missed, pleased send it on again. I think MarketSci readers would agree that we usually do a pretty good job at personal communication vis-a-vis transparency.
michael
The trading skill of traders such as John Lee is readily apparent. One need only follow http://twitter.com/WeeklyTA for a small fraction of the trading session before a dozen successful trades are executed in real-time.
It’s stunning how many actionable and accurate calls are made on iBankCoin each day.
-AH
The “John Lee” above, is not me. You can verify the real me by e-mailing me in the email address I provided in the “mail” part of the comment form.
I hope you understand why I had to do this. You forced this upon yourself. Have you read the comments section on my blog? Might take you a few hours to get through all 250 or so comments: http://ibankcoin.com/chart_addict/2009/08/20/important-matters-to-discuss-real-time-profitable-calls-sf-ms-real-3rd-party-auditing-michael-stokes-epic-failure-etc/#comment-17326.
Unfortunately, I won’t stop now. I will make sure that you learn a valuable lesson here and perhaps, you can rebuild your reputation afterwards. For now, I find enjoyment in this and will make sure everyone knows what you did.
In conclusion, good luck from here on out. You’ll need it.
P.S. stupid move in trying to get a few greenfaucet contributors to take your side. I identified them.
“Timer Trac tracks leveraged mutual fund traders like us so as long as the email, phone call, whatever is time stamped prior to the fund cutoff time, you know exactly when the order is executed (i.e. this isn’t intraday trading).”
Michael, does this mean the track record ends up with the “wrong” position when the market makes a last-minute move across unchanged that messes up your allocation? This is, does is simulate the real-life challenges of trading mutual funds?
RE to PSC: yes, the track record matches our actual trades (which occasionally includes getting the closing direction incorrect if the market makes a big move after the fund cutoff time). On the rare occasion that this does happen, sometimes it works in our favor, sometimes against us, but I think at the end of the day it all comes out in the wash. michael
Michael, do you regret the original post? I’m wondering if it would have been better to drop off GF and SA without offering an explanation.
RE to PSC: not even a little. In the end we drove some positive (albeit small) changes and the world is a better place as a result. That’s always worth taking a couple of “fuck you’s” over. michael
I just wish you’d stop being racist against Asians.
:)