What a self aggrandizing and narcissistic tirade.
I like you miles. You have interesting things to say, and you're deliberately inflammatory. I'll assume your personal insult was meant in the most benign way possible.
I was kind of hoping for a more thoughtful response to some of those issues though.
You deride trendfollowing here,
And you deride me personally here, but you still read what I have to say and maybe find value in it, just like I do with your momentum strategy.
For the record, I suspect that the US economy and thus the stock market, in broad strokes, has some particular traits that are predictable. And I'm pretty sure that there are ways to exploit that predictability, for a while, particularly if you're ahead of the curve and can do so before others catch on.
I think you've done it with your work on travel hacking. I'm guessing that in ten years time a short course on travel hacking will have no value, either because the loopholes have closed or because the knowledge is so widespread. In the meantime, you're successfully profiting from leading the curve on that particular exploit. Good on you.
I'm less convinced that an easy to implement technical trading strategy is the same kind of winner. But I will not begrudge you the fortune you make of you turn out to be right.
by your very definition of charlatan, I would point out that Bogle is a charlatan for profiting immensely off of his own strategy:
That seems like a fair point, but I might quibble over the details. Bogle got rich facilitating the trades of people following his advice, not selling the advice itself. It's probably an irrelevant distinction.
So you believe in the the superiority of a theory that has been demonstrably outperformed by the very strategy that you deride.
No, I believe that logic and reason are better predictors of future results than blindly following a strategy that might have succeeded by pure random chance. I still don't understand WHY double momentum should work, so the fact that it appears to have worked in the past has not convinced me it will work in the future.
As an example, I really like Meb Faber's work on international equity exposure by using national market CAPE ratios. It makes sense to me why it should work, so the fact that his strategy has been a dismal failure for the past few years doesn't discourage me and I think he might eventually be proven right. Double momentum lacks that rational basis in my mind, so the fact that it has worked has not convinced me that it will continue to do so, when random chance is also a viable explanation.
You seem to really believe in the data mining approach to creating an investment strategy, and that's fine for you. Lots of smart folks agree with you. When I'm playing with my own money, though, I want more than that if I'm going to adopt any strategy that might do worse than my guaranteed average returns.