In my opinion, there's the primary reason that, say, systems traders and commodities are able to make money in the markets, is that the market provides those opportunities.

That is, it's the market that provides the returns more than the particular methodology that's imposed.

And of course, you can see that if you look at, if you compare, you know, performance, particularly among CTAs,

is that, you know, sometimes the markets are easy to trade and other times they aren't.

And of course, that gets you into the whole idea of, you know, every few years

you hear that trend following's dead. Well, no, trend following is not dead. It's just sleeping.

You go in and out of these phases and it has more to do with the nature of the markets than it does

with the vagaries of any particular system.

Behind all this, I mean, this is all that I've discussed has to do with, you know, with

technical trading and designing systems.

And of course, what I do is, is purely mechanical.

That is, I run my program every day and I do what the program says.

I don't second guess it. I don't,

you know, omit trades or anything of that nature. Obviously, the system's adjusted on a periodic

basis for just to sort of maintain, keep it up to date. But other than that, my system's been

virtually unchanged for the last 25 years. But at any rate, my view on this is that underneath the statistics or the mathematics that describe markets are fundamentals.

That is, I'm a technical trader that believes in fundamentals.

And so I believe that markets, certainly commodity markets, are moved by supply and demand.

I believe that financial markets are moved by economic forces, most of which are fairly long-term.

I would call these business cycle moves.

And so this has influenced me, along with just my research, to trade very long term.

That is, I trade off weekly charts, and I'm probably one of the longer term traders that are out there.

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