Charley Donaldson
Part-Time Independent Trader

Charley Donaldson is a part-time trader and an investment banking analyst for Costal Securities, an institutional securities dealer and investment banking firm in Houston, TX. He has traded and studied technical analysis for nearly three years and has experience in the equity, bond, and currency markets.

Mr. Donaldson began using TradingSolutions in May ’03 at his previous employer and now uses it to manage his own taxable equity portfolio. Because of his limited time constraints, he uses a very basic approach for his success. He uses what is called a “SuperSolution” that is comprised of approximately 200 end-of-day models with various inputs (some of which are optimizable functions). After training, he finds the stocks that yield good out of sample returns, high Sharpe Ratio, linear equity curve as well as other informative statistics related to the model. Most importantly he chooses equities that are “easily model-able”. For example, he will choose an equity that produced several “good” models from the SuperSolution over an equity that may have only generated one good model for assurance that the data set has predictable patterns that are easily identifiable.

When it comes to re-training his models, Mr. Donaldson will take the top three or four performers from the SuperSolution run and re-train without a Testing set using the same Cross Validation set as originally trained, so the models use the most current data to generate signals. He also runs experiments on the top models, combining inputs, optimizing parameters, and adjusting the neural network settings. However, most of the time he sticks with an original model from the SuperSolution run. Regarding the SuperSolution, he retrains the entire solution every three months to keep it up to date with the most current data.

Currently, Mr. Donaldson simultaneously trades five stock models at Interactive Brokers, using low-risk tactics of trading both long and short and not trading on margin. Over the past 6-months his account has earned an 11% return! While Mr. Donaldson knows his methods are not the most complex, it “makes sense and is easily maintainable for someone without much time to build models.”

This clearly illustrates that you do not need to be a full-time trader to make TradingSolutions a profitable trading strategy. We would like to thank Mr. Donaldson for being so open with the details of his system, and we wish him continued success.

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Testimonials disclosure: Unique experiences and past performances do not guarantee future results! Testimonials herein are unsolicited and are non-representative of all clients; certain accounts may have worse performance than that indicated. Trading spot currencies involves substantial risk and there is always the potential for loss. Your trading results may vary. Because the risk factor is high in the foreign exchange market trading, only genuine "risk" funds should be used in such trading. If you do not have the extra capital that you can afford to lose, you should not trade in the foreign exchange market. No "safe" trading system has ever been devised, and no one can guarantee profits or freedom from loss.