Alpha Ideas

I’ll take one trader, one of the most amazing ones, Ed Thorp…He was the guy who changed the way casinos operate. His first fund ran nineteen years, gross returns 19% per year and that’s good, but that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is nineteen years he had three losing months, all of them were less than one percent. If you had twelve tosses of a coin, nineteen times, you only get three tails, what are the odds of that? And that’s conservative because his wins were larger than his losses, so the odds are smaller. But I did the probability calculation and the odds of his track record being luck are one million times less than the odds of picking a random atom in the entire mass of the earth, and then picking that same atom a second time. In other words, it’s impossible. It’s true that you will get some successful track records by luck, but these ones are beyond luck, that’s impossible if the markets were efficient.”-said Jack Schwager