Why Trade The Short Clips Trading System?

By Author: John M Elliot
Total Articles: 3
Comment this article

What is the Short Clips trading system? It is a system that uses a simple mechanical entry technique to trade a basket of commodities including: the grains, softs, meats, petroleum products, metals, currencies, financials, and stock indices. This strategy determines when a strong trend in place for a given market, and then looks for pullbacks from that trend to make a low-risk entry in the direction of the trend. All trades are entered, market on open at the start of the trading day, and exited market on open at the end of the trade, unless the trade is exited via a stop loss.

The Short Clips trading system was developed by Keith Fitschen. This trading system is a shorter term strategy which looks to take small bites out of a sweeping trend. Thus the average trading profit is smaller than a typical longer-term trading system, but the hold time is also shorter - on the order of 3 to 5 days. This shorter-term trading yields a higher percentage of winning trades than a longer term system, and is not subject to the open equity giveback problem of longer term strategies. Across a basket of over 60 commodities, the Short ...
... Clips strategy has averaged a profit of $161 per trade since 1980. The system averages about 7 trades per year on each commodity.

The Short Clips strategy tries to capture small profits while a sweeping trend unfolds in a commodity. It works across all the commodity groups, but it works best with the groups that tend to trend the most: commodities like the currencies, financials, energies, and metals.

The Short Clips trading systems trades across the commodity groups to mitigate the effects of losses in one group. Over the course of a year, a number of groups will have trending periods. These periods will produce profits that typically offset losses in the other groups. The performance of the system over a basket of commodities can be measured very easily with the user-friendly software provided with the fully disclosed system.

Short Clips uses portfolios to provide a trading plan for various account sizes. The portfolios are constructed by selecting the lower risk commodities in each group. Larger portfolios add commodities to further diversify. Portfolio performance is measured by using the software to construct equity curves and compute annual return and drawdown.

Short Clips is fully disclosed to traders who purchase the product. Knowing the basis behind a strategy helps a trader to stay with the trading when drawdown occurs. The strategy is implemented in user-friendly software that allows a user to generate daily signals, back-test historical performance on individual commodities, and back-test the historical performance of the various portfolios.