Why do your subscriptions cost so much?

Because I have customers who gladly pay me!  When just one good trade or commentary can help a trader make hundreds of thousands of dollars, $600 – $1,800 per month is not a lot of money.  I typically recommend 30-50+ official Trades a year and 75+% of them are profitable.  It’s hard to imagine you can’t find at least a handful of trades you may really like over the course of the year.  In addition, I suggest many higher frequency Flip Trades that can be just as profitable as the official Trades.  I also discuss various trading themes that may help you make better decisions regarding positioning.

How do I know you are accurately reporting your results?

The official Trades are only a small part of the value of the subscription.  The official Trades are the portion of the newsletter that is easily trackable so I keep a running tally of my winners and losers on every weekly Trades issue.  Clients have on many of the trades, and they know what the results are.  If I lose credibility with my customers, I lose my customers.  Period.

If you are any good, why aren’t you trading?

There are four main reasons:

1) I project that I can make as much doing this, as I can from trading – perhaps not in my $25 million P&L year, but for an “average” trading year.

2) I work half as long on the core Curve Advisor business as I did when I was trading.  I am in touch with the markets regularly, but I don’t sit and watch when there is nothing going on.  This gives me time to work on other projects.  This also gives me time to be around the people I want to spend the most time with – my wife and kids.

3) The part I love about trading is the analysis, strategy and planning, which I still get to do.  Taking risk, managing risk and making money is also fun.  But that is balanced by the monotony of schlepping to the office, the actual implementation (which could sometimes take weeks), recording trades, updating spreadsheets, dealing with middle office, dealing with risk management and participating in various corporate events – all of which are less interesting.

4) I have had Sharpe ratios above 2 on the curve trading.  However, the trades perform much better in someone else’s diversified book, rather than a single book – there is only so much diversification you can get with a book of just EDs.  As a result, the trades are more scalable over many books, instead of just a single large book.

A related example that recently came up is, “if Jon Gruden, Tony Dungy or Bill Cowher are any good, why aren’t they coaching?”  There is more money and prestige in being a top head coach.  But these are all smart men and being a TV commentator over a head coach is a primarily a lifestyle choice.  Jon Gruden is smiling all the time.  When’s the last time you saw Bill Belichek (or any other head coach) looking happy on the sidelines?

If you have any other questions, please email JChoi@CurveAdvisor.com.