He is down about 5% for May 11.

Volatility itself is not that relevant really.

Only when you are managing money for others, then you come up with useless measures of returns as a function of volatility where you will see the likes of Niederhoffer, Meriwether (LTCM) and Madoff do so well….until they blow up that is.

Skew is more important if you where to use “a” measure of quality of returns.

But at the end of the day, how much has Dunn returned over a period of 5 years? And how much have you made “investing” in the stock market for the same period?…ask the CNBC anchors.

Please be sure and sent us an update on his month and YTD when May is over. I find it slightly amusing you elect to highlight with timely emails when CTA’s are doing well yet I don’t recall any timely updates when they are getting steam-rolled either on a monthly or yearly basis.

BTW, the point was to show volatility across 2 months, not tout 2 months of performance. Thought that was obvious…

The point of this one blog post — was not historical performance. It was to show month to month volatility. In your working conspiracy theory how do you account for me putting every month of Dunn’s performance in my books ‘Trend Following’ and ‘Trend Commandments’?

If you look close…there is a guy hiding behind the tree over there.

I thought it was obvious also that the meaning of the post was not that Dunn had a good April…it was that good traders and good systems traders, will have sizeable swings from time to time.

I just don’t understand the love for Dunn. There are so many other trend followers with much better risk adjusted returns. And yes I know you can’t eat risk adjusted returns, but the point is after a 40 to 50% drawdown, you’re toast.

How about focusing more on Tactical Investment and Blue Trend and less on Dunn?

Michael asks how March and April makes us feel. How many people who started trading in March with Dunn’s system would’ve gone back to the drawing board to try yet another system after March’s poor performance?

I did it myself a few years ago until reading TF for a third time and realizing that poor returns from a good system are good results — eventually the odds are in your favor.

Difficult lesson to learn when you’re watching your money get flushed down the toilet.

@DGDye,
Spot on! When new trend followers start out, testing different market baskets, parameters, etc, they (and that means me) tend to look at beginning to end and say, “wow, that’s a lot of money”. But, I think it’s important to look at the monthly, or even daily results for no other reason but to internalize the feeling of going thru that roller coaster.

The thing I admire about Dunn is not so much the money he’s made, but his iron gut.

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Trading-Following-Strategy/dp/1118063503