Is one of the reasons you see magazines going out of print these days because they don’t seem up to modern standards for timeliness? Take Futures Magazine’s recent “Top Traders of 2012″ article highlighting some of the Top managed futures programs of last year. It was released on March 1st, fully two months after the end of last year. We understand it takes a while to get final 2012 numbers in, interview the traders, and put a compelling piece together… but still – how many articles were you reading this week about top anything in 2012?
Having said that, we’ll give them a pass this time – because they happened to highlight two of our recommended programs in their Top Traders of 2012 list: Clarke Capital Management and Briarwood Capital. Huzzah! You can see the write ups done by Futures Magazine below:
Futures Magazine Top Traders of 2012:
Now, one bit of caution here. Just like the Sports Illustrated and Madden Football cover curses, we have anecdotally noticed a bit of a Futures Magazine curse over the years for managers who show up in this list of “Top Traders.” Sometimes the managers highlighted had been lucky in achieving the performance which landed them there, but more often than not it was just a simple reversion to the mean which caused performance in the year following the selection as a top trader. No doubt this reversion to the mean is also responsible for the perceived sports cover “curses,” with someone who just had a career year more likely to revert to their average performance prior to that than take it to the next level.
Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1135567-the-madden-curse-examining-the-last-10-players-to-make-the-cover/page/3. Vick broke his leg less than 24 hours after the game was released.
We have yet to go back through all the Top Trader lists in Futures Magazine’s history and do a proper test, but we’ll get around to it one day and are sure to share the results right here. In the meantime, we’ll congratulate Clarke and Briarwood – two programs actively invested in by clients of Attain – and wish them the best of success in avoiding the curse (hey, it never slowed down Michael Jordan with his record 50 Sports Illustrated covers).
Note: the other two highlighted programs were LJM and White Indian, two option trading programs which have been on our watch list for some time but yet to make it onto our recommended list.
No curse.
The myth of a Futures Magazine curse similar to the Sports Illustrated curse has been bandied about for some time and there is simply nothing to it and I would encourage you to “get around” to looking at the performance of those selected.
While some managers followed-up strong years with drawdowns like in 2008 this is not a curse and with the 2008 example, managers dropping roughly 20% after a 100% plus performance is a pretty strong two-year track record and actually supportive given the environment of those years.
Clarke, for example, was profiled all the way back in 2002 as a Top Trader and has produced solid returns for many years, before and after that.
On several occasions, one of our Top Trader profiled was a manager who had previously been selected as one of our Hot New CTAs. It is always satisying to see a CTA who I had selected as a top emerging manager actually emerge to where I could profile that manager as a Top Trader. That has happened numerous times.
The notion of a curse has come up so often that I have contemplated creating an index of them. WHile researching Top Traders for the March 2012 issue (2011 Top Traders) I noticed so many past profiles that we put out the following table.
http://www.futuresmag.com/2012/02/27/2011-top-traders-have-familiar-ring
This was done in part to try and dispel the whole curse myth.
One of the things Futures has always done in selecting Top Traders and profiles in general is to look beyond that year’s performance to see if the managers’ performance is more than just luck or the result of a highly leveraged program. We weed those people out. We look at risk adjusted return.
While I am sure some mangers selected have had bad years following the feature and some may even have blown up, I am sure the majority have proven to be top performers over many years.
I know this to be the case because I selected them over the last 13 years and have features several more than once and follow-up on their performance.
So please help confirm this.