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.
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.