The oft referenced Clarke Capital stopped by the Attain office to meet with one of our clients, and we were thrilled to catch up with Michael Clarke. He spoke candidly about the Worldwide program, going into detail about the various markets and models traded. The way he explains it is that it is based on the idea of teamwork. Odds are, if the market climate is inhospitable for one model, another, theoretically, might be able to step up to the plate and pick up the slack. The current state of the economy, he explained, with active market intervention from the U.S. government, has created a unique (read: not too favorable for his programs) atmosphere. In his opinion, most models are going to work best in fundamental markets, and that’s simply not available right now. It seems like that’s become a more prevalent school of thought among the mangers we speak with.

We were very interested to hear this “fuzzy logic” filter explained in more detail as well. Essentially, this part of the program measures historical success of different kinds of trades under specific market conditions  in order to determine the statistical likelihood that a presently indicated trade would be a winner (past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results). If the probability is within a given range, they’ll consider the trade. If it falls outside of that range, the program won’t even look at it. Clarke considers this an integral component of the program, and retunes it every 2-3 years to include the most recent market data in its historical probability calculations.

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