I will be away on vacation from when you read this until Friday, July 4th. I will be checking in
regularly to make sure things are ok, but I will not be posting weekly picks. Worst case, if the broadband
provider's router goes down (which it does every few weeks) I may not be able to get the site online again
until I am back.

I've moved the backtester onto another server for now. The original server seems to have developed instabilities over time. Normally, this means a harddisk is going down, but this time this was not the case. Also, the server was very stable when I tested the machine under heavy loads without disk IO. As a final test I had to pull out the harddrive and test it on another system to verify that the harddrive was not to blame. That leaves the motherboard as the primary suspect, and the chipset responsible for handling disk IO. Over time the machine started going down, first once every month, then every week, then every day and lately every minute. You get the picture.

Anyway, I've moved the backtester and picks over to a more modern system which should hopefully be able to handle it for a while without any trouble. I have disabled the links to the older sites as part of this process, but if there are certain articles you want to access send me an email and I will see if I can pull it out for you. I may or may not put the older sites back online later.

Thank you for your patience.

It seems a disk on the server hosting the backtester and the picks is having trouble, which is the reason why the backtester and the picks (and older archives) are sometimes not available. I'm working on replacing the disk, but I have no ETA for when things will be stable again. In the meantime I will be restartin the machine manually from time to time when I notice it is down. My apologies for any inconvenience.

When writing automated trading systems (ATS) you need to get (usually buy) software and data (often bundled with software). Differently from most brokers, Interactive Brokers offer a free (assuming you have an account with them) API that makes it pretty easy to hook into their data feeds, and as a result quite a few graphing/trading packages support their interface. I've looked at a few packages and most of them do not support the features I am looking for, and quite often only support "programming" through very simplistic scripting languages. Either that, or their package/interface come at a significant up-front cost. For this and other reasons, I've decided to write my own software for writing various ATS (screenshot attached).

It's been yet another year for our screens and I've done a run of all the screens, holding top five and ten, for various starting years. You can download the summary from summary2008.txt or the ytd2008.zip which contains the raw data used for making the summaries. The summary file contains an explanation, and it looks like this:

SI screens performance 2008-01-01

This report summarizes SI screens performance over all the history in
the backtester. There are three different starting dates;

* 1997-08-31 - The first available data date in the backtester
* 2001-12-28 - The first date lots of new fields became available
               (which quite a few screens use)
* 2003-01-03 - Data resolution changed from monthly to weekly

Where applicable, the numbers represent the average numbers of all
possible starting dates. E.g. a 3 month trading cycle from 1997-08-31
means that a monthly backtest for each starting date from 1997-08-31
was done, and the numbers presented are the averages of those three
runs. Similarily, a 3 months trading cycle starting in 2003-01-03 is
the average of all 12/13 possible starting weeks.

Data from 2003-01-03 to 2008-01-01
/home/sipro/ytd/result-20030103-ytd-f7-h5.txt
                   CA/GS   upr CAGR  GSD  U/D T.o. Cycl
Up5X3               4.20  0.76  105   25   72   60  260
WK_Voom             3.11  0.79  109   35   67   35  260
GSX                 3.07  0.70   86   28   67   56  260
GSX2                2.97  0.71   98   33   67   49  260
BI                  2.81  0.62   76   27   69   58  260
3pt_Relative_Val    2.60  0.61   65   25   64   65  260
Low_Mult            2.56  0.74   82   32   63   47  260
Z26saTA             2.53  0.71   76   30   64   38  260
GS_PCF              2.53  0.59   81   32   68   56  260
High_Relative_Va    2.52  0.59   53   21   64   66  260
Zweig-26            2.36  0.68   85   36   66   27  260

With the success growth stocks had in 2007, it is easy to point to dividend/income stocks as under/non-performers. An article in Economist December 13th writes (http://economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10286619):

Those funds that invest on the basis of dividend income have also suffered badly. Alex Stewart, a strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort, says 2007 has been an annus horribilis for income investing.

As always, it depends. Using the backtester I tested the common Silver_Parachute screen (a dividend screen using a 26 week momentum sort) invented by DrBob:

In testing some new features in the unreleased backtester, I generated a lot of backtests which may be of interest to some readers. Basically, this is the result of a lot of automated backtests that test various number of holdings, holding periods and ranks. You may download the full pdf file from http://keelix.com/btdata/mfgen2-shadow.pdf. You may have to do some detective work to figure things out.

DrBob2 at the Mechanical Investing forum on The Fool (fool.com) posted a followup on his money flow screen (named Money_Flow hereafter). He first posted about this screen in January and according to his (manual, I presume) backtest (top 5, held monthly) the CAGR/GSD numbers were 56/46. Considering the high GSD number, this would be considered a very volatile screen. In December 2007 he posts a followup showing a CAGR of 80% for 2007. Even if the original GSD is a bit high for my taste, getting an 80% return in 2007 makes it worth spending a few minutes looking into the numbers.

On the traditional keelix.com backtester the Money_Flow screen can be described as follows:

Everything on this site should now be accessible through the standard HTTP port (80), so if you were having trouble accessing the backtester or the old site because it ran on 8088, things should work better for you now. If your old direct links are not working, try accessing everything from the main menu and see if that works better. If it does, make sure you update your links.

A Hotmail user have reported having trouble getting the registration/lost password emails, and was kind enough to email me a workaround. You can find it in the Frequently Asked Questions section.