Mindful Trader is a stock picking service. I post my stock picks to the website for subscribers. For those who choose to follow my stock picks, it's not possible to trade my stock picks at the exact same times as me; there will always be some amount of delay if they choose to make a trade based on the pick.
I wanted to see the financial impact that the delay might have. Considering that there will be a delay from the time the stock pick is made to the time a subscriber can actually trade it, will that mean less profit for the subscriber? More profit? The same profit? As always, I wanted data to tell me the answers. So I did a study on it using actual stock picks I posted through Mindful Trader. This video shows the results of the study.
The study shows that whether there was a 15-minute delay, 1-hour delay, 3-hour delay, or 1-day delay (from the time the subscriber entered the trade to when the stock pick was posted), the profit could have been at least the same for the subscriber as what I made in my own trading account from those same trades (over the course of the entire period in the study). It actually turned out to be more profit for the subscriber than me at every level of delay in the study.
And this makes sense for at least a couple reasons:
1) These trades are swing trades. I'm not making stock picks that are expected to shoot to the moon right after I get in. I'm typically holding positions that last about a week. Having a 1-hour delay to enter a trade that is expected to last about a week shouldn't have a noticeable impact on the outcome, and this study seems to underscore that.
2) All the trading strategies I use have raw edge in back tests. By that I mean that the entries and exits don't have to be super precise in order to benefit from the back-tested edge. So in other words, for any given trade I do, a person might be able to get in for a lower or higher price and the trade might still have a similar back-tested edge at that entry point too. It's one of the awesome things about these swing trade strategies I use.
Keep in mind that although the study was based on my live trades, I had to simulate what the entry price could have been for the delayed entries by looking at the price range that occurred at the time of projected entry. Since I didn't actually perform "late entry" trades in my live account, the results of the study use a simulated entry.
If you want to see the Excel file with the data from my study, you can access it here.
