rules or calculations. Clearly, many of these systems have more rules than that. I
still stand by that rule of thumb, although I have to admit that I have relaxed it
quite a bit at times—obviously. If for nothing else, one simple reason is that it is
very hard to come up with system ideas to test every month. I apologize for this,
but hope that you will still be able to take the concepts as such, run with them, and
perhaps boil them down to something that will fit the three-rules rule as well.
Also, many of the systems seem more complicated than they really are. This
is especially true for the relative-strength systems that compare several markets
with each other. But all we’re really doing is formalizing something most of us are
trying to do in our heads all the time anyway.
Finally, I’ve already mentioned that I really don’t regard the exits as part of
the systems’ rules. In a little while, we will get rid of most of them completely and
substitute them for a new set of expert exits, developed individually for each sys-
tem, just as we did in the experts exits system. Enough said. These are the systems
we will work with for the remainder of the book.CHAPTER 16 Evaluating System Performance 189