In our continual efforts at ETC to extract further relevant information from price series, we have a policy of avoiding summary statistics(for trade generation, not for statistical inference). My favorite example of what to avoid is a moving average of price - it boils all price history down to a single number; any information encoded in structural relations within the series is washed away.

The breakout trader retains a little of this structure in that he or she reduces price history to two numbers. This represents a substantial improvement over moving average trading--evidently a little structure goes a long way. However, in assessing the value of breakout trading another factor looms: to the extent the former Turtles still trade breakout or quasi-breakout systems, the colossal dollar amounts traded by this experienced and tenacious group has to place stress on this kind of trading. Add to this a ragtag group of traders who have purchased "turtle" systems and it becomes clear that the future of this kind of trading may be a lot less bright than its past. Accordingly, I've been avoiding breakout trading for ten years.