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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
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Author: TGMark   😊 😞
Number: of 6131 
Subject: Re: Long time reader, infrequent poster
Date: 10/15/25 8:41 PM
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No. of Recommendations: 17
I ran a lot of the complicated MI screens for a long time.

I *think* I was one of the more active traders around here (have not been since the pandemic).

My goal was to reproduce the GTR1-reported daily start results for the five or six screens I was using, usually 15-20 picks.
Those screens were so-called "high flyers" with great CAGR in backtest and relied on relatively low liquidity picks.
I needed to split up my portfolio into smaller chunks to be able to invest in those kind of stocks.

For 4-5 years at least, I would trade every day, probably 50-70 trades/day.
It would take a few minutes per day:
- run Powershell script which would in turn run GTR1 for all the screens and generate the daily picks;
- paste that list into Yahoo for a quick check for obvious problems
- paste the list into FolioFN and use "update and exchange" to rebalance that chunk to the new picks (using both morning and afternoon trading windows).

I could even do this all on my smartphone. Lol.

I had some great, great years, exceeding 60% return. But I did have trouble stomaching the downturns.
In particular, 2018 was very bad. This year appears to be a repeat of that.
(IMO there is something about the unpredictability of POTUS that destroys momentum-based screens).
At the depths of the pandemic bottom in 2020, I had enough and converted to mostly mag7 picks and a lot of BRK-B.
That has not at all been a bad decision, in hindsight.

I have tried (and come close) to reproducing all of this at Interactive Brokers, since FolioFN went belly up. (GTR1 was gone for a long while too).
It's more work at IBKR, with some spreadsheet processing required. It might take me at best 10-15 minutes to prepare the day's orders, which is too much for me.
And it's a little too manual, meaning mistakes happen more.
So I essentially have not been actively using MI, but I will get motivated once in a while and fire up the scripts and spreadsheets - they still work!

I have an affinity toward the mechanical, algorithmic nature of MI. GTR1 is simply amazing, but has a steep learning curve, and is not always up to date these days.
Most folks here worry a lot about curve fitting, but I'm really not one of them.
The screens I was using have continued to outperform over longer time periods, but they can have very bad stretches of several years in a row.
It is almost impossible to deal emotionally with those long stretches of underperformance compared to the market.
To be clear, everyone's implementation is different and YMMV.
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This community has written 6,115 posts about Mechanical Investing. The article-length ones it recommended most:
Dividend investing · 52 recs · 2025
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OT - Div yields and returns · 32 recs · 2024
Using AI to generate backtesting programs · 30 recs · 2025
Rankings for 19Dec2022 · 29 recs · 2022
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