I am seeing a trend starting to emerge of people hating on the trend following traders (see what I did there?). From my perspective there is a very simple explanation for this and thought I would just put it out there. It drives them absolutely crazy that there is a strategy out there that is irrespective of what anyone thinks. The entire way up people have been fighting this rally, shorting it, hating the people that were long, being childish about the whole situation because their emotions were completely taking over as their account diminished.
Now they are finally starting to make a bit of money over the past few weeks and all of a sudden they want to look around and see how the trend followers are doing since they were the primary people being hated on while we were riding the uptrend. They see that they were stopped out of the high flying tech stocks with a nice profit before the 30-50% declines, some took on short positions in the bio techs and high P/E tech stocks, some were rotating into the stronger sectors that aren't being cut in half, but they don't see the pain that they endured throughout the rally that they fought the entire way up. This is what they were waiting on so they could say "look at how terrible trend following is, it doesn't work they gave back all their profits" blah blah. Well they can't say it on any merit so they point to the trend followers who have no idea how to properly execute (whether because of lack of experience, knowledge, or whatever the case) and they say "look at these guys they suck, trend following sucks" or whatever they are saying because they are looking for the people that are enduring the pain they endured while fighting the trend the entire way up and slapping the label of the entire strategy on these people they can pick out.
They don't want to let you know about the history behind trend following or the many track records that are published, they just want to prove us wrong (aka they want to be right). They see the people taking on short positions that have been long for 2 years and they are thinking "hey you can't cross that line, you were long.. these are our profits and we deserve them!" No you don't deserve anything, none of us do. If you want to promote your strategy then fine, do that. Compete head to head with us like normal people do, we are all happy to have some enjoyable competition and a happy environment but attacking people gets you no where and it makes you and your strategy look weak. It looks like you see trend following as a threat to your precious strategy and you need to do everything you can to discredit it before your followers move to the other side. Just be good spirited and people will choose where they want to put their money.
