About longtermtrading.com 

My name is Alan Pryor and I am the principal of longtermtrading.com and the developer of our suite of trading systems. Like many traders, I have undergone a long trading philosophy transformation at longtermtrading.com. 

I started out many years ago drawing trend lines on commercial chart service graphs that were meticulously updated by hand each day. Indicators and moving averages were done with a calculator and also plotted by hand. The process was laborious and tedious but forced me to focus on only a very limited amount of information just to be able to keep on top of it each day. A day I’ll never forget was when I got my first handheld programmable HP calculator. All I had to do was put in the open, high, low, close of each tradable issue and all the moving averages were calculated for me…my world had changed! Then came an Apple II...then PCs with ever increasing processing power...then Super Charts followed by TradeStation and their library of indicators...then Internet real-time quotes. With ever increasing amounts of information at my disposal, I could now follow 100 times the number of tradable issues with 10 times the information available for each of those issues compared to only 15 years ago. 

Through it all, though, my trading performance was gradually decreasing each year. I had gone from consistent double digit returns each year to considering myself lucky is I turned a profit by the end of the year. At the time, it was all too easy to write this off as due to the tough markets…after all, most of the pros have also had tough years recently… the markets just aren’t trending anymore, etc. etc. A watershed event occurred some time ago, however, that forced me to completely rethink my trading approach.

My background is in Environmental Engineer in the everyday, real world. I love my work because I have a genuine calling to improve the world for our children and grandchildren. It can sometimes be very hard and demanding work, though, with long hours in the field doing experiments and collecting data and/or a lot of traveling time. I also dearly loved my family and my trading and system development work. This created some very real day-to-day conflicts in my schedule. This came to a head one evening some years ago when, as usual, I was hunkered over my computer agonizing over the reams of charts available to analyze the next day's trading opportunities. 

My young son at the time wandered up behind me trying to entice me into a game. I tried to divert his attention and let me get back to work by showing him a multi-windowed screen I was viewing of a number of charts. Each of the charts had multiple indicators, trend lines, and paint bars in different colors. I thought it would be quite colorful and visually interesting to him. When I showed him the screen, though, he immediately turned his nose up at me and sneered, "that's just colored 'pasghetti' and doesn't mean anything" and strolled off looking for other more promising entertainment opportunities. When I looked back at the screen, it suddenly struck me how true were his words. There was so much data and so much information to digest compared to my old ways of trading that I really didn't get a clear picture of the markets anymore.  My son was right…all that data and graphics capabilities and raw computing power “didn’t mean anything”. 

I thought back to my early days of trading and the simplified (but then untested) approaches I used to consistently beat the market - and the proverbial lightening bolt struck. What if I went back to the most basic and simple trading principles that I used early in my trading career and applied to them the same rigorous testing tools I now had at my disposal today? Fervently wanting to spend more time with my kids and having grown tired of the daily effort required to keep on top of my trading, I also decided to see if good results could be obtained trading on a weekly or even monthly basis rather than a daily or intraday basis. I had always heard that "trading less is making more". It would be a good time to test this theory. This began a long period of  late-night code writing and back testing…but the results were well worth the thousands on man-hours of effort. I am proud of the trading products we have developed using simple principles that have stood the test of time.

I am not a rocket scientist, though. I don’t use the latest advanced neural net technologies or newly declassified Dept. of Defense missile tracking algorithms to develop a slew of complicated indicators. Nor have I scoured the financial universe looking for obscure or obtuse relationships to try to capitalize on short term anomalies or imbalances in the markets. Rather, what I have very simply done is to take time-proven trading concepts for entering and exiting the markets and dramatically improved them by adding in my own unique adaptive functions to make them sensitive to current market conditions. 

In many ways, by working with the time-proven methods of the masters instead of developing my own cutting edge technologies it has made me a far more objective developer of trading systems. This is simply because I haven’t developed any new purported Holy Grail oscillators or indicators and thus feel no pressure to continue to  promote them even in the face of contradictory information. If it meets my criteria and it works, I keep it. About 99 times out of 100, though, the tested concept did not work and I quickly discarded it. 

What I arrived at was a very powerful and robust suite of completely nonoptimized long term trading systems that trade the exact same way across all markets. The systems have all been painstakingly backtested against the same, identical, rigorously selected 21-commodity portfolio and outperform almost everything on the market - and at a substantially reduced price. I'm very proud of our work and hope you agree with our approach.