Pete,
Don’t assert that Quill’s trading system doesn’t work when your difficulties with applying it are of your own doing. For sure, the two rules aren’t a complete trading system, merely one-third of it, as I’ve said before, many times.
What three questions does any trading system have to answer? What? When? How much? ’
*What?’ is one’s trading universe, which can be a delimited pool of tradables or tradables constantly discovered with scans. Simon Sez doesn’t talk about that and could be faulted for that (or not).
When? is the buy/sell rules. Simon Sez is clear about that except for the matter of how to manage adverse price moves between flags. The implicit assumption is to exit on a reverse of entry condtions. By and large, that works well enough, though it does create some horrific drawdowns, though no worse than those suffered by the Turtle Traders and everyone knows about the fabulous, mega amounts of money they made --and it would require extensive backtesting to prove those drawdowns couldn’t be tolerated.
‘How much?’ is position-sizing and scaling. SS says nothing about that and doesn’t need to on its own. Those are just matters that any user of any trading system has to decide and test. Another word for this part of the system is money management. Poor money management will break any trading system, no matter how good it tests otherwise. Superior money management can turn a very crappy trading system into a money-maker.
Lastly, as I’ve said before, if you find you can’t make Quill’s system work for you, then don’t try to use it.
Charlie