Bio
Dean Hoffman
Dean Hoffman is both the President and founder of Strategic Trading Systems Inc., he holds a commodity license and is also registered as a Commodity Trading Advisor with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In addition to his background in computer science at Penn State University he has over 16 years of experience in the futures industry. He started out as a commodity broker in 1987 and eventually became a top producer with a major Chicago Futures Commission Merchant (FCM). He later went on to form his own commodity brokerage firm at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Dean states "During my years as a broker and later as a brokerage firm owner I gained tremendous experience watching clients trade in many different ways. Unfortunately, most of the approaches did not work and I saw the vast majority of my clients and my firms clients lose money. This was very painful on many levels and I decided there must be a better way. My early experiences motivated me to begin a full blown research project into commodity trading systems".
At this point Dean has invested close to 15 years researching thousands of trading systems. He started out developing simple single market based systems and then evolved to far more complex portfolio based systems and system combinations. He has tested much of what was available in the public domain "without satisfaction" and then created his own proprietary indicators, methods and software. He also spent many years researching the critical areas of money management, position sizing & trading psychology.
System
Checkmate
Checkmate is a truly unique commodity trading system; it trades the entire spectrum of commodities and does so with identical rule and parameter sets. This helps eliminate the problems associated with over optimizing and curve fitting. The primary performance goal with Checkmate is not maximum profit, but rather consistency of returns and minimization of drawdowns. Checkmate is very selective when entering the market, even when monitoring a large number of commodities Checkmate will usually only be in a small number of trades. The average margin requirement for Checkmate is often much less than other systems tracking the same markets. This makes it ideal for the smaller account trading a larger portfolio.
The logic is designed to capture mid-term trends. The system uses advanced trend filtering when entering and a combination of exits. It is not uncommon for Checkmate to get out of profitable trades very near the recent high (or low) of the trend. This helps reduce the huge give back in open trade equity often seen in many trend following systems. This can make Checkmate a more psychologically "comfortable" system to trade. If you’re looking for broad diversification with solid risk control and mid-term timing then Checkmate might be right for you.
The February 2007 issue of Futures Magazine displayed the Top 10 Trading Systems, which were research by George Pruitt of Futures Truth. PFG cannot verify the performance of the programs listed. The risk of loss in trading futures, options, cash currencies and other leveraged transaction products can be substantial. Therefore only "risk capital" should be used. Futures, options, cash currencies and other leveraged transaction products are not suitable investments for everyone. The valuation of futures, options, cash currencies and other leveraged transaction products may fluctuate and as a result clients may lose more than the amount originally invested and may also have to pay more later. Consider your financial condition before deciding to invest or trade.