Good morning Allen, Re: SAFE settings..............
Please remember that the AIM-Users archived site is a collection of information that started "early on" in my AIMing. While I feel that the idea of splitting the SAFE is a good one, I no longer feel that reducing the Buy SAFE below 10% is a good idea for most investments.
That is because the feedback to the Portfolio Control (PC) is a significant part of what makes AIM work well over time. It seems to work just about right with 10% SAFE on the buy side and a 50% feedback to PC. While I've never tested a customized feedback based on other Buy SAFE settings, one could tinker with that, too. Probably a smaller SAFE than 10% would justify a smaller feedback to PC as well.
I didn't do a lot of 'reverse editing' of the web site as my experience with AIM grew. So, there are probably lots of anachronistic bits of info there. It was the Dot Com bubble that pushed me toward always maintaining the 10% Buy SAFE as a minimum. During that era I shifted essentially the total SAFE to the buy side. So, if I'd been 10 buy/10 sell, I pushed it all to the buy side making it 20% buy and zero sell SAFE. Of course those settings were mainly for individual company stocks, which might not be at all appropriate for ETFs or mutual funds.
My best suggestion is to follow the concepts given at the web site and probably not the specifics. For instance, that particular piece was written before I'd been introduced to the Zig Zag graphing that became available on StockCharts.com. Zig Zag helped to quantify the frequency of price reversals at a specific level which could be approximated by AIM's SAFE and Minimum $$$ Trade amounts. That helped define what seemed to be appropriate settings for AIM for a specific investment or class of investments.
Today I make my AIM settings as appropriate for a class of investments as possible, set them and forget them. We like to think of AIM as a volatility capture device, but for things like sector ETFs and diversified style funds we actually are doing what might be referred to as 'trend capture' instead. With trend capture AIM is either buying or selling multiple times in the same direction before a reversal is seen. 6 sells in a row followed by 3 buys in a row is far different from what we see in many growth type company common stocks.
Ideally we want to see AIM recycle the cash to stock shares as often as it can while keeping our profit margins intact. Our choice of settings with SAFE and with size of the min. order relative to holding size will help determine this.
