If I were you, I prefer to program myself, instead of using other person's work. It takes time, but it is worth in the long run, specially to computer program traders.
Great point. Thank you. My background is in math/stats but never learned about C++ to automate trades. Any suggestion where I should start?
Good to hear from similar background. I have math/stats degree too. For automating trade while you are working, refer to Retail Form forum here where I used to spend most time. IB is a first starting point. For further, send me PM.
Over last few weeks, I started de-leveraging my positions on both long and short as I couldn't think of a good entry point. Personally, I'm not an expert in macroeconomics but I look at those data like disposable income, earning growth, housing index, retail sales... It seems for me that oil price drop didn't drive anything positive significantly.
I ended February with decent profit covering losses from last November and December. Looking back, I don't think I was able to survive on oil drop if I had more aggressive positions than what I had. I learned the lesson again that diversification was must on a leveraged portfolio (and never predict when the market will turn around). Overall, I made losses on oil while profits on gold/tech/retail/pharma.
Good to hear. Please note that long-term annual 20% outperformance over market is impossible. It is since one with annual 20% takes all the money over the 400 years for capitalism history. Buffet and Gates should be wiped out now if there is one with annual 20% over the last 400 years. Please recall that Buffet made ONLY "12% outperformance over SnP500", for the last 45(?) years. BTW, with no knowledge background in fundseeder above, let me ask you few questions. 1) Which broker do you use, such as IB? 2) Does FS receive daily PnL, automatically from IB? If not, do you insert the PnL data everyday?
Hi, 1) I use IB. 2) FS is connected with my IB account, so they pull PnL data automatically. My trading goal sounds aggressive, but I only trade with about $100k - If I generate the market performance, I wouldn't retire for a long time =) In the past, I had a chance to have an interview with a $3B hedge fund who wanted to hire retail traders to run some sort of fof structure. At the call, he said that my return wasn't high enough and said that manager's return decreased as they managed larger capital. It sounded like they looked for traders generating over 100% YoY.
It is interesting to hear it. How often FS pull out your PnL, such as once every day at 5PM? Furthermore, do you use IB API, for easy and better connection to IB?