Advice required regarding automated trading from home / office

and some of us on here are workin' together (loosely). You just gotta be able to identify who's a loser, etc., which shouldn't be too hard...

(as a last resort!)

 

Thanks to all for the very helpful input.

I worked with a trader a couple of years ago, who wanted me to implement a pretty simple trading algorithm, he described it in plenty of detail, I coded it up and back-tested it. The results weren't what the trader expected. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing we determined that his algorithm was more discretionary than we originally thought! Essentially he used his experiences over the years as a trader to tune his entries and exits without even realising he was doing it and was unable to articulate these 'experiences' in a way for me to code.

I’ve come a long way since then and now use my experiences to “fill in the gaps” or “re-interpret” traders algorithms in order for them to actually understand what they are doing!

We shouldn’t let geographical location be a barrier to communication. It‘s no doubt a face-to-face chat over a coffee or a beer is best but sometimes a web cam and instant messaging can be sufficient.

In fact I prefer the web-cam solution since you can see if the person is a troll…

 

You can tell they're a troll by looking at 'em?

 

This is a troll:



No that hard, really.

 

LOL! I think he wants to do a casting session!

"Well Bob, I know you can't trade for shit. But you sure look good. So let's get together."

:eek:

 

Interesting thread, describes my issue perfectly. Few years ago I left my Information technology job to trade full time. I am also a systemetic automated trader.

I quickly discovered that trading from home, I was bored to tears within a few weeks. So I rented office space in Manhattan near SOHO in a shared office. I purposely wanted non-traders, so I shared space with graphic designers, creative types. That helped somewhat. I even took art/drawing classess during the day to pass time, drawing nude models is not as much fun as one would imagine!

Full time system trading is not easy, its a different type of psychological stress. I believe my need for social interaction or execitement if you will, led to terriable trading discipline. I would override my system all the time and want to 'take control'.

This lasted about year and half, and now for the past four years I am back at my regular IT job. I don't know which is more painful dealing with office politics at work or the daily grind of systems trading.

 

Office politics is more painful ,because you are imprisoned whether you like it not...trading is painless IF you take every trade you should be taking

I can empathize with you guys, because I trade from home both equities and ES minis. It is a lonely experience up to appoint, because I won't take calls during the trading session and very few people come to visit as know I won't really make time for them..

The web cam thing could be interesting....

 

You might want to look for 'coworking' offices in London.

Just in the San Francisco bay area there are several.

http://www.optionsatwork.com/virtual_office_options.html

http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

There are also opportunities to rent a desk in larger office spaces that are stable.

Better than staying at home but without the pain of 'being employed'.

Good trading.

 

It takes many months of work to build your trading platform as many have done. (I know because I did that myself.)

What do you think of forming an open source community working on the same platform?

Check out my recent post about potentially releasing my personal platform to open source.

As a software architect for many years, I built all the features I needed in a well designed reusable system. And with many years working on "real time" systems, I had the experience to highly optimize it for back testing and running using tick data as the basis.

It's in C# and has an interface working for MB TRading brokers. Anyone could use the interface and write a plugin for other brokers.

FYI, it's fully built for the goal of running your own "black box" automated trading system.

If you want to do manual trading, then platforms like NinjaTrader are better for that.

Neoticker works well also but it just has limitations and is closed source that force me to build my own. There's multicharts also but it lacks a true coding debugger for EasyLanguage code so it becomes very hard to write a full features set of trading rules.

It also limits your time frames available, etc. Of course that all applies to TradeStration mostly too.

It's almost impossible to get a solid usable black box trading platform for any reasonable price in the market, much less, open source.

Sincerely,
Wayne