Hello, I been learning to program in #C for a few months now with Ninjatrader and I have developed and back tested a few strategies. It's been a tedious yet challenging and fun process. I have not traded live yet. I mainly work alone on my computer and lately I wondered if any tradars actually produce a yearly profit or income from trading an automated trading systems. How can I confirm if any traders are actually making money trading automated trading systems? I am reviewing striker and collective2.com for systems performance, but how can I trust this data. Thank you and appreciate your response or recommendation.
Regarding C2, You can trust the data if (1) the trading system is TOS certified (developer has linked his/her brokerage account to C2), or (2) while the system had/has autotraders (subscribers that have linked their brokerage accounts to C2). In these cases, the data/statistics are based upon actual trade fills.
Usually, stuff you'll find developed by other people is always crap. Either distributors charge a large commission or the systems are over-fitted. I'd say that hedge funds that make money today are more systematic than discretionary > I'd advise you to buy a few books and trade your own Ninja Trader system.
Yes. You can verify even without signing up. I just want to clarify that systems can be non-TOS and have no autotrading subscribers (not all subscribers autotrade) and produce data and a track record; then later become TOS and/or obtain autotrading subscribers. One should recognize that older stats of the system may not be based upon actual fills. You can check when autotrading first occurred by clicking the 'show autotrader data' link on the system page.
Thank you wintergasp, I will not be investing in someone else strategy on C2, or any other service. I was wanting to know if any other automated trading system developers are making decent returns year to year. This insight will give me a boost in my own trading efforts to develop and test strategies. Thanks for advice, I shall do.
The market is complex and weird, every day, The market is anything but 'automated' -- I can't imagine no system or fixed formula to be truly, fruitfully profitable consistently for the longer haul, You are rather extremely vulnerable to pitfalls and whammies and stepping on land mines along your journey, -- if you fail to use your intuition and common sense and experience and wisdom, (and vice versa too for the rewards side)
I agree with this, especially stressing the words "you'll find", i.e. "stuff readily available to retail traders". (Of course there are many financial institutions owning and/or leasing automated systems which are in a different league, but I appreciate that that's not relevant to the context within which you're asking.) The specific problem in looking at places like C2 is that those tend to be systems which are designed to fit those sites' ranking parameters well, to attract attention and customers, and this all too often signifies that they're a lot riskier than they look, and are always quite likely to crash and burn at some unspecified future point. Key concept: the correlation between systems at sites like that, which have had a good run for the previous 6 months, and those which will have the same sort of good run again in the next 6 months (which is of course what actually matters to you as a customer) is much lower than many people imagine, and there are reasons for this being so. Great care, skill, knowledge and experience are therefore needed in assessing them. Never lose site of the fact that their creators might always be professional marketers rather than professional traders. Personally, I wouldn't touch them, but that's perhaps just my skepchick perspective.
Most short-term black box systems don't hold up without added layers of complexity. I run gray boxes with a few inputs. They all started out as white boxes.