No, because this would mean that the person/company selling such software is a failure and was unable to use their own product. While at the same time no real traders give away, share or sell their edge because they’d instantly lose it. And do you really think that RenTec would simply say “ah, making $100 billion was too much, so let’s fire everyone and sell our tech for a $million, while we can binge watch Star Wars” ? On another hand, there are plenty of decent strategy development and automation products offered, from free to costing $millions. Some will actually instantly start auto-trading great strategies on your computer and put money into your account, with some risk but their strats will self-adjust and rebalance every few months. Others are services that will connect you to their own or 3rd party trading bots and allow you to duplicate their trades. Yet others will install TradeStarion with strategies on your own server and charge you x% of profit. Others are hedge funds that run advanced strategies and also charge you %fee. Others are consultants to hedge funds that provide tech to them. So there is a huge ecosystem of trading software and services. Yet, anyone who actually has a strong edge where they can make $millions of $billions without working, wouldn’t sell it for any price, unless using your money as a leverage and charging you % (hedge funds). Actually selling and supporting such technology would be too much work since they could simply watch tv instead. Though there are plenty of binary options websites that promise you wealth just by making a few clicks before you go to bed.
What Guru said is true and makes me very sad as my programming skills are lacking. Do any of you have edges so powerful...don't worry I know you will not share...just wondering? ES P.S. Send me an Angel..Send me an Angel....right now....right now...
Just an idea, maybe you'd like to take a look at Collective2. I haven't looked at them in a year+, but in the past seen some investors claiming that they subscribe to multiple strategies there, which gives them uncorrelated profits/results. I'd also recommend learning how to trade options, as they'd allow you to develop strategies "by hand" that have defined risk and somewhat predictable returns, at least to a level that you can control. Personally, I had an edge in options but lost it, so not sure if it could be called an edge. While now I'm working on new ones and I think/hope I have something again. So an "edge" seems to be a fluid substance. In trading stocks & futures directly, the most powerful edge is to have thousands of strategies, which is one reason that so many individual strategies just don't have sufficient pull, while getting thousands of strategies to work in real-time requires larger infrastructure. (this is what I'm currently working on)
I imagine there is a tipping point where it makes more sense to keep all technology in house and trade vs licensing the software. Obviously, if you have billions to trade, selling the software makes little sense. In my case, with an account just at six figures, only trading and not licensing technology is not an option.
I think spending on tech should be proportional to the account size you are trading. If you have $30,000, spending $3000 a year on tech is way too much. I would think spending 2% to 5% of account value would be appropriate. There are some products out there that can find strategies based on performance metrics and then generate code that can be run in an auto trading platform. They range from $1500 to $20,000 per year.
Yes I have. My system can be 100% automated. All I have to do to make sure is the internet connection being on and computer running and it will make me all the profits I need but the problem is I don't trust those 3rd-party trading software because my system would be going through their server and IB's API is slow and crap. That is when I was with IB. Now that I am no longer with them, my system is only about 10% automated with TOS' extremely limited scripting language. But no biggie, I found another manual trading strategy that's actually more profitable and it's working out quite well with TD's generous margin policy so I am not losing out on anything.
I cracked the code and it's automated. Roughly around 30% annual return with drawdowns less than 10-15%. The only problem I am facing now is capital. Trying to set up a fund a few years down the road while building my track record now.
I am trading a discretionary system manually. I think I am actually getting the hang of it...or very near. But... I always look around. ES