Here's most of the current Elite Trader group. Why not also contact them through the Austin Traders Yahoo Group?... There's some pretty sharp trader/programmer-types residing in the capitol of the Lone Star State - a few are also regular Elite Trader contributors, and at least a couple are affiliated with the University of Texas in some capacity. And a few others have made millions from developing trading platforms. Maybe one or two of them contribute to ET on occasion...
I know their is a Futures Association there. They meet regularly on the first Tuesday of every month. It is call Austin Association of Futures Traders. I am sure you can find it through Google.
We've had traders of all different stripes show up. The only thing for sure is that Jerry Medved will show up and kick anyone's ass at pool/bowling/whatever.
I moved to Austin about 3 months ago. There is a group you can visit here: http://www.aaft.org/ I've been coming to the happy hour most Fridays, pretty fun. Last month's presentation was pretty good; I saw Keith the inventor of Aberration when he came to our group. Mostly he talked about the importance of avoiding curve-fitting. Just one of the many items of interest he made were that if you simply look at this it works well: if $TICK(today's open) > $TICK(yesterday's close) then Buy [ES / etc] at Open then close position at the close of market that day. This has been a pretty reasonable strategy the last few years at least. He said if you just put in a simple non-optimized profit target + stop loss (I think he used 1.5 SD for this, can't remember) you get a very smooth equity curve. -Taric
Oh I am *sure* Jerry will be interested in discussing trading platforms. Especially one particular one.