About two years ago I foolishly published a strategy (on another message board), and from that point on a consistent winning strategy became a consistent loser. Therefore these days I'm more worried about fellow traders, especially beginners. If I ever publish my system, then they would be the first ones to compete with me and copy all my trades. As to broker fading my trades. Wenever I consistently win, they can make money by doing what I am doing. However, even when they do that, they're no real competition, because most of the time they have to wait for me to enter *before* they can make a trade. This way they're not a real competition. This way they can even *help* me by supporting the market *after* I have already have taken a position.
Yeah brokers could easily steal your strategy if they wanted to. There was a broker advertising on ET a while back "we keep your trades top secret". I dunno what thats about. Some advise, go with a large broker. They are more likely to have more automated processes and bigger fish to fry that trying to steal a retail trader's strategy. However, employees of the firm might try to. Try to avoid contacting account services since they will review your trade history. Mix up different trade styles, automated and discretionary.
...and you must be an idiot my friend, because the keyword is "consistent". Would it have been really hard to reverse the CONSISTENT loser strategy??? A consistent loser strategy is worth as much as a consistent winner strategy...
If a broker wanted to look at all my trades they could reverse engineer my strategies.... what I would really hate is if I encoded all I know in an autotrading scheme and somebody got ahold of it. That represents a third of a lifetime's work.. there is nothing new in there but still... letting some hacker get ahold of that is not an option for me... I'd definitely want to find them and cut off their head and stick my bowie knife with my initials on it up their backside and just call the cops and tell them it was worth it... that is one reason I'm not quite autotrading yet... I go a little mad just thinking how they are waiting to do that.. Good brokers are going to have a tight firewall to protect themselves and their clients.. these firewalls are called "pinhole" firewalls, the only way something goes through that, is that a form is presented with all the blanks filled in properly and then the data goes through.. to autotrade you have to give your broker a connection but it's hard for some jerk working there to upload anything not officially included in the firewall spec... that is good... but they could download spyware to your machine along with an install for example and upload to another site.. so what you do is you get a whitelisting firewall and use trading software that does not need to phone home for anything, license check, upgrades, none of that shit... then you only need one url in your whitelist, that of your broker, and pick a professional one with a pinhole firewall... at that point you are reasonably secure.. stuck with brokerage data to trade with but secure... If some really unreasonable and powerful people wanted your stuff at that point they could force your internet provider to allow them to spoof your broker and they would get your intellectual property.. or they could do that from an internet node even, the DNS servers were shown to be open to spoofing last year... There is no firewall or software solution to that one.. with some hardware you can have a one way internet connection in a sense.. it's doable.. and one way data provision too, all doable, all a big and expensive hardware design problem afaik but doable... if I had some astoundingly new and powerful ideas I would not utter them aloud, I would not make note of them, and I would not deploy them until I had the airtight computer setup and some capable mercenaries guarding even that.. I'm not kidding for a minute here, look at what Wall Street has done over the years in conjunction with the politicians.. thinking they would not steal your intellectual property is purest of folly... going after them with the Bowie Knife when they try.. ahhhh, pure satisfaction... I'd love to say to the judge "yeah, that's my Bowie Knife. It has my initials on it.. where exactly did you guys find it again?" :eek:
Unless they can see your screen and the set up your are using they can't steal anything. If you are this paranoid then you have bigger concerns that someone stealing your strategy.
You sound like an expert, what low resources anti-virus,spyware,firewall you use ? P.S. Sorry for being a little of topic.
the brokers have competitive advantages like super low commissions and leverage 10:1 or more overngiht positions and low interest rates etc. and financing from banks. broker could front run you or trade against you.
I often have read about these great bank traders who when they leave the bank, fall on their asses because they no longer have access to the order flow. Has anyone else noticed this as well?
Sorry guys this is a lot about nothing. I had a guy watch me trade profitably for two years in the same office who tried to copy my strat when I left and fell flat on his face. brokers don't have the time/energy to bother. They have seen SO many people come in and make millions for 3 years only to blow out on the 4th that they wouldn't consider your strat if you wrote it down and handed it to them. Being safety minded is a good idea, but take the tin foil hats off.