zenith of 3rd inning is not enough to replace most of today's job yet. alphaZero doesn't unclog toilets, need robots for that, which is a parallel development with AI.. check the Boston Robotics stuff... in the 1st inning maybe. not necessarily at AMZN IPO, Bezos himself didn't know it would turn out like this today. yes with a very wide stroke of brush you can categorize back testing with machine learning, but the degree of sophistication is night and day... the point is don't take a knife to a machine gun fight
I can do it for you. I charge $100 per hour. A very simple strategy can probably be done in one hour. More complex ones could cost much more.
If he had a good system and paid me to program it, I would not deceive him. I would give him honest results because first, he paid for it, and second, I would not want to discourage him. I would want him to come back to me with other good ideas that I can also implement and use for my own benefit.
There is no shortage of good automatic strategies. I have written over 200 of them. The problem is that people will not actually trade as the strategy says. They will inevitably add their personal opinion, and take/not take trades, depending on their discretion. Afterward, they will claim the strategy (that they didn't follow) doesn't work.
Trading is personal, everyone wants what they want. I've been in this business as long time, I can honestly say that I would be adjusting or getting someone to adjust these ready made programs to fit my needs as well. But when programs work and people don't trade them/ this maybe something a therapist can only answer? But i would add that the discretionary approach is easily ingrained or burned-in and can be challenging to overcome.
In 30 minutes I've got a Skype call with a company interested in aquiring my backtesting (and maybe live trading) software. Although I'm giving very low chances to making an actual sale, thing is there seems to be a market for this sort of stuff. The market I'm after is in the (semi) professional league since being on this forum for about two years and having interacted with the retail trader, I can tell you, they ain't got neither the capital nor the competence required to dislocate the amount of money needed for a proper backtester.
Call went fine, they're willing to pay $10,000 / month, I'm paying $1000 as I already stated here repeatedly but still, we can't find no competent guys to hire.