I used to work at one of the #1s. I had pretty much zero knowledge in trading systems but picked up on the job. My team wd convert what super traders want to do into efficient algorithms. Then there are front end developers who don't know what backend does.They home brew a lot. Some proprietary code in hft side exists but those are pretty expensive and very specialized, requires consulting but the point is their software budget runs into several millions moving multi billions.. If you say you have the same code targeting #1 and retail traders then it does look like a red flag (no offense to you). What is affordable to #1 will be unaffordable to retail and #1 don't buy cheap sw. You can penetrate small hedge funds if you prove that you provide them an edge. They mostly like automated code that can highlight options. Stock strategies have limited scope. Pick out a list and ask for an audience or demo using live feed. They won't buy into backtest crap. If the sw makes them go belly up on the get go, they will be after you. In covid mkt anyone can claim an algo. Are you sure.
Aquarians, You have a strategy that does 13% sim trading, and you think it's gold mine that hedge funds that spend $100m+ each a year for just salaries for their developers, data experts would want?
Yes, this is an alternate approach, though I might start with at least a free if not fully open source tool. I'd start with: - Display and validate market data. So you can browse through years of data, step through day by day, select a term and view the vol curve and options. Data validation is very important because the one I pay for has a lot of errors, and I suspect any cheap feed will have the same problem. Also I might be willing to open source this part since if someone steps in and helps with data validation code (essentialy algos + heuristics) so I can reliably filter out crap, it's useful for me too.
It needs at least a few $100,000s to work. I can (and will) only test it on a virtual trading account, just to confirm I'm getting the same figures as in a simulation.
10% with a Sharpe of 2 is a dream for pension funds. I knew a guy who got financed ($5MM) on a much crappier system just because "it lost less when market went down" and "made same or more when it went up", or so it claimed. Not all systems are supposed to work on a Robinhood $2000 account and take it into millions. And not all systems require a "track record" on a retail trading account on trader's money, this is not how research in professional finance works.
Why not create a syndicate of ET members, they chip in $10k each which remains in their ownership. A little bit like a ET hedge fund. If the kitty grows, great, if it declines then they may assist a little like open sourcing to fine tune. If you name it 'Church of the Latter Day Shitheads' then possibly get tax exemption.
Run it on SIM for a bit and if it performs well, I can get you in contact with one of the worlds largest algo hedge funds. They have a group that reaches out to independent traders (they found me on LinkedIn), evaluates what they are doing and if they like it, enter into some sort of agreement where they can use the strategy. In my case, I gave them read only access to my Interactive Brokers account. My strategies at the time eroded performance wise so no deal was struck. One option to track live performance is you can post trades to their system in real time. Of course the strategies need to be scalable and not be to tightly correlated to equity indexes.