This. Thread is basically about competing with Goldman on a $5K budget fantasy... Mixed with paranoia that someone will spend $50K to steal your "secrets"... Typical of young, inexperienced traders... like me circa 1995. When you are actually start doing some damage... And are actually *** eating someone's lunch ***... You can start to worry... and then stop... Because your broker's or your broker's Clearing Firm's Market Makers... Will just have a look at your Statements... And decide if they wanna bother screwing with you or not. You need margins to absorb being cheated on 5-10% of your trades... You will have to evolve dozens of times to survive... What successful firms are doing today is temporary and constantly evolving... And there is no Right to Privacy is today's corrupt markets.
if anyone thinks that it is impossible to reverse engineer a trader's strategy, i am an example to prove it untrue. I once spent 18 months to crack a guru's strategy, which significantly shorted the time i needed to learn how to trade if ever i could be able to learn by myself. I still think the best way to learn how to trade is to reverse engineer a successful strategy. if someone pays attention.
I have a hard time believing that. And I can almost guarantee you, even if true, the time will come very soon where it has lost all edge. What/Who fits the definition of a guru?
why do you think a strategy is impossible to be reverse engineered? if you can not do it, it does not mean others can not either.
Alright. You cracked the code, sweet. Now your only problem is you spent all that time to acquire something with a short expiration date. Hopefully you know other guru's as well.
system that is based on mass behavior will work forever, because, as livemore once said, there is no new stuff on wall street.
BS. A strategy typically consists of a number of virtual transactions trading multiple instruments projected into a single trading account. Even with the actual executed trade logs it would be impossible to unravel the formula when there are layers upon layers of rules correlating instruments, folio, time, sequences & results. Many of the next generation algo's are no longer static.. they adjust parameters dynamically based on trades, actual fills and price action. Obviously you can figure out a single instrument martingale or simple static strategies but the dynamic algo's are often difficult to monitor and debug by the authors.
i agree it is difficult, but it is possible to do it, especially for the strategies that work for standalone instruments. for example, most of us on this forum choose a broker and enter and exit positions on a few instruments, while the instruments traded are all independent. if the strategies are applied to a few instruments at the same time, which will complicate the reversing engineer.
I believe that the Trend Follower Dr. David Druz said that the most robust system is the most volatile. So trade a robust system, no one will ever steal it because its too volatile. That will reduce your security expenditures.