Perhaps someone who has gone through this program, obtained funding ( leverage) then actually obtained institutional funding to start their own operation, or whatever can opine here. A firm I worked with back in 2004 tried the farm team approach to find potential traders. However, only 10k was required to act as a test account. Traders actually traded from the firms trading floor in NYC-- a 100% legit, 100 million plus fund--with quants, third party admn, infrastructure, impressive offices, etc. Over 100 traders tried out for the position. All were vetted extensively with their track record, checks, etc. Out of the 100 traders, all of whom had solid track records, only 1 survived to be hired. This person had a real edge and it worked. It was not anything we had were even aware of at the time. Its not cheap to advertise on elitetrader--- I am interested to hear from anyone in this program successful or not--- Good luck to everyone! But man, this is a hard road to hoe. surf
Interesting Marketsurfer> was the 10k the trader's own? What instruments did they trade? Did 99 lose money? What strategies did they trade, their own or the firms? Why do you think you had such a low success rate vs Richard Dennis for example.
Richard Dennis taught a method,that worked at the time. This firm had the traders bring their own methods--no training. No, not all lost money, but only one had results that were needed to be hired. They could trade anything. surf
There is a great deal of truth to that for any trading methodology. The markets are always changing, and the trader who wants to stay with this for a career will have to adapt as well. There are always "the good old days". Even back during "the good old days" all they talked about at the time was "the good old days". That is so brilliant, I am going to trademark that.
Hoeing a road (as opposed to a row) would indeed be pretty hard. Heh. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be asking anybody unaccustomed to verbal brawlfests to come on here to try and duck random punches thrown at their heads. I'm sort of a unique breed for liking the brawl... kind of like Fight Club... but most normal folks, no. This thread has done a decent enough job of hashing out what's what. Those who are interested will be interested. Those who won't be, won't be. Which is fine. It is what it is. We fully expected the capital raising thing to appeal to a VERY small percentage of the broader ET audience anyway. And the futures community has benefited too, via the "IF YOU TRADE FUTURES, BECOME A CTA" bullhorn. (We can help guys looking for CTA setups too btw. No charges or kickbacks, just direction to counsel we know is solid.) Thanks to all who helped confirm the old sparring muscles are still in shape.
Heh - yeah that is pretty good. Has the ring of old timer wisdom to it. One of the interviews in Hedge Fund Market Wizards -- Michael Platt of Bluecrest I believe -- talks about how some of the old school trend following programs have degraded via failure to evolve. (Platt's Bluetrend runs a couple billion.) In fact that reminds me of a kick-ass Michael Steinhardt quote relating to this topic. Might have to go look it up again.
Do you know why only 1 was hired? My guess is the survivor could be likely a contrarian trader, who can provide a negative correlation to the firm's historical performance. What the firm really want is to find talents for improving its overall beta performance, rather than general traders who are aiming at adding alpha to the firm. My 2 cents!
That or they were just exploiting uncovered anomalies.... exploiting the slippage of large orders.. accelerating irrational moves.. finding the bigger fish to fry.. just like you can crack a crazy big md5 hash you can crack and front run algos
Hey Darkhorse, so you and your buddy Mike are both active traders. Both have years of experience. Are you two going through your allocator's program? If not, why not? And if you are, how is it going?
We're most likely going to do it in 2013. The reason we aren't doing it right now is because we have some major project initiatives to fund that represent a heavy draw on cash flows. For instance, we are working with an ex-NASA software engineer (who is a trader himself) to co-develop some extremely powerful portfolio analysis tools and real-time market scan tools (where you input the parameters of your strategy, and the program actually scans market data, in real time, and sends you a push notification via email or text SMS when a window of opportunity arises). That plus a slew of other possibilities too much to list here. The above project is very capital intensive. We're going to have get our own servers (in the works as I write), figure out data feed costs, and a bunch of other stuff, then start testing and rolling out functionality modules one by one. We may also need to hire additional contract programmers to help speed the dev process (which our technology partner will handle). Needless to say, though, the potential rewards -- for both us and other traders -- will be huge if we pull it off. (Which I believe we will.) This software, on the portfolio analysis side as well as the strategy analysis side, will be potentially revolutionary. But we are building it from the ground up -- with our rocket scientist leading the tech -- and that shit is expensive as you might imagine. Once the software is fully functional and running, with the platform out of beta and users paying monthly subscriptions, it should be producing excellent cash flows. We anticipate this to be happening within the next six months or so. Once that is happening, our entrepreneurial cash flow commitments will be freed up, allowing us to participate fully in the program with a solid starting amount (on the order of 250 - 500K). Thanks for asking, we'll keep you posted...