"Les gouts et les couleurs ne se discutent pas." I believe however in sound engineering in the sense that an optimum way always exists, perhaps unkown to the the practitioner. "my experience is that a good coder will usually prefer to work as low within the environment as possible": this is simply job security and this costs his boss more money. About quant-traders loving MathLab: they don't necessarely make money with it.
Stephen, don't give it away man, let them think it doesn't work. Also agree on the time to figure it out, if it takes you more than a few days - at most - to figure this out, then maybe you need to skill up on the Maths/Stats/Programming required before dismissing it. Of course, this does not imply that it will ever work for you. There are guys making serious dosh using a moving average, and guys who couldn't trade using the most sophisticated models even if their livelihood depended on it. At the end of the day who gives a shit. Use what grooves your equity curve.
We seem to have hit a little divergence of opinion on the time it takes to figure something out as being useful. You guys make me nervous about my own figuring out. I'm not going to tell you more about this. I bet, that's the way we all like it.
the thing that takes time is not the single whateverAlgorithm that replaces something in bigger context be it cointegration, wavelet and so forth. what takes time is move somewhere totally different. we were only used to single time series five years ago. then turned to real market neutral testing including cleaning of database from biases, bla bla. once you have the frame ... well ... i am still reluctant to go into level II data. still think uncorrelated sharpe can be obtained easier, quicker elsewhere. i have something lying around for japanese equity pairs trading. the testing took a week, but i know it will take me months until everything is really, really in place to switch on trading.