I started this journal to help my own discipline in trading, I made a commitment to myself to stick to this journal, its not as easy to deviate from a laid out trading plan when your trading in front of other people, therefore it keeps me systematic, im not here to pimp pt finder, couldn't care less about that, as my results have shown this journal has significantly helped me and others, ive learnt a lot over the years from more experienced traders than me, so I feel satisfied I can help others aswell, and many guys have come on here not knowing much and learnt pair trading and have personally thanked me for sharing my knowledge, this gives me great satisfaction and helps us all, because isn't that what we are here for, to band together to learn and grow as a community of the online traders we are, otherwise the markets will just be dominated by a few large players. Im still learning new things all the time, and many of my ideas have come from the posts in this journal from others which Im grateful for, Ive become good friends with Jared from pt finder and we talk every other day, he asked me if he could share my results with his other clients and I said yes, It doesn't bother me at all, Im here to trade and get better and thats it. Alright back to business, just closed 2 very profitable trades Sold IP @ 10.54 Covered BKI @ 3.84 Sold MGG @ 20.10 Covered TPP @ 26.10
There are always people who feel that any form of positive results from software must be engineered spam from the distributor of the software. That's the nature of forums I'm afraid and the only way to deal with it is to ignore it. I'm simply trialing it at the moment and dont have anything to do with PTF. I've trialed and purchased virtually all the trading software out there over the past 20 years or so and must say that most of the predictive stuff just doesnt work so I can see why some people may be cynical. However, things are looking good at the moment but the number of trades (for me at least) are low and I wouldnt want to assume too much at this stage. I'm a different type of trader to most of you I suspect because I treat it more like gambling. I have developed my own automated arbitrage software for sports betting and that's done well in the past, although these days its difficult for me to get a substantial amount on because I've been tagged as an arber by most of the sports books and they've reduced my limits to very low numbers. I've read almost everything to read about risk and statistical arbitrage and I like the concept although its not strictly what I would call arbitrage. Its still dependent on a historical relationship being walked forward into the future and as we all know, historical relationships have a nasty habit of breaking down when we least expect it. These days most of my income comes from automated software I have developed to take advantage of inter-sports exchange anomalies that I've found that are not based on historic relationships. That and my ability to trade FX at times of news releases. Meanwhile, I'm always looking for software thats worth testing, so rather than cynically decrying other people's genuine attempts at finding an edge, it wont cost anyone anything by engaging in the free 30-day trial that PTF offer.
As for the PTF, having build my own system from scratch all by myself, I can tell you it's a real bargain price for such a specialized product.
It is always interesting to hear experiences from people working on the markets for a long time. How did you developed your own automated arbitrage software? Some webscraping on the betting websites, loading the data to a database, and generating alerts when a arbitrage oportunity is found? Since you was tagged as an arber, never considered using an identity of some friend or relative " That and my ability to trade FX at times of news releases." Are you on the high-frequency trading business?
The algorithms to base sports arbitrage on are pretty trivial (read my book available from Lulu.com !!) and a few years ago when Tradesports existed there were also plenty of inter-exchange arbs between Tradesports and Betfair. I then got some coders from RAC (Rentacoder) to do the coding for me. The app was completely automated, as is my current software and it did well while it lasted. I have an account with IB and trade news events that I think will have a significant effect on the exchange rate. Thats doing quite well too, although my Betfair apps are doing the best. I still have me reservations about statistical arbitrage but the way its going at the moment, I'm slowly being convinced it could have legs.
I do. Based on the efficient market hypothesis, it's already priced in, lol. Seriously, I'm taking the risk based on the technicals.