Thanks again. How about, in a CTA program, each of the trades lasts minimum one week? Any protection?
Hi, i have a question who are expert in MT4 business. Suppose i am using multiple automated trading system ( EAs) , ALL are playing on the same instrument, Each EA has its own magic number, Each EA open its own buy and sell orders. Could Broker track certain strategy and its trades? Is the magic number saved on my end or it could be seen from the broker end? Thanks
The whole discussion is complete nonsense. Here are the reasons: 1. I don't believe that there are so many successful Traders with successful strategies around here to care about there (wannabe)successful strategy being discovered (out of 500 People here there might be one or two who are profitable) 2. Brokers are the ones who really Profit in the whole game. For each trade the Client makes, they Profit. Why would they jeopardize their success by trying to figure out some crazy strategies, let alone trade them? It's like if the Casino owner Plays on his own roulette table. 3. About Prop Firms: I don't see the Advantage of using a prop firm anyway. If a Trader is not successful, she would also not be successful at a prop firm. If the Trader is really successful, then why trade with them and not alone in the own book. Be your own Boss and keep 100% of the profits sounds much better to me 4. There are really big Algo companies out there, with high-paid analysts and developers. In the last couple of years the number of those firms literally exploded. If the things discussed in this Topic would be an issue, those firms could not exist. 5. Let's look at a practical example. There is a Group that seems to make big profits in just a couple of days. You can look at their Excel Sheet here: http://youtu.be/e16lYolgpig Now even if we can see this Excel Sheet that contains a very large amount of information, it is impossible to figure out what they exactly are doing. Let alone if we would just have some numbers as the Broker has.
1) you confuse general traders with specific profitable traders. for example, you do not know if OP has a profitable strategy or not, and in my case, I have a profitable strategy and I have worries about reverse-engineering, and I decoded other's strategy before. 2) again, you confuse broker firms with people working for the firms. 3) agreed 4) you do not know what incentives the firms have paid their employee not to reverse engineer the code; or it could be the algorithm is useless for individuals such as most of hft algorithms which the individuals can not pay the high cost of hardware. 5) some strategies may be harder to decode such as the signals are based on related markets or involved with discretion. some strategies are easier to decode. you can not say all people are nonsense to worry about reverse engineering.
Right, and can you please tell me the number of strategies which are "easy to decode" and are also profitable? We are making the assumption that brokers would only want to steal profitable strategies, correct? My guess is that the overlap between "easy to decode" and "profitable" is about nil. The market is more likely to reward people who don't think in ways that others can readily untangle than those whose thoughts approximate the average market participant. Think of it with respect to the "10,000 hour rule" of expertise development. If it takes a profitable trader 10,000 hours of trading time to become profitable, that's about 1500 days of trading or about 6 years. Over the course of that 6 years of strategy development, the profitable trader continues to refine the strategy to be the best it can be. Now, you are going to take a list of outcomes based on that 6-year refinement process and reverse-engineer it? It is just so unlikely that you are more likely to be able to find someone with his own successful strategy who wants to share it with you willingly.
I agree it is very few strategies that is easy to decode and profitable. but for a broker like IB, who has 140,000 active traders, I believe the number is not small. As long as the strategy is based on individual chart only, it is not hard to decode.
OK, look, I can't argue out of the assumption you want to make, which, as far as I can tell, goes something like this "There must be some simple strategies which are profitable and because those simple strategies are easy to decode, brokers must be decoding them". Yet, when I ask for a single real-life example of these decodings, I get nothing back but "There must be some but we just haven't heard about them". Don't you think that someone would have sued his broker if this was happening? Even 1 single person? To turn around your IB fact about having 140,000 traders, let's say they were doing this to 140 traders or 1 out of every 1,000. Don't you think out of that 140, 1 of them would have figured it out and sued IB or filed a complaint against them with the relevant authorities? Do you at least see that all you've really done is put forward 3 assertions without any evidence? It's all just assumptions without a SHRED of evidence. Doesn't it hurt your brain to put forward an "argument" like that? I don't think I would physically be capable of typing the words.
people worry about reverse engineering because it is hard for them to detect such activity. i have said most of such activities occur not in the level of firms but individual employees. how could someone prove his strategy has been decoded? since I successfully decoded one strategy from a foreign forum, I believe if I can do it, others can do it too. If I were the employee working for IB and I have access to customers' trade records, I would be interested in peeping into how those guys do it. apparently those successful traders make much more than i possibly make from the job. would not you?
What makes you so certain that your strategy isnt known already to most in the business? If you are successful at the retail level, it's not because of your strategy but because of how you apply it and adjust it on a daily basis. In my opinion, it's about how you trade and not what you trade but carry on with the paranoia.
Was the strategy you decoded profitable? How do you know you actually decoded it? Did you confirm that with the person who developed it? If so, are you sure they weren't lying to you to make you think you decoded it? As for the activity being "hard to detect", so is corporate espionage and other types of espionage. Yet, I have no problem acknowledging those activities occur because, from time to time, someone is caught in the act or with tangible evidence of the act. In this case, I am being asked to believe that these employees or firms or whatever are doing this and are, amazingly, NEVER GETTING CAUGHT. The CIA should sign these fuckers up for some real spying because apparently Joe Schmoe employee at the brokerage firm is able to elude all forms of detection. Are you even thinking through what you say implies? I mean in terms of the real world, not some hypothetical world where low-level employees of trading brokerages are the equivalent of James Bond-level spies. Unbelievable.