I said I decoded one of such strategies before, though not sure 100% identical, but at least I benefited a lot.
I would think the experienced developers do Not need to get your codes physically. My guess is All they need is to understand your underlying logics of the strategy/system, plus your actual/back-test signals and results/PnL. And time - probably years.
developers (as in programmers) would not know what to do at all with trading signals. Experienced strategists and quants may be able to use trading signals to understand the overall strategy mechanics. But today's working and profitable strategies implement so many strategy details that generally it would take a long time to reverse engineer an exact or close enough copy of a strategy from signals alone (without seeing any line of code). The firm knows anyway that a strategy is momentum based with this type of risk mitigation algorithms and that profit taking algo. Those alone do not make a working strategy. Please notice I am not talking about some MT5 or Amibroker or Ninjatrader or what have you retail "stuff", I am talking about strategies that trade high frequency or intraday frequency on hundreds if not thousands of stock symbols, G10 currencies, options chains, ...
My bet still stands: $1000 for the first one who reverse engineers a relatively simple profitable strategy - no neuronal network, pattern detection or the like - based on 100 trades. Needs not be 100% identical, but should come close.
You're correct. I meant developers of strategies like this: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=90608 . Please notice I didn't even mention exactly whether they could attained 100% (or 80% or 120%) close to their target results.
To reverse engineer doesn't take hours, nor days, it may take weeks or a couple of months or so, from my experience. The $1k reward is not even worth contemplating. As I speak I'm working on something, all evening and no headway yet, not even a glimmer, but I know I will crack it. Just takes logic, bit like detective work.
Yes, the $1k is of course no compensation for work, just a sort of incentive. If I claimed on a forum that I can do something, and some other guy doubts it, I would be motivated to prove him wrong - even without money. But for how much would you do it?
the real incentive is that you should provide a system that worth decoding. if you have a mechanical system that has 75% win ratio, and the average win at least not bigger than loss, I will take your challenge. It is idiot for anyone to spend months on a garbage system just to prove it is a garbage.
Yes this is a good and valid point. JCL should provide 100 entries/exits of a good system with PF at least 1.7, to make it worthy of decoding. If this is true, I will also take an attempt at decoding the system.