Stat arb? Technical indicators? News trading? Chart patterns? Risk arb? Momentum trading? Fast market making and spread extraction? I'm trying to get a feel for what the distribution is like out there for people who have profitable trading systems. I get the feeling most people in this forum are "curve fitters" -- applying their intuition of a market and finding technical indicators that fit their observations. I want to know where people fall, and how they fell before they became profitable.
Having a "style" and declaring one is basically a "limitation". It can be based skils, knowledge, environment or even worse, what you are placing yourself. In another words, you're curve-fitting a "style" with the market. Seriously, you probably fall into one of the "majority of curve-fitters" you tend to see in ET. If I wanted to have one style, I'll be trading discretion. Which I do have, and is a different story than automated trading...
So you have no style that you're willing to admit and you have no answer for the question. You just wanted to try and see yourself sound wise and wasted three paragraphs on it. Ok. Next?
I admit that I diversify my models. So I have no style, and I prefer things to be that way. I know that I'm "wise" enough not to start a dumb ass thread like you. OK? Next.
My take is that the majority of the programs focus on either some type of arbitrage in fixed income futures or long/short execution as a reaction to newly released economic data/numbers. I dont know how an ATS could trade on momentum. That seems to me to be a very human trade. I have a hard time believing that any purely black-box program can survive over the long-term. There needs to be some sort of human intervention. I trade on a purely discretionary basis and so naturally hate program trading and and all the noise it brings into my market. my .02
I agree. I'll bet there are traders maknig a killnig with black boxes but they aren't those gonig for $150 with pretty pictures of fighter pilots on the box. with 5 bonuses and 50% off ! LOL What a joke.
If you had a system that traded just price for example, and it worked at any speed, then real fast it would be scalping, slower and it would be position trading, and slower yet it might mimic Warren Buffet......
Out of curiosity, I figured out how to automate my systems. But I would never trust a machine I did not directly control with placing/managing orders of real cash. It's a stretch trusting my broker's platform, let alone yet another machine in the mix. I worked too hard for my money and I trade too well for me to have to blame losing my account on some idiot machine.