A lot of great replies Frankly, I was thinking more existentially. Coding for coding's sake. Coding is one of the ways that I relax. I may never write a profitable strategy, but I'll code them anyway. Probably won't run them ...
While coding is great, it's what you know in addition to coding that matters. In trading it's no different. I grew up obsessed with coding and to be honest it was mostly a waste in terms of aiding other life goals, despite becoming good at what I had spent absurd amounts of time on. Well, maybe the fact it put me into a booming industry helped, but the point is it could have been done way more efficiently, if instead of coding at every opportunity I would have thought more about how to avoid coding and solve my problem anyway.
The process is to combine risk management, psychology and a market edge of some kind to take money from other trading accounts that belong to very smart participants in a zero sum game. Extremely difficult. There is no mathematical formula that will ever do this. Programming can be helpful but it is not the full answer or solution.
You do understand that there are funds that do exactly what you say is impossible? This is like saying electric cars will never be practical anywhere in 2019.
There is never one thing in trading being the full answer or solution. Like a cake recipe - but a giant complicated cake, there are many ingredients and tweaks which provide an outcome. I've been in this game longer than the majority on ET (30+ yrs) and not a week goes by another little dicovery reveals itself. So for me the cake recipe gets better. If the world is turning more toward coding & automation, why not trading?
‘Extremely difficult’ is not the same as impossible. It is extremely difficult to take money from the markets consistently over the long term.
An example, for some, catching a fish is time consuming, frustrating and full of bad luck/accidents. For others with the right gear and experience it's not only a pleasure but highly rewarding. But as like fishing, sometimes the conditions are not suitable and smart fishos stay at home and chill for a while, perhaps upgrading their gear for the next window of lucrative opportunity. So yes, winning trading experiences do not happen all year long even for the insiders. Even brokers have been known to go broke.
I think no-one is suggesting they don't make adjustments to their strategies. But this idea that everything radically changes every month or even every year is false. If the basis is solid (not curve-fit), strategies don't reverse easily.
Hi - market conditions constantly change. To what extent do you feel the warning of ‘past performance is not a reliable guide to future results ‘ applies? Is it safe to extrapolate from historic results? Just how useful are non curve fitted back tests? Your opinion..