Recent content by mokomo

I'd agree. The margins on commoditised instruments are very tight now. The institutions make their money by outsourcing as many component pieces of their transaction flow as possible to cheap suppliers; probably located in 3rd world economies and hiring less traders/brokers/dealers to handle...

To be fair, anyone who says they "use Excel" professionally in a trading/modelling environment will at least also use VBA, if not their institution's internal pricing library, functions, integration to static data database etc. Then again, in large institutions, it would primarily be the...

Excel - it is hard to imagine a world without it.

Unless you really are interested in exploring C/C#/VB/Java/Python (it'll never be a waste to at least explore some of these languages) you do not need to become a programmer in such languages in order to achieve the executon triggers you describe (though not if there is a very high frequency of...

Those who will be successful will have the knowledge to recognise what wheels have already been invented. Only if your stretegy is so novel and unique that it demands totally fresh development should you need to start from scratch. Write down your trading strategy on a piece of paper and then...

I don't think anyone was talking about whether the strategies were effective or not. A generic strategy is merely a class of strategy. It is not an actual strategy. It is funny that you misunderstand the context of this discussion, yet you still made your argument so forcefully. Your...

Strange as it may seem, I like using Microsoft because besides it being a great platform, Bill Gates has donated the vast majority of his wealth to charity and is actively involved, with his wife, in ensuring the money is spent responsibly. I can't say I was noble enough to choose MS because...

a lot of commercial software I currently pay for used to be open source. In addition, open source doesn't automatically mean good support, design or that it will always be around. In many cases, quite the opposite. Java is very popular in financial institutions, but C# is catching on...

I'd strongly recommend you go for C# and Python. They both can serve a wide range of requirements, are easy for a diligent beginner to get proficient in and nononsense has discovered, ironpython is now available to bring you the best of both worlds - python's great immediacy, simplicity and...

Perhaps trend-following is the wrong name for a generic strategy type; it could be "technical chart signals" as that could include trends, patterns, waves and lines? (thus trendfollowing is a subset, rather than the highest level of this genre) Not all technical trading strategies are trend...