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    trades at fractional penny prices

    You may be able to put in a "midpoint" order on some exchanges and receive a fill at a half-penny increment; for example, IEX executes many of its orders at the midpoint. Other increments that are not at half-penny are probably "internalization" or "order flow sold to wholesalers", which is a...
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    Hedge Funds Miss the Boat Again

    You're correct insofar as this was the intention of the first hedge fund, in fact called a "Hedged Fund", in 1949. That said, clearly expectations have changed over the years: both the holdings and the high fees indicate that hedge funds are expected to significantly outperform the market by...
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    are we going to run out of shares?

    I don't think it's that simple. First of all, a lot of the top-quality mid-to-small-cap companies are getting bought out. There have been plenty of articles lately lamenting shrinkage in the number of public companies, which has been cut in half over the past 20 years. There are a number of...
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    How to adjust historical intraday data? (solved)

    I have seen these types of errors not only in Yahoo, but also part of paid data services of many types. I have never used a corporate actions data source that isn't somewhat error-prone, which is somewhat crazy when you think about it. Why can't there just be a single, free database of all US...
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    Why do more than 90% of traders lose?

    "Novices" and "hobbyists" aren't necessarily the same thing. For example, Renaissance Technologies is the most successful hedge fund of the past 30 years, and they hire highly-accomplished PhD researchers who are utter novices when it comes to trading. I'm probably not going out on a limb here...
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    Our 400,000 Trade Test Proves Using Stops Is Not Very Bright

    In most of my valuation-based investments, there was no default risk on my part -- I paid for the shares in full and I could hold indefinitely. As long as the valuation was attractive, I could afford to wait for that cash to percolate to the surface, and generally it did. If you are buying a...
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    I need a real-time data feed that matches IB's historical data as closely as possible!

    If it's in your budget and you're interested in a purely API-based solution, I'd recommend checking into NxCore. NxCore sends a full feed for any given market for which you've paid (e.g., NBBO and trades for US equities, add Nasdaq Level II for something extra), and its historical data is the...
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    Our 400,000 Trade Test Proves Using Stops Is Not Very Bright

    This is false. I myself have put on trades that would have no stop loss, ever. This is true of most of my valuation-based investments in equities, for example AAPL in the early 2000's, which at times had more cash in the bank per share than the share price. There's simply no reason to sell...
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    What will my broker charge me to borrow shares for purpose of short selling?

    Here is a risk you should consider in any such strategy, IMO: short borrow costs can spike up to astronomical levels, e.g. 400% per year for KBIO during its Martin Shkreli drama last November/December. (My guess is that much of that was being collected by Shkreli himself through one of those...
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    How do day traders and investors pay their taxes?

    Not necessarily true -- by using entities and a management fee, you can have earned income, as well as numerous other advantages such as tax-advantaged health care payouts. But don't take my word for it as I am not a CPA -- see e.g. Green Trader Tax's Web site...
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    One Of A Kind Totally Silent Core I7 Computer Built For Day Trading - $2350

    In my experience, the $110.00 Fractal Design R5 stays absolutely silent with a top-end Noctua cooler while running only SSD's (although some hard drives such as the WD green's are a pretty quiet addition, albeit noticeable). I have an R5 enclosing a delidded, 4.6ghz overclocked 6700k and it...
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    Does anyone here use a Xeon processor laptop or computer?

    If a debatable "best" for you is worth the extra $, lowered battery life, and jet-engine-class fan noise, then all the power to you. But in my experience of owning two "workstation class laptops", it's not somewhere one should go unless your work really requires it. As earlier posters pointed...
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    [IBrokers] From 0 to Algorithmic Trading

    If you're speaking of some GUI platform that Nasdaq offers, I think we're comparing apples to oranges. When you speak of "algorithmic trading", I assume that (optimally at least) you really want full-feed products -- e.g., the entire US equity market fed to you all the time, rather than...
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    [IBrokers] From 0 to Algorithmic Trading

    At some point you might want to consider a third-party, tick-level data source, such as NxCore (which runs well under wine), as the broker data feeds (at least the retail ones) are generally not quite at that level. These types of feeds stream an entire market (e.g., the BBO and trades for all...
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    A hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb made $1 billion this week

    Interesting point, Butterball. Looks like the original "$1 billion" claim was bogus anyway: http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2015/09/07/billion-dollar-claim-from-black-swan-fund-not-from-taleb/ Taleb himself backed away from taking credit for having much to do with the fund almost immediately. As...
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    "Nothing Is Moving," Baltic Dry Crashes As Insiders Warn "Commerce Has Come To A Halt"

    The economy is clearly on the cooler side, but the dramatic drop in BDI seems far more about the oversupply of ships, built on cheap debt, than about an impending economic disaster (not that I'm discounting the possibility of a worsening economy -- but I am discounting the theory that "the drop...
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    What happens to option holders in cases of acquisitions?

    What rmorse wrote looks fine to me; but I'd like to add that the OCC stuff is generally posted far in advance of corporate actions (when they're public knowledge, of course). In general, I think it's safe to say that the OCC does "something sensible" with the options in these types of cases --...
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    Is it possible to participate in the ARCA opening cross with IB ?

    They probably mean Nasdaq if they're referring to a current trading venue as "Island". Instinet bought Island, then Nasdaq bought the Instinet ECN business years ago and then (essentially) switched over to using the Island technology to run all their exchanges. So, if you see "Island"...
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    Are There Any Successful Option Buyers ?

    Of course the Black-Scholes equation has something to do with CAPM -- in fact, the second derivation in the Nobel-prize winning 1973 paper starts directly with CAPM -- it's right there in the first sentence. That said, I'm not sure that thinking about the CAPM derivation is going to help a...
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    Adding some forex to my stock portfolio

    Forex is less volatile (historically at least) than most stocks. That said, the available leverage can make it into a killer if you go lever up in the "gambling" direction. For example, some "retail forex" places offer 100x margin, which ends up being far riskier than almost any (unlevered)...
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