On Roy Niederhoffer:
He is of the view that movements in stock, currency, and commodity prices lead to patterns of short-term investor responses that can be anticipated.
[4] Niederhoffer’s computerized trading models are based on a belief in the presence of
cognitive biases in the human brain, which in his view cause investors and the models they create to behave predictably.
[59] He believes that other short-term investors generally engage in certain predictable behavior: they overemphasize recent experience when they make decisions, they hate to lose even more than they love to win, their behavior becomes increasingly predictable as markets become more volatile, and when the investors are emotional they engage in
herd-like behavior and sell stocks when they are at their lowest level and buy stocks when they are at their highest level.
[4] The firm's trading models do not focus on
company fundamentals or
macroeconomic trends.
[4][60]
Niederhoffer's computer models analyze the
real-time data as it comes in, such as
volume and price of every major market and most of the largest stocks.
[59] The models make decisions as to what the probability is that a particular market may rise or fall over a period of the next few hours, to the next few days.
[59] As with the way an airplane is flown, the models are flown by
auto-pilot most of the time, with a pilot watching over them to make corrections if need be.
[59] The models focus among other things not just on the price of a security, but on the path that a price has taken to get to where it is.
[59] They are premised on the notion that to be effective, the quantitative strategy must be applied and the emotion of the trader has to be stripped from the process.
[61] Niederhoffer's strategy thrives on volatility, because it brings out emotional, predictable herd behavior in investors