Quote from rlb21079:
What if "sharing edges" itself became the edge? Let's say we start a thread/think tank from which a system is designed.
Such things have been tried before but only by a select few individuals with a great deal of wealth. The internet enables us, via chat rooms or whatever, to plan and rapidly execute coordinated market plays.
As a cohesive group of individual traders we could:
(1) Attain the resources available, until now, to only a select few
(2) Move in and out of markets with relative ease
Any thoughts?
Here's one suggestion how we might implement your idea. Create a
Trader's Mutual Fund. Most mutual funds are run by investment-traders. They take funds from the public, but the public has no input into how
their money is handled by the fund. The public's only option is limited to choosing which mutual fund out of thousands of mutual funds they will entrust their money to. Beyond that, what the fund decides to do with their money is entirely out of the public's hands.
Based on
your suggestion, suppose we started a Trader's Mutual Fund. All members would have a say in how the fund's money is invested. In fact, passive membership would not be allowed. Any member who remained uninvolved in the decision process for a certain maximum length of time would have their shares of the mutual fund liquidated and their account would remain in cash as long as they remain inactive in the Fund's activity.
As in most mutual funds, the size of each person's investment would be reflected in their amount of
shares of the fund. The number of shares any member held should not affect their weight in the decision process of the fund. But perhaps what
would affect the weight of a member's vote would be their P&L record from their own trading accounts. The members who can show the best records of P&L from their own personal accounts would have more votes. Those members with the poorest records would either have fewer votes, or perhaps negative votes. Everyone would benefit. The less successful traders would benefit by the the fund being overweighted by the choices of the more successful traders. The more successful traders would
also benefit from the input of the less successful traders. How many times have you seen people write on Elite Trader
"please tell me what your trades are [loser!] so I can take the opposite side . . ."? Well, with this mutual fund, that very thing would happen. And the fund should have detailed records of all suggestions by each member, and there would be an adjustable ranking, so that the more times a person's suggestions (whether they were implemented by the fund or not) turned out to be successful, the higher their voting rank would go. And the more times a member's suggestions turned out to be bombs, the more their ranking would drop.
The fund would of course have its own secure members-only (or members-only section within a larger site accessible to the public) website, where all this could take place.
With Interactive Broker's new "Friends and Family" accounts, this suggestion could in fact be started with up to 15 initial members. I think 15 members is as many as we could expect at first anyhow. And if we got above 15 members, clearly by then we would have enough financial clout to start a professional account at IB instead of Friends and Family.
What do you think?

I think it sounds like a plan!