How to protect strategy from theft by а trader

[Pekelo]

How to protect our trading strategy?

The bottom line and short answer is, you can't really. Unless you are using family members or extra loyal friends, the chance that the trader takes it to somewhere else and trade your strategy there will always exist.

The reverse strategy as was advised above also doesn't work, because as long as a system is consistent (loser or winner) it can be used as a winning system.

Look at it this way: As long as your system isn't affected by more people using it, like liquidity issues, others using it might actually strengthen the system. You bought long? Well, so did others thus pushing the price in the wanted direction.

So I would say, don't worry about it, unless it is such a fragile system that competition would kill it, but then you might need a better system...

 

[Sig]

Did not miss the point, but you missed mine. I said it can be done, and very easyly and quickly. That's all. Did not say they will or do. But if they want to do it they can.

Then thank you for pointing out the obvious, yes brokers have computers and its technically possible to scan for accounts that consistently win. We're in violent agreement on this point. Pretty sure I didn't ever disagree with that fact, I actually said "they're not going to go find your account and try to reverse engineer your strategy, mostly because you're just not as important as you think you are."

 

[nomoremondays]

How to protect our trading strategy? For example we have a strategy that requires manual trading. To reduce risks we need to trade with different traders who use differend actives.
But the trouble is that there is few Very important details. If trader knows this detail, he can easily steal it.
How to protect yourself? Except of developing of robot and inventing fake indicator (even if we will change indicator, smart trader anyway will understand the sence of strategy).

Sounds like you're a PM at a fund/part of a fund. Outside of hiring people you trust and/or stringent non-competes the only real way is to trade it yourself. Or you go automated.
What you might think of as theft is what the execution trader would call 'learning experience'. Every strategy on wall street diffuses out eventually.