I will demonstrate that a mechanical trading system which will use discretionary rules like a human can outperform the best traders in the world: It will participate in the world trading championship. His code name is Big Yellow to reference to Big Blue which beats Kasparov at chess.
As for me yes it has never been so easy.
But the real performance will be kept secret (and I have still to do thorough backtesting so as to be sure that nothing is left to hasard) since we are negotiating partnership : this is a physical model in competition with a few others like one of the Sante Fe institute and everybody keeps that secret see for example the interview of Doyne Farmer "Do not say anything about performance "
Cracking Wall Street :
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.07/wall.st.html?pg=8&topic=
"By late 1993, the Prediction Company reported success in predicting markets with "computerized intuition" in live trading. They refused, however, to comment about their performance. Their agreement with their investors prohibits them from talking about this, as much as the talkative ex-physicists are dying to do so. They were told: "Do not say anything about performance -- anything!" They won't say how much money they trade, or exactly where. (Farmer asked me to let him vet these closing paragraphs because "if I inadvertently tell you something I shouldn't, it could blow our contract with the Swiss Bank Corporation. You know the Swiss -- they are secretive to the point of paranoia.") Indeed, at his request, I removed the hints of what kind of markets they track that slipped out during his conversations with me. "
In fact at the moment I'm just making fun with people on forum but probably after discussing with my collegues we won't make the model available for the public for long except for the talents we would like to detect for trading our system.
Our model is far more ambitious than the one of Santa Fe which just look at pattern detection whereas we are looking at predicting the whole paths of the market at term even on the sub micro-cycle. At the moment I just limit the ambition for usual daytrading activity.
Quote from Babak:
harry,
just a simple question which deserves a y/n answer:
do you make money trading this 'system' of yours?