What constitutes edge / why is my system working?

[qxr1011]

While I was happy, I was also quite suspicious to see this working as well. Can someone help me intuit how such systems work?

what do you call "works"?- generates profits so far? so what?..

tomorrow it may stop.. that is your concern?

what works - works always ...and anywhere... but not necessarily for anyone, since skills are required too, and balls, and money.. and luck...

you intuitively understand that... you want confirmation that it will be working.. like that guy with the wife

What are the market forces making this system work?

market forces do not make system to work or not to work,

it's ideas (or coincidence) that it based on make it work (again what is definition of working)

Is this effectively taking money from less sophisticated traders?

it depends

if u trade Forex it means you take money from your brokers pocket (unless you hold overnight and he is hedging his total overnight exposure )

if we talking stocks on exchange then you buy from one guy and sell to another -

you are not taking money from one particular person when you win, you take it form the market)

Or, am I riding the wave with smart money who just don't mind taking smaller losses which are actually quite meaningful for retail traders?

there are no smart money, all of them are stupid

and who cares whose money you taking

i guess your question is more : how they allow me to take it...?

well if it the broker - soon he will finish your happines

if its the stock market then it depends of how long your luck (and we both know that this is mostly just luck) will run

Why haven't hedge funds/smarter people arbitraged or sucked the alpha out of my system?

nobody cares about you or your system, they even do not know you exist

we ( retail traders) are just like worms underground.. elephants do not even know we are there..

I've read Ernest Chan's books and it seems that this might be related to 'capacity' but I am still not sure why it is actually working.

fuck Ernest Chan

 

[algofy]

fuck Ernest Chan

whoa

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

if u trade Forex it means you take money from your brokers pocket

Can you elaborate on this?

 

[qxr1011]

Can you elaborate on this?

well in forex most brokers give you quotes, playing the the role of the marketmaker,

since there is no exchange similar to stock where brokers will rout your order (we are not talking about interbank) the broker is maintaining the market for the trader

when you win you win from the broker , when you loose you loose to him

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

well in forex most brokers give you quotes, playing the the role of the marketmaker,

since there is no exchange similar to stock where brokers will rout your order (we are not talking about interbank) the broker is maintaining the market for the trader

when you win you win from the broker , when you loose you loose to him

Is that true? They are a market maker for a reason: the spread.

 

[murray t turtle]

Some background: I am no quant PhD, and certainly no hedge fund guy. I am just an engineer with decent programming skill.

I have spent a small part of the last 2 years developing and building a pretty simple intra-day trend-following system (fully automated) focussed on currencies. No fancy indicators, just signals based of when price exceeds a simple moving average. After a bunch of backtesting and paper trading, I'm seeing that it actually makes good return and I just started live trading with it.

BT results: Sharpe > 1.7, with tight stop losses.

While I was happy, I was also quite suspicious to see this working as well. Can someone help me intuit how such systems work?

• What are the market forces making this system work?
  
• Is this effectively taking money from less sophisticated traders? Or, am I riding the wave with smart money who just don't mind taking smaller losses which are actually quite meaningful for retail traders?
  
• Why haven't hedge funds/smarter people arbitraged or sucked the alpha out of my system?
  
• I've read Ernest Chan's books and it seems that this might be related to 'capacity' but I am still not sure why it is actually working.

Thanks in advance.

%%
Dont know; but some markets trend well, may or may not apply to you. As far as why markets trend... books have been written on that+some birds fly north in spring; south in winter. Some do not

 

[qxr1011]

Is that true? They are a market maker for a reason: the spread.

The spread is motivation but not a reason , there reason is that there is just not anything else they can do with orders just to feel them ( or not )

Overall spread is pinuts, most money are made on public's inability to successfully trade therefore client's money go into brokers pocket....

 

[ET180]

Not knowing anything about your system or how you developed it, I can only issue the blanket warning that it's really easy to curve fit given enough parameters. The more trades your system produces, the greater the chance that the results will hold.

 

[Xela]

Is that true? They are a market maker for a reason: the spread.

Noooooooooo, noooooooo ... this really isn't quite right. Occasionally true, arguably (some might say "very arguably"), but certainly not at all representative of the counterparty market-making world of "spot forex brokerages": characteristically, representatively, they're in business to fleece their typically undercapitalized, typically relatively ill-informed, typically naive, typically gullible victims ... excuse me - of course I meant to say "customers" ... who typically have wildly unrealistic expectations of what they can achieve and within what kind of timeframe, combined with (you guessed it: "typically") a somewhat distorted perspective of what a "broker" is.

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

Interesting. You guys are so negative about brokers. So what makes you think they do this? Ideally, they want clients who don't lose all their money.