Trader & Trader Related Posts and News

A trader is anyone who buys and sells in the financial markets for the purpose of achieving short-term gains (alpha.)  Traders today utilize execution management systems to watch the prices in the market and to execute their orders.

The following are posts and links that are interesting to traders and those who want to move from trading into algorithmic trading and who are seeking capital for trading.

Posts

Algo Trading powered by Alternative Data Sets

Conversations: Effects of Alternative Data Sets on Trading Algorithms

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What effect can alternative data sets have on trading algorithms?

We asked a few of our teammates and systematic traders what the effect of alternative data sets is on trading algos. We thought we could spread some insight as to why our alternative data is so valuable the also developers. We all start using the smallest and most basic data sets, such as the generic S&P500 stock prices. This is all just fine until you want to take your development to the next level. You can delve deeper into predicting the rise and fall of each stock using these specified alternative data sets. CloudQuant offers a wide and expanding variety of these data sets for free, giving our users easy access to alternative data in order to help them improve their trading strategies.
The teammates featured are:
  • Tayloe Draughon- Sr. Product Manager
  • James Chang- Quantitative Portfolio Manager
  • Morgan Slade- CEO
  • Steve Pettinato- Portfolio Manager
  • Paul Tunney- Client Success Manager
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Market Turmoil Generates Opportunity for Proprietary Traders

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In these times of market turmoil and volatility, the Kershner Trading Group stands ready to provide traders with a firm built on a strong foundation of significant capital investment, innovation-focused trading technology and decades of experience in the active and proprietary trading space. Kershner Trading is actively seeking experienced US Equities Traders
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Trading Strategy Scorecard from CloudQuant

52 Traders Interviews Morgan Slade

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The podcast on Massive 30,000 Trades Daily, High-Frequency Quant Trading with Morgan Slade including an interesting breakout trading strategy.
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News for Machine Learning and Algo Trading

Deep Dive With JLN: How Can The Financial Industry Draw In The Next Generation Of Talent?

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The former trading floors provided a sense of community. Electronic trading communities like CloudQuant provide a bright future for new traders.
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chicago cityscape and sears tower

Built in Chicago: Wanna try your hand at high-frequency trading? There’s an app for that

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Built in Chicago discusses CloudQuant, a Chicago-based algorithmic trading startup, lets anyone try their hand at devising their own strategies.
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Trend Analysis in a Candlestick Market Data Chart

Algorithms for Trading

The hardest part of starting any project, including building a quantitative trading strategy, is figuring out where to start. To that end, this post covers a basic overview of a few algorithms for trading. We hope to help you get your creative energy to level up.
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Quantitative Strategy, Trading, and Algo Development Industry News

Why You Should Always Question The Status Quo — Tradeciety

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CloudQuant was mentioned in this article by Tradeciety about trading psychology. We particularly like the comment saying “If you are so worried about algos, why don’t you look at Python? Read up on it. Cloudquant, Quantopian. The tools are there, the information is there, for free.” Change is progress, stagnation is death. That is the truest truth, especially in capitalism and thus also in trading. Grow or die. But then the real question is, why do so many people want to go backward? Everything was better before, we will make this and that great again, bla bla bla, yada yada yada. And why are so many people afraid of change when change is the only thing that ever brought humanity forward?
In Germany, we have this saying:”The farmer doesn’t eat what he doesn’t know”…that exactly describes the herd mentality. People are afraid of change because it involves an unknown factor. What will happen if we do that? What will happen if do this? I want to go back to my mommy. Where is my mommy? That is exactly what is happening in politics and in the world right now. Read the full article on Tradeciety
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Innovation in Trading

The next wave of broker innovation will be Crowdsourced algos

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Are Institutional Brokers Innovative?

Markets Media is reporting that “47% of buy-side firms, mostly those with modest levels of assets under management, did not think their brokers were doing anything innovative.” Andy Kershner, the CEO of CloudQuant’s parent company was interviewed.  He believes:

The next wave of broker innovation likely will be geared toward democratizing quantitative trading, according to Kershner Trading Group Founder and CEO Andy Kershner. That would vastly expand the universe of high-level quant traders globally, which Kershner roughly estimated stands at perhaps 5,000 today.

Andy Kershner, Kershner Trading

“It will be very similar to what you saw when you had access to the market open up in the mid-90s for day traders,” Kershner said. “You had lots of innovation, lots of people coming in with lots of ideas, and lots of software that really changed and knocked out all the market makers. Then high-frequency came along and killed all the specialists and also knocked out some of the day traders. I think now we’ll see a reversion.”

“You’ve got ‘big data’ out there everywhere that everybody talks about, but the moat is access to the data, access to capital, and access to some knowledge of what to do with it,” Kershner continued. “I think in the next three years if you do not have an auto- or quantitative-trading system that’s more than just APIs — you’ll need back-testing, forward-testing, live, the whole package — if you don’t have that for people to sign up for, your brokerage will be left behind.”

Read the full story on Markets Media

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Sharpe Ratio distribution

Four Problems with the Sharpe Ratio

If you are an algorithmic trader, developer, or data scientists they you have already heard of the Sharpe Ratio. Many of you use this measurement as your score card for how well your algo performs.

The Sharpe Ratio, named after William Forsyth Sharpe,  measures the excess return per unit of deviation in an investment asset or a trading strategy. There are the four potential problems in using the Sharpe Ratio to measure trading performance. The first two problems are relevant if trading results in different intervals are correlated, while the latter two problems are relevant even if trading results are uncorrelated.

Problem 1. Failure to distinguish between intermittent and consecutive losses

Problem 2. Dependency on time interval

Problem 3. Failure to distinguish between upside and downside fluctuations

Problem 4. Failure to distinguish between retracements in unrealized profits versus retracements from “Trade Entry Date” equity.

Read the four problems with more detail and graphs on Oxford Capital Strategies
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Andy Kershner, veteran trader discusses CloudQuant

Risk tolerance, daily habits and trade critiques with Andy Kershner

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Trading industry veteran Andy Kershner, the CEO of CloudQuant’s parent company Kersher Trading spoke with Chat With Traders about risk tolerance, daily habits and trade critiques. Andy has been an active stock trader since the early 90’s, and in 2001 he founded Kershner Trading Group—a proprietary trading and technology firm in Austin (Texas) and, through a partnership with SMB Capital, Kershner Trading have a second office in Midtown (Manhattan) too.

Topics of discussion:

  • Andy talks about his ability to take pain on trades moving against him, and whether or not day traders with a greater risk tolerance make more money.
  • Beyond good strategies; the daily habits which have contributed to Andy’s trading success. Plus, Andy critiques his trades from the session prior to recording.
  • Andy shares several types of strategies which have been working for him lately, how he “ladders” into favorable positions and a few tips for doing the same.
  • As someone who’s hired many new traders, Andy describes some of the typical errors made by traders just starting out and how they could be better prepared.
128: Risk tolerance, daily habits and trade critiques w/ Andy Kershner
  The follow up interview with Morgan Slade is now available too at https://info.cloudquant.com/2017/06/crowd-research/
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