set up a new brokerage account with $100,000 capital, implement the execution system, and start trading the strategy. The strategy immediately became profitable in the first month. Back in the dot-com era, I started an internet software firm. It took about 3 times more investment, 5 times more human power, and 24 times longer to find out that the business model didn't work, whereupon all investors including myself lost 100 percent of their investments. Compared to that experience, it really has been a breeze trading quantitatively and profitably.
CHAPTER 2 Fishing for Ideas: Where Can We Find Good Strategies?
This is the surprise: Finding a trading idea is actually not the hardest part of building a quantitative trading business. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of trading ideas that are in the public sphere at any time, accessible to anyone at little or no cost. Many authors of these trading ideas will tell you their complete methodologies in addition to their backtest results. There are finance and investment books, newspapers and magazines, mainstream media websites, academic papers available online or in the nearest public library, trader forums, blogs, and on and on. Some of the ones I find valuable are listed in Table 2.1, but this is just a small fraction of what is available out there.
In the past, because of my own academic bent, I regularly perused the various preprints published by business school professors or downloaded the latest online finance journal articles to scan for good prospective strategies. In fact, the first strategy I traded when I became independent was based on such academic research. (It was a version of the PEAD strategy referenced in Chapter 7.) Increasingly, however, I have found that many strategies described by academics are either too complicated, out of date (perhaps the once-profitable strategies have already lost their power due to competition), or require expensive data to backtest (such as historical fundamental data). Furthermore, many of these academic strategies work only on small-cap stocks, whose illiquidity may render actual trading profits far less impressive than their backtests would suggest.
TABLE 2.1 Sources of Trading Ideas
| Type | URL |
|---|---|
| Academic | |
| Business schools' finance professors' websites | www.hbs.edu/research/research.html |
| Social Science Research Network | www.ssrn.com |
| National Bureau of Economic Research | www.nber.org |
| Business schools' quantitative finance seminars | www.ieor.columbia.edu/seminars/financialengineering |
| Quantpedia (aggregator of all academic papers on quantitative trading strategies!) | quantpedia.com |
| Financial blogs and podcasts | |
| Flirting with Models | www.thinknewfound.com |
| Mutiny Fund | mutinyfund.com/podcast/ |
| Chat with Traders | chatwithtraders.com |
| Eran Raviv | eranraviv.com |
| Sibyl/Godot Finance | godotfinance.com |
| Party at the Moontower | moontowermeta.com |
| My own! | epchan.blogspot.com |
| Trader forums | |
| Elite Trader | www.Elitetrader.com |
| Wealth-Lab | www.wealth-lab.com |
| Benn Eifert | @bennpeifert |
| Corey Hoffstein | @choffstein |
| Quantocracy (retweet of new articles) | @Quantocracy |
| Mike Harris | @mikeharrisNY |
| Euan Sinclair | @sinclaireuan |
| My own! | @chanep |
| Newspaper and magazines | |
| Stocks, Futures and Options magazine | www.sfomag.com |
This is not to say that you will not find some gems if you are persistent enough, but I have found that many traders' forums or blogs may suggest simpler strategies that are equally profitable. You might be skeptical that people would actually post truly profitable strategies in the public space for all to see. After all, doesn't this disclosure increase the competition and decrease the profitability of the strategy? And you would be right: Most ready-made strategies that you may find in these places actually do not withstand careful backtesting. Just like the academic studies, the strategies from traders' forums may have worked only for a little while, or they work for only a certain class of stocks, or they work only if you don't factor in transaction costs. However, the trick is that you can often modify the basic strategy and make it profitable. (Many of these caveats as well as a few common variations on a basic strategy will be examined in detail in Chapter 3.)
For example, someone once suggested a strategy to me that was described in Wealth-Lab (see Table
