10 Insights from the Man Who Solved the Market: A Deep Dive

Good day, good day, everybody. Brian here from wantlabs.net. Today is May 28th. I'm going to have some big news coming down the pipe soon. So keep your eyes and ears and all that peeled out for it. Anyways, I came across another interesting article. I do like this BetterSystemTrader.com podcast. It's pretty good. They did a posting called 10 Insights from the Man Who Solved the Market. This is referring back to the book Jim Simons Medallion Fund. It's the book put out by Gregory Zuckerman a few years ago. So this guy, Andrew Swan Scott, read it and thought he'd provide his insights. So let's go through these.

 

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The first one is originality matters. Ignore conventional wisdom about the markets. Innovate and explore unique trading strategies and ideas. Look at the market differently from the herd. I totally agree with that because when you look at the markets, there's usually a star performer out there if you go out and dig for that among all the different data sources. And it could be a long-term trending strategy that you could use based on that. A good one in the past was USD Japanese Yen. Another one that was lesser known was USD Turkish Lira or Euro Turkish Lira. They did really good over the years, but now central bankers have stepped in and taken away those opportunities. Now, I don't know about the yen. That could continue, but that could lead to something that could be the next big catalyst to take us all down. But at the end of the day, looking for those sort of things, finding them, that's what gives you what they call trading edge for sure.

Number two, collaborative success. Partner with talented individuals. Foster a collaborative environment to enhance problem-solving and innovations. Again, I cannot stress this. We're hoping to have an interview with Ernie Chan and other people that have kind of trailblazed the whole quant trading space, specifically for those that are coming from the retail trading space. Because as we know, to do true HFT, high-frequency trading, and true low-level quant research and that, people can kind of do it, but you have to have a fairly big account to take advantage of it to really do the pay-to-play thing directly right on the exchanges. As a retail trader going through a retail trading broker, that's pretty hard to do. So you have to find people that are kind of in the same area as you in terms of your account size, maybe your technical chops, as well as your mathematical experience. For myself, I guess I can share this now is that I will be moving my site over to a better technology, to Wix. I'm hoping to build out a better group community through that. That's part of the WIC's features, I guess. I did have an amazing group a few years ago. They're still around. I just want to bring more people together so that they can engage with each other behind the scenes. All at a paywall, but membership privileges have its costs. So that's where you get the collaborative success. So that's what I'm hoping to bring to the table.

Okay, number three, embrace scientific rigor. Apply a rigorous scientific approach in model Model testing and validation ensuring robustness and statistical significance. This isn't really HFT, but to make life easier for a retail trader, I find using tools, very popular, very in-depth tools like TradingView helps you here. You can see instantly without going through any of the wonky backtesting packages out there, frameworks. works. Out of the box, you're ready to go. When you're working with an open source trading strategy, if you build your own, buy one, lease one, whatever on TradingView, you get the ability to see it. What's its profit potential? What is its profit factor? Which is another way of saying, if I'm going to put a dollar in, how much can I expect to get return from that via the profit factor? These are right there out of the box. So when you have these sort of instantly viewable to you from a high level, it makes your life a lot easier and a lot less stressful. A lot of people want to build and roll their own solutions. I'm not against that. But when you get up to my age, you will start to see how valuable time will be. That's all I could tell you. Efficient capital allocation. Okay. Develop systems to optimize capital allocation across various strategies to maximize returns and manage risk. One thing I can mention here, a lot of the boutique hedge funds, boutique AGFT shops, a lot of them will trade in the space of options. I don't think you can operate under a really successful trading strategy with a $1,000, $5,000 account. You need to have something fairly significant to play those kind of, I don't want to say gains, but kind of strategy capabilities. You need probably $20,000, $25,000 because you have to add all your premium and all that fun stuff. And that's why one of the reasons why ETFs are popular because they're not really risky. You can dream like a stock and there's no margin requirement any of that so these sort of things matter but if you do do the options training you can do very well if you get something that actually actually works okay let's talk number six leverage with caution use leverage strategically to amplify your returns now most people i talk to who keep their account in check from early blowing up. One of the things they do is they use no more than six times. I've seen in crypto years ago, finance would have 100 times and so on. And that's high risk when things are not going your way, especially when the assets are in a consolidation phase or downward spiraling or falling knife environment. You don't want to use leverage there. If it's a long-term trend and it's doing well, then yeah, add your leverage. Some people may go up to 12, let's say, but no more will not go more than six.

Data quality is key. Prioritize the acquisition and cleaning all extensive data sets for accurate model development and testing. Again, this is where I like TradingView. you. You can get all kinds of data sources. You'll get, let's say if you're using free data sources like Yahoo Finance, expect to get the gaps. The gaps are going to be deadweight to you and they're going to be hard to work with. So you got to use good quality data. Obviously, there's lots of sources and most of them, I think all of them are going to be paid. And if you're not willing to do that, you're going to, I don't know, if you're just playing around and experimenting, fine. But if you ever want to get serious, you got to pay for the data. And as I say what you get what you pay for is what you get so if you're going to get free stuff I expect to have a low quality. Experiences and results that's all I can tell you they have the ability to enable you to have. Enable you to have decent success there. But obviously, you got to find your proper strategy. Short-term focus, number eight, concentrate on short-term trading opportunities where predictive power is stronger and more actionable. I know one successful trader, he most likely will hear this, he's trading on one minute. Now, he's probably successful there based upon his experience, based upon his history, and he's probably blown up a lot of accounts. So the short focus can help, but this is, again, for a guy who's built and defined high-frequency trading. And obviously, sub-second, sub-minute matters if you're successful. If you're coming from the free trade world, you want to work with basically. Basically long-term, daily, four-hour. When I was writing for Seeking Alpha, they wouldn't accept articles that timeframes less than four hours. So that's just to give you a scenario depending upon who you are and where you're coming from in terms of knowledge in the world of trading.

Execution matters. Invest in technology and processes for efficient trade execution to minimize market impact and slippage the one i've come up with between trading view and the auto trading that's how trading view defines it with something like traders post is exceptional i could be sleeping at night and it trades and it's 100 fully synced that's all i can tell you there unless you try it you're not going to know except luck's rule there is a lot of luck i'm not going to deny that to you and yeah so we'll leave it at that you know basically it's like betting in a casino where if you're betting. If you're betting in Vegas, well, that means you may be riding on luck. You may have to do 10 little trades, take 10 little losses, but maybe that 11th trade may be the big one that you're seeking. But how often does that happen? No one knows. If you have a strategy that may be able to predict that, fine. And then you can work off of that for luck. So basically what this guy was saying, the author of this article here, Peter, this Andrew guy said, what Simmons, Simons and his team achieved is remarkable. We'll probably never see anything like this in our lifetime. Who knows? Computers may come up and do stuff and they may be doing it already through the AI, but we just don't know about it because these are not publicly known. They're not going to go on the internet and say, hey, look at me. I bought a Ferrari because I made an amazing AI trading solution. And if they are, they're just probably BSing. And if they're not showing they're creating journal to achieve that, well, there's a problem there. We may never know the details, but there are enough hints to guide all traders. Very true.

Yeah. And then there's interview posted here with the guy, Gregory Zuckerman. Also, I think I can say about this is that Simons was very reluctant to do the interview and to do the book. And apparently, there are some parts in the book that Simons didn't want to get revealed. But this Zuckerman still went ahead and published it. And I don't think Simons was too happy about it. I wanted to leave that as well. And I'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Remember, get on our training books, quantlabs.net slash books. That may change soon. So do it while you can. Over and out. Thank you.