QuoteOriginally posted by: mayl2QuoteOriginally posted by: rexlexQuoteOriginally posted by: rexlexmayl2,I don't know why I have WASTED 30 minutes of my life writing such a LONG private message to an idiot like you? What's the matter - you are disappointed that I stated that I am not going to send you money in advance??? Or perhaps you are disappointed that I didn't mention anything about the strategy, so you can't sell your car now and put it in practice yourself? Sorry If I am sounding a "bit frustrated", but as you know - too much ignorance from people like you is irritating sometimes .And yeah...we all have "a couple of millions to spare"...(what a jackass...).And no - I am not going to send you 4$ million.P.S.Do you think that if I was like Madoff I was going to offer so much HIGHER returns??? No, "wise guy", IF I was a con artist - I would obviously offer 40%-60%...think about it.whatever...I was kind of expecting you to tell me that "The cheque is in the post". Ignored. No more replies from me to you, kiddo.

rexlex, I recently worked for a company (hedge fund) . The front office wasn't that busy (for various reasons) . A guy I worked with (broker type) started options trading from his own personal account. He showed me his strategy and asked me what my opinion was. It was pretty straight forward (straddles, collars, covered calls etc.) but he was consistently making money. In fact on 36 of his last 40 trades he made a profit, I saw the official trade history. As a result he had an return of approx 76%. over the few months before.. no joke. The only thing was that he traded one ticker only!! Anyway, he then wrote a 3 page document to appeal to friends and family to rasie 100K to invest in his strategy. I believe he got it although i'm not sure about this. Here are a few suggestions for you. Are you a graduate student? if so you could1) Approach a member of the faculty in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and be honest!! Show them your complete strategy. Show them it works at different entry points etc. Be comprehensive in your analysis, leave no stone unturned. You might be surpirsed at what happens. I guarantee you will learn something. You may even get the money you need.2) Start a quant investment society at university. Use university resources (13th floor of the library for group meetings, photocopying machine, computer, software) to advertise around campus. Charge a membership fee, Assign yourself president and treasurer. Submit your strategy to the group. 3) If you are a PhD student you will be receving a small stipend. Get yourself a credit card and don't deal in cash for the next 6 months. Instead purchase everything you usually do on the card and pay off the card religiously (on the same date of every month) . You will build up enough credit to open up an investment brokers trading account and apply for a limit increase and a margin account at IB. Yossarian

QuoteOriginally posted by: Yossarian22rexlex, I recently worked for a company (hedge fund) . The front office wasn't that busy (for various reasons) . A guy I worked with (broker type) started options trading from his own personal account. He showed me his strategy and asked me what my opinion was. It was pretty straight forward (straddles, collars, covered calls etc.) but he was consistently making money. In fact on 36 of his last 40 trades he made a profit, I saw the official trade history. As a result he had an return of approx 76%. over the few months before.. no joke. The only thing was that he traded one ticker only!! Anyway, he then wrote a 3 page document to appeal to friends and family to rasie 100K to invest in his strategy. I believe he got it although i'm not sure about this. Here are a few suggestions for you. Are you a graduate student? if so you could1) Approach a member of the faculty in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and be honest!! Show them your complete strategy. Show them it works at different entry points etc. Be comprehensive in your analysis, leave no stone unturned. You might be surpirsed at what happens. I guarantee you will learn something. You may even get the money you need.2) Start a quant investment society at university. Use university resources (13th floor of the library for group meetings, photocopying machine, computer, software) to advertise around campus. Charge a membership fee, Assign yourself president and treasurer. Submit your strategy to the group. 3) If you are a PhD student you will be receving a small stipend. Get yourself a credit card and don't deal in cash for the next 6 months. Instead purchase everything you usually do on the card and pay off the card religiously (on the same date of every month) . You will build up enough credit to open up an investment brokers trading account and apply for a limit increase and a margin account at IB. YossarianThanks for the recommendations.I think options 1 and 2 might be considered, so I will think about what you say...about the faculty member and the quant investment society start up.However, speaking about your friend, the option trader, with all due my respect: I'd say his success was largely attributed to luck. To quote Prof. Merton Miller:"If 10 000 people try to pick stocks, one of them will score a big win....people really think they are doing something useful, but they are really not"- It's from a documentary I highly recommend: "trillion dollar bet" - you can find it on youtube as well. and again...this quote is not word by word - but the sense was the same.In my own research I have explored anything from "scalping" to designing my own genetic algorithm. And NOTHING was able to outperform the market - at least so sufficiently as to force me to believe it. For instance, I have like 500+ university papers on my laptop right now...and about 100 of them dedicated to neural networks - whereas 30 of them a purely about using neural networks to predict prices. Funnily enough, 15 papers of these 30 claim that prices can be predicted - while the other 30 that they can't? Of course...now I am expecting again - Dave Angel to criticize me ...because I was sort of obsessed with neural networks a few months ago - BUT still I am not giving up on my position that neural networks have great power - it's just the present algorithms that don't work and finally - if they do - I just won't trust to any "predictive paranormal black box".Other than that, I found neural networks(mainly RBF and Backprops) to have great power predicting companies that will go bankrupt - so at least you should know when you are relatively safe when buying stocks .And...I mentioned that my idea is virtually risk free - I WON't call however your friend's strategies risk free (covered calls, straddles...). It doesn't matter if he trades small enough in quantity or if he specializes in a single asset. So what, technical analyzers like Larry Williams and Tymothy Sykes made one million in one year starting with 10 000 too! But how they traded? Well...here is Tymothy Sykes, enjoy yourself :"Suck one that" ...I am not on Wall Street...so you can trust me? At least following Tim's logic . Anyway...both Tim and Larry lost HUGE part from their compounded capital after 3 years or so...and yes you are right: They are making millions selling their books: "how I made one million". I myself even wrote a program which tests Larry Williams'es pseudo-stochastic oscillator in practice...guess what - after many thousands of trades - the program has lost huge percent . I will be happy to post the source code is someone is interested. But anyway, Thanks again!

If you really have a zero risk, high return trading strategy, then you will have no problem raising such a small sum. The problem is that no-one believes you. Practitioners have been looking for such a market condition since markets began to little avail. The chances are that you think you have a zero risk, high return strategy but you just don't recognise the real risk.Having said that, your best bet is the prop shops - you can PM me if you like but be prepared to be transparant about your strategy. Black boxes don't fly well these days.

Rexlex where are you located?

THE MARKET IS NOT SYMMETRIC, SO THE LOSS AND THE WIN.

NO RISK=ARBITRAGE DIFFERENT FROM STATISTICAL ARBITRAGE

QuoteOriginally posted by: miltenpointIf you really have a zero risk, high return trading strategy, then you will have no problem raising such a small sum. The problem is that no-one believes you. Practitioners have been looking for such a market condition since markets began to little avail. The chances are that you think you have a zero risk, high return strategy but you just don't recognise the real risk.Having said that, your best bet is the prop shops - you can PM me if you like but be prepared to be transparant about your strategy. Black boxes don't fly well these days."good idea" . To send you a private message with all of the details about the strategy . What could be smarter than that? Let me put it another way : You will "claim" that you can't invest 10k(of course you can't anyway...but who cares , hence you will tell me: "I can't invest in "black box", just tell me the idea in PM" . But...guess what? People have thought since ages how to protect both parties in similar situations. For instance, recall the situation whereas a manufactere cannot ship the goods before they have the money - but the seller cannot send the money before they see the goods. Ever heard of letter of credit??? I am teaching you to such simple foundations of economics, judging by your naive approach . And yes - letter of credits can be used in more subjective situations - NOT only in goods shipping. I have even created a website, whereas I describe how I see similar investment process - whereas the investor opens a letter of credit...and then we can proceed to the knowhow. But before that - 'sending PMs with the idea'...no comment. Speaking of the risk involved...I thought that someone is going to criticize me that I have forgotten all the expenses involved...such as spread and commissions.I admit - I underrated the overall intelligence here . But still...you claim that there is risk I have mised somehow. Again...I stated that there is ALWAYS risk - but THEORETICAL. I know that Scholes and Merton's methods were "close to riskless" in Bill Ziemba's own words - but...he also write about them: "While they should have been diversified, they weren't". So, in my idea - I have taken into account diversification + hedging + kelly criterion + anything that can eliminate risk. Hence even, I am looking for 10k and not 1M to say...even in the super worse case scenario - if something goes wrong(always a possibility), wich such a great return - the money should be already millions withdrawn.... So, even if you lose - you'd be a millionaire. In fact...I am so risk averse, that I share Warren Buffett's view when he says(humorously... :"If I am offered a recolver with one million empty holes and just one with a bullet....I won't do it" - actually I should start a topic about this issue here . Most mathematicians here would agree that having stated the condition as such: the probability to kill yourself is 1/1 000 000...so we take as risky actions on daily basis - but we don't even think about it? I am curious what's te probability to be hit by a car every day you go to work...but anyway 1 in a million is a low probability especially if your capital grows exponentially. Now...as I mentioned however - the idea that your capital grows exponentially cannot be applied in practice - because the more arbitrageurs take advantage of arbitrage...the less profitable it is. So, in a sense - even if I am the only person who is aware of this strategy - when I play with billions - I will play against myself . Other limitation is the limit set by regulatory organs. For instance, CME to the best of my knowledge have set a $500 million limit involved money in a deal. So...if you trade options/futures for more than that at once - you are penalized with 15K(as far as I remember...) at irst - and for further persistance...with ban . Now, lets address this more mathematically. One might ask: Knowing that $500,000,000 is the limit where from I will be either penalized by regulations or I will simply eliminate the arbitrage situation, knowing that as well I start with $10 000 and the money will grow by 5 ( a constant of proportionality representing capital's growth rate when the capital density is too low). Then...how my money invested should grow by the end of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year so that I will NOT affect arbitrage?The goal here is obvious: You to invest as much as possible, but at the same time you don't want to destroy the possibility of arbitrage when you invest "too much". Well:Also...please no critics that I am writing d10 when I can simply write "dt" or similar...actually it totally doesn't matter - I just like number notations rather than letters .Once againe: "5" is not the rate of growth as %500.But again...as I mentioned a few times, I am great fan of Paul Wilmott's reasoning that mathematical finance is often useless when estimating risk.Why not try predicting financial crashes by a Poisson process??? ...Now...of course I have a few more quotes to quote ...one from Keynes, one from Wittgenstein and one from Marx . But...I'll save them...

QuoteOriginally posted by: lombardovitoNO RISK=ARBITRAGE DIFFERENT FROM STATISTICAL ARBITRAGEWelll...yeah...Actually I don't like the term "statistical arbitrage", I wonder who coined this term anyway...Thorp??? Of course I am a great fan of Thorp...after all - God might be wrong - but Thorp - never . Still, this is one of the few things where I disagree with him. To me the so called "statistical arbitrage" is just a way to attract more investors...as Thorp succeded perhaps in such endevour . Not just Thorp, but I am sure many other great economists would strongly disagree when objecting against the term "statistical arbitrage". You can read the book: "Arbitrage guide to financial markets" - by Prof. Robert Dubil, who has worked in Chase Manhatten and etc....so he also points the usage of the idea that something might be "statistically risk free" - to which I still disagree! One thing is either riskless or close to riskless. It can't be "statistically riskless". Of course this is in the context of quantitative trading. Statistical arbitrage could be used also to describe expected value in games...but that's not how it's used in trading - even "pair trading" is called statistical arbitrage! To me this is nothing but high risk gambling - there is NO such things are "overperforming...support and resistance"...it's just illusion. Fooled by randomness.Hence, when I am referring to arbitrage - I usually mean pure classical arbitrage.

First, the two biggest risks in simulated or paper-trading are: 1) that the simulated trades would NOT have occurred at the times and prices one thinks they would have occurred; 2) that the observed profitable pattern won't persist in the market in the future.Second, how do we know (or how can one prove) that the Prof Merton Miller quote about luck does not apply to any given proposed trading system, including this one?Third, a person in the U.S. averages a 1-in-a-million chance of death in an automobile accident every 2.5 days. That's a per-capita, not a per-driver figure, so the risk of death conditional on choosing to get in a car is significantly higher than that figure.

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaFirst, the two biggest risks in simulated or paper-trading are: 1) that the simulated trades would NOT have occurred at the times and prices one thinks they would have occurred; 2) that the observed profitable pattern won't persist in the market in the future.Second, how do we know (or how can one prove) that the Prof Merton Miller quote about luck does not apply to any given proposed trading system, including this one?Third, a person in the U.S. averages a 1-in-a-million chance of death in an automobile accident every 2.5 days. That's a per-capita, not a per-driver figure, so the risk of death conditional on choosing to get in a car is significantly higher than that figure.If luck pays out well its more than welcome. Unfortunately rarely persists. Regarding your last paragraph, made some calculations out of curiosity, and found out that the chance to die in an automobile accident becomes 50-50 after 3425 years. Well pyramids in Egypt must be much younger than this...

QuoteOriginally posted by: AnthisRegarding your last paragraph, made some calculations out of curiosity, and found out that the chance to die in an automobile accident becomes 50-50 after 3425 years. Well pyramids in Egypt must be much younger than this...Yes, and these mummies are all driving around Florida's highways with their turn signals blinking.

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaFirst, the two biggest risks in simulated or paper-trading are: 1) that the simulated trades would NOT have occurred at the times and prices one thinks they would have occurred; 2) that the observed profitable pattern won't persist in the market in the future.Second, how do we know (or how can one prove) that the Prof Merton Miller quote about luck does not apply to any given proposed trading system, including this one?Third, a person in the U.S. averages a 1-in-a-million chance of death in an automobile accident every 2.5 days. That's a per-capita, not a per-driver figure, so the risk of death conditional on choosing to get in a car is significantly higher than that figure.Well...here are my answers...:As to your first questions: Yes, but this is namely Operational risk, or as I call it "execution risk"- if there was such risk I won't call the idea risk free...once again...in fact - call me a scammer, but I CANNOT say right now as to how long will the profitable case scenario hold - since the more I am writing here...the more details people learn ...so it's sort of reverse engineering - I am stating that I won't say what the strategy is - but I am saying anything it's NOT - so people learn by the method of rejection what that might be . So, sorry. No long post from me this time! Now...as yo your next critics: I ADMIT you have a point about Merton Miller's case. So, my bad - I was WRONG here . But so what...does this destroy my idea? No it was just a mistake out of the many things I wrote . Besides...was it actually a mistake? Here is a link to the exact quote by Merton MIller, it's clearly shown in the context of technical analysis - which I just criticiezd! So...in the movie - an interview with some guy running around with charts is shown...and after that - there is the addressed quote we are talking about, so: believe the quote is at the end of this part...? And finally as to your stats with the car accident...interesting, but NOT that I am lying or something - but I really meant to ask what is the probability to be hit by car as a PEDESTRIAN while going to work. I can't prove that I meant that ...but as you probably know - English isn't my mother tongue...so I guess sometimes I am not expressing myself 100% clear. Anyway...I know at least by intuition I would have guessed that the probability to die in car accident is higher - because let's face it- everyday we listen on the news about number of car accidents within the previous day. However we don't listen about pedestrians hit...so yeah, you got the idea and here . So, to summarize perhaps in the issues you addressed - you got me only in the M.Miller case...and once again, the quote was in the context of behavioural finance and technical analysis - which I clearly stated that I hate...finally with all due my respect to Prof Miller...but...I personally believe that the EMH pioneers such as MIller, Burton and of course - Fama...went too far. How far? Well, far enough to be skeptical about arbitrage oppurtunities - but not far as to claim that prices can't be predicted. SO, I agree with EMH on its claims that prices can't be predicted, but just that. Besides, I don't think AMH is a better case...google "Adaptive market hypothesis", it's not a popular topic hence I am giving the note .

With all due respect, are you a troll or can you show in some way that you are serious?This is such a clumsy attempt to actually get someone to back your strategy and take you seriously that I doubt this to be true.What speaks for you is that you have 35 posts against your name; too many for a fake account.I would recommend a less arrogant attitude, less quoting from people irrelevant to your idea, less emoticons, less upper case words and better punctuation.Regards,PS: The "killed in a car accident" is such a chestnut and ignores the expectations across "conditionally skewed probabilities" being silly. As was siad before, P(killed|pedestrian) <<<<<<< P(killed|cardriver) <<<<<< P(killed|cardriver under 25 and male). I can not believe that you are serious with your ideas; you are pulling a joke, aren't you?

QuoteOriginally posted by: AlkmeneWith all due respect, are you a troll or can you show in some way that you are serious?This is such a clumsy attempt to actually get someone to back your strategy and take you seriously that I doubt this to be true.What speaks for you is that you have 35 posts against your name; too many for a fake account.I would recommend a less arrogant attitude, less quoting from people irrelevant to your idea, less emoticons, less upper case words and better punctuation.Regards,PS: The "killed in a car accident" is such a chestnut and ignores the expectations across "conditionally skewed probabilities" being silly. As was siad before, P(killed|pedestrian) <<<<<<< P(killed|cardriver) <<<<<< P(killed|cardriver under 25 and male). I can not believe that you are serious with your ideas; you are pulling a joke, aren't you?Alkmene, I suggest you better shoot yourself...aren;t yo?Well, since some people can behave stupiT - I can try too! See, it's not that hard...There I said it - I feel much better now .(short post...NO arguments...)Just like you .