Get Rich Quick Trading Strategies (and why they don’t work)

Every aspiring millionaire who comes to the markets armed with some programming ability has implemented a systematic Get Rich Quick (GRQ) trading strategy. Of course, they don’t work. Deep down even the greenest of newbies knows this. Yet, still, we are compelled to give them a try, just once, just for fun (or so we …

Read more

A Review of Zorro for Systematic Trading

One of the keys to running a successful systematic trading business is a relentless focus on high return-on-investment activities. High ROI activities include: Implementing new trading strategies within a proven framework. An example might be to implement a portfolio of pairs trades in the equity market. Scaling existing strategies to new instruments or markets. For …

Read more

Are SPX Options Expensive?

Options are non-linear financial products that allow you to do useful things that you can’t easily do with other financial instruments. Let me give a specific illustration of options being useful… The chart below shows the monthly cumulative % performance of our RW systematic trading portfolio since we started trading it in October 2018. The …

Read more

A Quant’s Approach to Drawdown:
The Cold Blood Index

In part 1 of this series, we talked about how a market-savvy systematic trader would approach a period of drawdown in a trading strategy. Specifically, they’d: do the best job possible of designing and building their trading strategy to be robust to a range of future market conditions chill out and let the strategy do …

Read more

A Quant’s Approach to Drawdown: Part 1

Imagine you’ve tinkered for days or even weeks, perfecting a strategy idea that’s showing a whole lot of promise. You’ve meticulously tweaked a mouth-watering Sharpe Ratio out of your backtests….it even survived costs. YES! Systems go, let’s trade it. Imagine this new strategy enters a drawdown.…maybe a lengthy one….maybe from day one! How would you …

Read more

Run Your Trading Like a Business

One of the biggest wins we have at Robot Wealth is in helping aspiring traders see the markets, and profitable trading, for what it really is. Rather than utilising a tried and tested approach that has generated real money in the markets, in practice, many aspiring traders gravitate to seemingly exciting approaches with the weakest …

Read more

Humility and The Pain Trade

If you don’t bring a humble attitude to the markets, the markets will quickly humble you. Being humble is fundamental to everything we do at Robot Wealth: in our own trading, and in collaborative research in our Bootcamps. The more we trade, the more we are humbled by the markets. The more we are humbled …

Read more

Trading Lessons from Gamblers

Pick the Easy Games Like many sociopaths, Frank Wallace was a fan of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. He wrote a book called “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life”, started a cult based on Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, and got convicted of tax fraud.   “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life” is about getting edges in …

Read more