We assume some fundamentals about financial markets and products, but we don’t assume that you have any past experience trading. Fundamental concepts are explained from first principles throughout and you are welcome to ask any questions on Discord.

Yes! You won’t need to write code. We assume you can use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Some of our examples are in the R statistical programming language, but we don’t assume you can use it in the course, we’re just illustrating techniques.

Yes, I think the course will be very valuable to you.

There is significant discretion in all trading, including the design of quant trading systems.

This course will help you quantify and test your discretionary judgment.

You have lifetime access to the course content and can review the material at your convenience.

You get everything as soon as you sign up.

The course will be taught through a combination of video lessons, presentation slides, written materials, and our Bootcamp Discord server. 

Our Bootcamp Discord community is quite active. You’ll not only get help and insights from your instructors, James and Kris, but from your fellow teammates.

James and Kris are on Discord at regular times throughout the week. These times are posted to the Discord server.

Being an international community, you will always have other community members around to talk to.

Yes – definitely! 

Our Bootcamps comprise people from all across the globe. We’ve had hundreds of Bootcamp participants from the northern hemisphere who have successfully completed Bootcamp.

James and Kris are usually around on Discord enough that we cross paths with all timezones between us, and – due to the diversity and global depth of our member base – you can almost always find someone online in the Discord workspace at any time of the day or week.

The hardest thing for non-native English speakers who join us for Bootcamp is making sense of Kris’ Australian accent! But thankfully, James does most of the talking, and he speaks a lovely, clear version of British English.

In addition to webinars and video content, we also provide written content, which you can consume at your own pace. Your interaction with us will mostly be via the written word on Discord.

Also, if you did find that the language barriers were insurmountable, we will of course provide a full refund. Rest assured that if you wanted to, you can try out Bootcamp risk-free.

No. To quote our RW mantra: “Trade broad, trade small, trade humble”.

Of course, you need money to make money, but we recommend starting with an amount of capital that you are financially and emotionally able to lose without dire consequences, in a worst case scenario.

That being said, our goal is to make your money grow, and as long as you have realistic expectations about what can be achieved with a small retail-level account, you’re in great company.

That’s fine! It would mostly be redundant because you simply don’t need expensive setups to do well.

You just need a broker to be able to trade ETFs, or access to a cryptocurrency exchange.

Everything else will be provided to you.

We supply everything you need as part of Bootcamp.

This program includes no automation, no coding, and the trading strategies we discuss are those that can be executed manually.

Automation and coding are great ways to scale a trading operation – but without the fundamentals in place, they aren’t worth anything in the markets.

The intent of Bootcamp is to help you become brilliant at the basics – the things that will set you up for a lifetime of sustainable, sensible trading.

The strategies can be traded by hand with a very small time commitment. They also lend themselves to automation, but we won’t cover that in Bootcamp.

We always have something going on with our RW Pro membership community, which is open to anyone who’s completed Trade Like a Quant.

Occassionally, we offer one-off courses and Bootcamps to the public. We are currently preparing to offer a course in Excel for traders and plan to open it in Q4 2024.

First and foremost, you’ll have gained an appreciation for the most important aspects of running a serious systematic trading operation:

• How to think about the market, its participants, and their constraints and incentives
• How to find opportunities to get paid in the market and how to think about “edge”
• How to put together simple trading rules to harness such opportunities
• How to manage a portfolio of edges so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
• How to avoid the mistakes that guarantee failure

Once you’ve got that stuff nailed, you’re on your way and are very well placed to develop your trading operation further. The most obvious next step would be finding more things to trade. Perhaps, depending on your goals and ability to commit time, you might think about automation.

If you’d like to continue with us after Bootcamp, we can help develop your trading operation further. You’ll get the opportunity to join our membership community.

We only accept people who’ve completed Bootcamp because:

• There is a minimum level of knowledge that is required in order to get the most out of membership, which we’ll make sure you get via Bootcamp.
• We like to keep things focused and moving forward (once, we tried letting people in directly without doing a Bootcamp, and essentially wound up having to run a mini-Bootcamp to get them up to speed…. this was frustrating for members, newcomers, and us – we’ve learned our lesson!)
• We share our life’s work inside RW Pro and like to get to know people beforehand.
• It isn’t for everyone, and doing a Bootcamp is the best way to get to know us and our approach before making the commitment.

Community membership is offered upon completion of Trade Like a Quant, so if you sign up for Bootcamp today, you can be a RW Pro member within 2-3 weeks.

We use quant analysis and market knowledge to find opportunities (as well as less glamorous approaches such as talking to other traders!).

Backtesting is literally the final step in the process and really only serves to confirm that the thing that we researched could indeed be harnessed with simple trading rules under modeled cost constraints. We do a lot less backtesting than you probably think we do.

Many strategies are discussed in Bootcamp. Historically, their sharpe ratios have ranged from around 0.8 to 3.

But don’t read too much into that.

The truth is that a backtest is only so useful for setting performance expectations. Real life performance is highly dependent on the actual specification and execution of the trading rules. And the only guarantee about market inefficiencies is that eventually they will disappear. We plan against this by trading a few of them – and adapting to the markets. Trading isn’t set and forget. It’s a grind.

Things that are quite useful in forming a view on whether a particular edge is worth pursuing in the future include:

• Is there a compelling reason for the trade to exist and to persist? (ie why would I get paid for taking on this risk?)
• Related, does the trade make sense given my model of the market, its actors, and their constraints?
• Is the positive expected value of the edge supported by the data? (using simple quant analysis, we look for evidence of persistence and stability of the edge in the data across time and assets)

There’s more detail about these questions and how we’ll answer them in Bootcamp in the outline of the course curriculum.

Right now, we’re trading global macro assets and cryptocurrencies. We trade some of the strategies we discuss in the Bootcamp program.

We won’t be using Zorro or any coding or automation during the Bootcamp program.

Bootcamp is focused on the fundamental lessons of running a systematic trading operation. We wanted to exclude anything that might distract from or obscure those important lessons – so there’s no coding, no automation, and no heavy quant stuff.

The strategies are specifically designed such that a time-poor, part-time trader could manage them by hand with a small monthly time commitment. They do lend themselves to automation, which you may want to consider at some point after Bootcamp.

We have some training material around Zorro in our RW Pro membership group, which Bootcampers are invited to join at the conclusion of the course.