It's been awhile

Getting back into the blogging thing and going to keep it short and sweet from now on.  After meeting and seeing the lamborghini in the driveway of a wealth quantitative trader and getting to see his returns, I am going to be modifying my approach to move toward the automated trading side of things.

The benefits:

• My background is in engineering so the math and coding shouldn't be too much of a problem
• Most of my mistakes come not from strategies but with the fact that I can't stick with a trade
• I had no risk management other than a stop loss, and it cost me a lot of money.  Automation will force me to trust the probability curve instead of the one-time massive gain I have been looking for

What I've done so far:

• Read a fairly good introduction by Ernie Chan
• Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business (Wiley Trading) 
• Blog: http://epchan.blogspot.com/
• Outlined the steps to move forward with a basic automated trading system
• Get historical data
• Create a method to backtest a strategy on that historical data
• Get a realtime stock feed
• Read realtime stock feed into strategy
• Automate execution of stock purchase and exit

I'm going to focus on iteration while moving forward as fast as possible.  I think the sooner you get to working prototype the better off the project becomes.

The next post will be on how to get all the historical EOD survivorbiased data you could ever want