Professional Stock Trading: System Design and Automation by Mark R. Conway

Summary: A showcase of trading systems written for TradeStation. Examples are hand picked. The systems do not work well when applied in reality.

Review

It is difficult to write a lot more than the summary unless I want to insult the authors. The only thing missing from the summary is that the biggest warning sign of the models presented is the lack of statistics driven target exit.

I will write a story here instead.

Long time ago, I had a big argument with the developer and founder of a trading platform in some public forum. My point is that a platform that allows the system designers to peek into the future of the price data to make trading decision is ethically wrong. I pointed out that their platform and the most popular system platform at the time both had this issue.

These two platforms never fix this fundamental issue. In fact, this problem is the most popular side effect loved by system creators and hobbyists because they can produce outrageous trading results easily which in reality would never hold up.

A number of rookie fund managers thought their models were gold and could print money discussed their work with me and I pointed out that their models will not produce the kind of profit they expected. They always refer to these 2 platforms allowing them to code the way they did and that the platform I designed should do so. I politely told them what they have are junk. Of course, with books published under their belts they thought they are invincible.

At the end of course I am correct but I could not save their investors.

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