Futures Strategy Developer Urges You to “Never Catch a Falling Knife”

It wasn’t until Amal T.’s company went public 10 years ago, requiring him to open a brokerage account, that he become a trader.  His trading journey began along a familiar path, as an expensive  hobby.

In Episode 13 of Top Trader Radio, Collective2 trader leader and software developer Amal chats with Charley about familiar topics including automation, keeping emotions in check, and strategy recalibration. He also humbly attributes some of the success of his strategy to an overall strong, trending market.  

Amal’s Day Trader Futures strategy is long only trend-following strategy that trades the S&P 500 and Nasdaq emini futures. 

The biggest misconception to start trading is that you need a great deal of financial knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, it helps, but it’s all about understanding the psychology of trading and keeping emotions in check.

James Leigh Says, ‘Be Choosy When it Comes to Opportunity’

Toronto-based James Leigh believes that, as a trader, you absolutely need to let most opportunities pass you by. Most traders believe that they need to do everything, when the opposite is true. “Slow down and think long-term” Leigh urges. “It’s said that the deal of a lifetime comes around every 90 days” added guest host and show producer Paul Roberts.

James Leigh’s popular C2 strategy, Correlation Factor, is a fully automated, sector rotation strategy that picks 5 sectors of favorable strength and stability. It is a long-only and thus “IRA-friendly” strategy that trades only U.S. equities, excluding stocks in the energy and minerals sectors as “those are too tied to the commodities.” Over time, James has found some fascinating behavior in the correlations and trends among various sectors.  

In Episode 12 of Top Trader Radio, we dive into why James believes his strategy has outperformed the market, the benefits of a sector rotation strategy, and how to keep your losses at a minimum. 

Everyone wants to invest in something long-term…but, before it becomes a good long-term trend it needs to be a good short-term trend.

Danny Merkel: Minimize Stress with a Systematic Approach

It took a high school business teacher’s stock market competition to inspire the interest of Danny Merkel, the Trade Leader of the The Momentum of Now  trading strategy. Danny’s successful 10-year career in trading (mostly individual stocks of a wide variety, across many sectors) is methodological and rules-based: cut losers, let winners ride. 

In Episode 11 of Top Trader Radio, Charley explores Danny’s rigorous systematic approach to trading, the best advice he’s ever received, and the benefits of varying stocks across many sectors. He even dives into the future of Bitcoin from a trader’s perspective. At the end of the day, Danny says, you need to learn to think in terms of the next 1,000 trades; position sizing and a little perspective is everything.  

When it comes to Bitcoin, you need an exit strategy. If you don’t manage the risk, it could end up really bad.

David Stephens: Indices vs. Stocks? Do what works for you.

This week our host Charley Wright welcomes David Stephens, a Silicon Valley software director and C2 trade leader to the podcast to discuss his background, start in trading, and his popular long-only strategy SystematicBlue SP500.  David prefers indices over individual stocks, an approach that he believes to be of much lower risk with less dependency on ‘market noise’. It’s important, David says, that every trader find what works for them. 

According to David, whose day job has him working regularly with the likes of Nasa, BMW and Boeing, the amount of trading advice out there can be overwhelming. At the end of the day, be it mean reversion or price action, nobody can argue with what is working for you. 

I’ve made every mistake there is to make when it comes to trading. You have to make mistakes in order to learn.

Richard Metzger prefers pragmatism and probabilities to the pursuit of perfection

Four years ago, Richard Metzger went from designing the logic that goes into cell phones, computers and electronics to designing trading algorithms for his own venture AlgorithmicTrading.net. The results in just a short time have been impressive. 

In Episode 9 of Top Trader Radio, Richard and host Charley Wright cover a broad range of topics from why to avoid perfection to how to use inversely correlated instruments to hedge. Richard has algorithms for a variety of market conditions but within each strategy he advocates for simplicity when possible. 

Richard offers one of his marquee strategies under the name Swing Trader ES TY on a privately branded Collective2 site. 

Always remember, don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the sufficient … because back-testing is only a small part of the battle. I’ve coded over 300 algorithms, almost all of which did poorly when applied to live trades. A few stood out as gems and those are what we offer to our customers today.  

GD Singh challenges conventional wisdom but follows common sense

GD Singh is CFA Institute member and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst who, along with his team of research contributors that all boast similar credentials, manage seven core strategies, each with a different risk/return profile designed to cater to a specific type of investor.  

GD founded HedgedEquity in 2015 to provide access to signals from his portfolio of strategies. The firm specializes in low volatility, alpha seeking equities, ETFs and futures strategies that are non-correlated to the traditional equity and bond indices. 

Episode 8 of Top Trader Radio features host Charley Wright interviewing GD about the approach, market and personal philosophies, and style that drive his investment process.  On Collective2, you can find his strategies under the user NTLLC including Emini Short Term, Allcap Stocks Long Only, and SP Swing Trading among others.

GD’s proprietary multi-instrument, multi-time frame trading strategies have been published on Collective2 since 2015.

Our fundamental belief is centered around the fact that markets are inherently inefficient and often create pockets of opportunities for astute investors.

Brad Pappas proves that green portfolios can stay well in the black

In 1995, Brad Pappas formed Rocky Mountain Humane Investing, Corp (RMHI), an independent Boulder investment advisory firm to cater to Vegan and Socially Responsible Investing.  RMHI was the first investment adviser in the United States that focused exclusively on humane and environmentally screening as part of a socially responsible investing philosophy.

In Episode 7 of Top Trader Radio, Brad and host Charley Wright talk about the investment approach behind several strategies tracked on Collective2 including Optimized Partners I and The Vegan Growth Portfolio.  Topics include trend following, what makes a market worthy of investment, and the common question of whether socially responsible investing means sacrificing performance. 

Brad’s proprietary ranking and trading systems have been public on Collective2.com  since 2013.

The technique that a manager employs is far more important than the investment selection universe. I figured the only way I could really prove it to people was to do it in real time in real life. 

Alessandro Cocciola’s strategy has experienced 4 years of good “Carma”

Alessandro Cocciola designs and develops quantitative, mechanical trading strategies that utilize proprietary measurements to determine the market regime along with a scoring system for S&P equities. His flagship strategy Carma Stocks is a mean reversion swing trading strategy that filters for oversold and overbought stocks. The strategy trades only highly liquid stocks, both long and short.

In Episode 6 of Top Trader Radio, Alessandro and host Charley Wright talk about the investment approach behind Carma Stocks, the importance of matching trading methods to your personality, lessons learned about liquidity from the perils of 2008, and the characteristics that have lead to Alessandro’s success as a portfolio manager. 

Trading and portfolio management are my passions and my job. I find myself very fortunate that the two things coincide. 

IQBroker’s Daniel Tochner has 18 ways to make you a better trader

Software Architect Daniel Tochner wanted a way to backtest, optimize, and execute multiple algorithmic trading strategies at a portfolio level. When he was unable to find a platform that was capable of the heavy lifting required to meet his needs, he set out to design and build it himself, and IQBroker was born.

In Episode 5 of Top Trader Radio, Daniel and host Charley Wright cover the features and benefits of the IQBroker software which was recently selected as Collective2’s first Preferred Trading Platform.  Daniel explains how IQBroker allows multiple strategies, within a single portfolio, to trade multiple symbols, on multiple exchanges… and to use multiple bar-types, news feeds, RSS feeds, and fundamental data.

The result of over 11 years of R&D, IQBroker is one of the most powerful and feature-rich broker-neutral trading platforms for equities, futures and forex. IQBroker has received rave reviews from quantitative and algorithmic traders all over the world. 

…a trader can have a strategy that looks at equities in New York, forex in Tel Aviv, and futures in London and they can simulate all of that as a single portfolio. That was impossible for traders to do [before IQBroker].