About SIF Trading Systems
I have been a fulltime trader and system developer since 2002 focused exclusively on trading stock index futures. My background is in engineering and not finance or trading. The idea of systematic trading grew out a natural interest in the stock and futures markets. Being self taught has its good and bad points. The bad is mostly having to learn from my mistakes; the good is that the school of hard knocks is an excellent teacher. One of the things you learn is how much risk tolerance you have. In my case that is not very much. So fairly early on in this endeavor I gave up on any long term or even swing trading. I also gave up on the idea of being able to pick stocks since very few professionally managed mutual funds are able to consistently outperform the market indexes. By day trading the stock index futures, your risk is limited to what can happen in the entire market in one day. The risk of news events is substantially less for the broader market than it is for a single stock. Really bad news for a stock means its value can go to zero; this will never happen to the broader market in a single day.
One question I’ve always had about people selling trading systems is why don’t they just trade it themselves if it is so good. If you look into this you will find a lot of people who are selling trading systems but do not trade it themselves. They may be really smart and have good ideas, but if they don’t believe in it enough to trade it themselves, then I have to question the value of their system. In my case I’m actually trading what I’m promoting so I have an interest in its performance that goes well beyond selling software. In going public, I hope to leverage what I have been working on the past few years into something of lasting value which will provide for me and my family when the time comes that I am no longer a day to day trader.
