1) Autoscalp price engine logic required many years of research, why don’t you standardize the process and sell it to retail brokers?

2) So why don’t you run your own customers pool?

3) So why do brokers offer their tools to customers instead?

4) Brokers with hidden agendas offering standard tools to customers, sounds quite nasty. Can you make me an example please?

5) Your view seems negative about brokers in general , can you elaborate more?

6) You mean that often beneath a “broker label” there is a market maker?

7) So is all about broker bad practice , is such practice legal?

8) What you mean by brokers routing orders to external sources?

9) How about your view on another hot topic: LEVERAGE?

10) What is the best retailer market platform in your opinion?

11) What you mean by broker-side created prices?

12) What about high frequency trading and flash trading platforms?

13) I didn’t quite understand the difference between flash trading and High Frequency Trading. Can you make me a clear example?

14) I see you have neither facebook nor linkedin page… why?

15) So, intellectual property is important in autoscalp but if competitors try to steal your know how? How do you react?

16) Can you please explain an example on how you defend from procurement outsourcing or other intellectual property theft attempts?

17) …but if you outsource development, isn’t that dangerous from a proprietary know-how point of view?

18) Fundamental Analysis .

19) OHLC candlesticks : a broker side convention passed as a customer convenience.

20) Technical analysis.

21) Mark to market .

22) News release deal entrapment and analyst advice traps.

23) Charts always lie .

24) “tight spreads” , false friend.

25) Leverage is the hang up game.

26) High watermark.

27) Black Scholes model.

28) Market transparency.

29) Broker fees – Software fees.

30) Manual trading.

31) Why Traders can’t profit with manual trading.

32) Segregated account:

33) STP guarantees the customer doesn’t receive in-house brewed artificial price.

34) Market price and broker price.

35) Why all platform show same instruments to trade on .

36) Expensive models work better than cheap ones.

37) How CTA and Asset Managers lie with the track records, how brokers lie with reports.

38) How Track Records Certifications are faked.

39) Why remote hosted trading systems , grids , mirror trading can not profit.

40) Percent Allocation Managed (PAMM) accounts : deception based lie.

41) Mirror trading : lie based on asymmetric information.

42) Pool account misuse.

43) Close all positions before Friday market close.

44) Recipes through which companies boil and lure traders.

45) Asymmetric info and restricted usage of price filtering.

46) Mind that even the software evaluating your trading system might fail .

47) Often brokers even try sell things they don’t know anything about .

48) Pseudo … trading instructor, trading coach , trading guru , trading mentor trading rooms.

49) Financial Tv Shows, trading books and their lies.

50) See some movies instead.

51) Why “Anyone can trade” is a lie .

52) How Asset Managers and Hedge Funds lie about “their” algos.

A case study: the stolen algo.

Because is my proprietary speculative instrument , not a publicly available tool and my primary objective is to defend my intellectual property no matter what. As I am a speculator and autoscalp is my tool, I use it , I don’t sell it. Let me explain it clearly, assume you created a model just seldom capable of creating profits: most retailers would try any possible trick to steal your intellectual property and use it themselves rather than allow you use it… against them. Then Autoscalp is not a standard broker tool by choice: the less you standardize something the harder is to reverse engineer the process . Also most retailers fit in the retailer illusion game (see sketch above) and that doesn’t help them.

In its many years Autoscalp collected plenty of requests for alterating our product in many ways: some fair some not, brokers doing trade copy, social trading, mirror trading, system grids… mostly against their customer pool but We always replied: no thanks, execution is not our business. Notably many of these guys went bankrupt within 4 years from starting their service.
Also any intellectual property poured in a company always makes stockholders and executives rich, not quite the I.P. owner instead.
Thus, just refusing to fall in those tempting requests, more than tripled our lifespan respect to theirs, maybe coincidence, maybe not…
anyway, We create algos, not executions: that is the Autoscalp business model and We like it as it is.

That is also why Autoscalp provides a raw algo feed , not even an executable order:
The signal receiver is free to do what he thinks fair with the signal received: he can decide to render it anr run it: straight, reversed, lag it,spread it, shred it, repeat it on multiple accounts or even hedge against it and use it as contrarian index… and no problem since the order execution part is none of our business.

Practically, the receiver party in order to transform the algo raw feed in a trade the receiver needs to:
1) Render the received raw algo signal in an executable format compatible to the one his bank uses.
2) Execute the trade as order on his bank platform,
3) Use the bank execution and monitoring system to track his account and orders status.

We have no access of any to those information, to be “not in the need to know” is a precise choice which avoids so many conflict of interests is even useless to list them. That might sound quite confusing so let’s clear the doubt from another point of view.

In the NDA We sign contains a specific clause which says:
We are forbidden from asking which bank you will use our signals with… then would be quite useless for us to render the feed in an executable signal format since We’ll never know who the final user is, which specs the bank uses to trade, on which markets etc. We are not in the need to know… so there is no risk we play any of man in the middle tool of tricks.

If you don’t believe me the market is rigged against retails… Understandable. See this movie then : Inverse Inarrative

What if you have a successful model ? You don’t sell it. You lend it. Also you don’t advertise it at all.
You don’t want your competitors to go head-hunting your R&D team , do you ?

Luckily there is no way to overcome the algo obsolescence . Information lag is your best ally.
When they finished reverse engineering the process is often too late for them to profit with the tool they cloned.
Thus making competitors waste time budget and efforts in late cloning what you do is also a kind of profit as they learn the hard way that playing fair and hiring your model is far cheaper than stealing it.

Is also wise you don’t disclose the research effort beneath, or better : derail and deceive nosy guys toward mock-ups. Even a mediocre Head hunter is capable of putting in line all men who cooperated with your research and rebuild it from sketch: from the idea to the algo but again this path takes time and often is an useless effort.

[see the case study: “the stolen algo”].

First and foremost: most people can’t get the difference between brokers (do their interest) and market makers (bet against them).
You really think that with a two hundred years old candlestick analysis can be of any use nowadays with third grade math charts painted on it?
Or even better , brokers always offer same technical analysis package since 1980s but execution is much faster than chart updating itself. Whenever a price appears on chart is late to click on it. Market is now so fast that charting has become useless. Also because you read a price doesn’t mean there is enough volume to support your deal at that price level. In one word: if you see it on screen is late to trade it.

Years ago brokers were reliable entities that tried to execute customers orders and will at the best price. Now has become common practice for market makers to name themselves brokers and keep their internal “order pools” anyway. They can and DO profiling, act AGAINST their own customers and ultimately often inject arbitrary in-house created prices in their feed to go fishing stops from customers or delay their executions until price is bad to customers, generally speaking , brokers bait customers, thus I don’t like brokerage models at all.

Fortunately if you let one of those self appointed brokers talk more than 10 minutes you get flooded by a gargantuesque stream of incompetence . Most of them are either dud promoters, or retail market makers so they like to talk a lot, lifting the doubt on what their real job is.

Yes but also that often such malpractice is hidden, often orders are sent as STP: a seemingly harmless acronym but it means orders are re-routed to external pools which offers arbitrary quotes not necessarily in line with market. Especially when customers profit. STP means sending orders somewhere outside the market maker company, which doesn’t imply the STP receiver is a friendly firm at all.

It depends: certain jurisdictions have forbidden such practices but the problem is now about routing orders. Assume an European broker routes orders to a third party who belongs to an unregulated country… generally speaking if you don’t do B-book (taking positions AGAINST your customers)
and then route deals through stp to a company operating in an unregulated country… n not only you do B-book but B stands for butchering! Sad story it takes years to spot such malpractice and as usual: muppets pay the bill.

Some countries have no market regulation or customer protections, then is even much less likely there is any law against bad practices, at all.

By default autoscalp models are not allowed to leverage, as that it is a required step for Shariah Compliance we are trying to reach. But if you are asking instead what is MY personal view on leveraged accounts… well, leverage is just a way for retailers to make you gear up debt to become a victim at the brokers’ will . Notice that leverage was once 3 then 10 then 20 now 50 or even 200… leverage has grown parallel to broker-side know how. No coincidence. Mind that most of leveraged accounts get emptied within 90 days from inception. Making it more clear: serious traders and their counterparts don’t leverage at all. Leveraging means indebting yourself to bet on a non necessary risk… but be sure
you ‘ll never see it explained this way on the brokers page.

That is another common misunderstanding : that any platform represents market. This is false. When you click on a platform you’re convinced to click on the market but too often you click on broker-side created prices and there is also a long chain of big and expensive machines between you and the market. simply put, the more buttons a platform offers, the more is easily to confuse your will with your perceived projection on the market. Higher the buttons higher the possible mistakes. Just because a retail broker offers a powerful platform with more than 200 keys combinations for each order in in any possible market doesn’t mean that has been done for you to profit.
On the opposite, specialists got a very limited number of buttons on their platform. Also, specialist platforms have the proper tools to avoid being boxed and spiked by broker created prices. In short, what I look for when evaluating a platform is :
<< does it include specialist tools or just a ton of buttons ? >>

Arbitrary pricing. There are platforms that allow brokers put in arbitrary price quotes on OTC market on broker-side price manipulation against customers, fore example google for “virtual dealer” and you get a very precise idea on it…

[ Virtual Dealer is a broker-side package for price manipulation against customers. Interview was resumed after interviewer looked for “Virtual dealer” on google and got informed on it. ] …This is really shocking .

That’s another misunderstanding .
There is a radical difference between high frequency trading and flash trading. Flash platforms allow light speed execution of extremely high volumes (billions per second). Personally I feel that sooner or later flash platforms will lead to a huge market failure whose early warning announcements are already on everyday newspapers. Instead High Frequency Trading means doing a lot of orders to differentiate risk fragmenting operations on multiple instruments and multiple markets. Newcomers mismatch between high frequency trading and flash trading and that doesn’t help.

Flash trading or ultra HFT looks like ordinary HFT, scalping.. but is like sheep shearing instead! Problem is that people are paid to execute orders the faster they can so they always suggest you do flash trading but is in their interest, not in yours.

We often let them reach a certain level of intrusion before counter acting.
The most common, and obviously hopeless, attempt to steal us something is the typical social engineering trick to offer us a very cheap hosting contract on very fast colocated machines which hides an industrial espionage attempt from a competitor. When we receive such proposals most often it takes just a few minutes to gather who hides beneath such scheme as the most likely candidate for these naif espionage attempts are a few non neutral (broker-side) trading system grids or boiler rooms such as forex promoters chains . They are the only ones not to know that they are well known for such practices. Broadly speaking , we practically reverse their exploits and social engineering attempts on a daily basis , we also engage in proactive defense against more organized dishonest competitors who are using more sophisticated techniques to bait our staff through “procurement outsourcing” schemes, that is luring people to get away with a part of code or resources etc. for a better job. Apparently it looks the best way to steal engineers and processes but in real life experience, procurement outsourcing is a malpractice very easy to defend from.

We have many concurrent ideas in various development stages, even if when one turns out to be unprofitable is always taken to the final stage. The dud ones play the front-end mockup role, that is to derail infiltrates and lead them to dead ends or wrong conclusions, in a word: deception.

Reason is simple: the harder is for a competitor to spot the right haystack in which to look for the right needle, the less cost he would have had if he played fair instead. We are extremely efficient in splitting development into very tiny tasks which are eventually outsourced to different independent companies so that only the project leader knows what the final model will look like. Worth noticing the project leader rotates too when his task is closed, that fragments information even further.

Assume a coder is trying to reverse engineer one of our models from the portion he was working on: he would get just a lot of garbage as the core part is never outsourced. Provided that the part he was working on was a profitable one because that is not a fact , is his assumption and the difference can be staggering. Assume a decent trading system today is around 25000 lines of code, just changing one of the external environment variables,not even the internal ones, radically changes the output.

Broadly speaking, we apply many intellectual property defense tactics… including many pro-active ones, most of which are unseen to an untrained eye. I must stress this: Intellectual property is our core value and must be protected at all costs >>.

In part 2 interviewer requested also the autoscalp team to join a shared open discussion about the common mistakes in trading and automated trading and autoscalp team network members promptly answered online from their various locations around the globe. The interviewer then collected all answers and ordered such concepts by topics to make the reader an easier understanding of the key points that were discussed.

The Interviewer did a summary , a synthesis by topic and asked to add examples where possible.

While developing the main autoscalp engine and some of its modules and strategies we got in contact with the very deep logic of a price engine and found numerous issues which could be just common sense misunderstandings, lies, malpractices or even just bad data interpretation but all ultimately is concurring to confuse or derail trader minds, what follows is mostly derived from our personal experience on forex and indexes.

So let’s go through the most common trading lies and mistakes we found…
[Interviewer did a summary , synthesis by topic]

It is based on theoretical concepts that have evolved since 1929 to justify crashes (backwards). If applied to forex market it did not even work in simulations since 1960s. It lost coherence as most of the “static analysis” model assumptions got obsolete faster and faster. So go figure out if they have ANY sense in a world where trading speed doubles every 6 months.

Example 1: self-referential and second guessing .
Fundamental analysis is too often done to justify political choices not to inform on market status. Some states are not quite transparent , as it looks from their balances hence it happens that on and off their major variables are simply artificially inflated or deflated for political targets to such an extent that their currency rate and their stock exchange indexes simply don’t follow those data at all. Reason is that such data is not computed but politically cast and derived from its own objectives too.

Example 2: M3 and M4 releases are purely “nominal” and used to trigger sentiment driven market response rather than explaining the real liquidity of the State publishing them.

Example 3: fundamental analysis implies a wrong assumption: same political move brings same economic results, which is wrong.
If a central bank promises an intervention too many times there is a point where market doesn’t react at all at such announcements.

Example 4: reaction times changes depending on operators’ size hence same news can be bought and sold at different speeds making a fundamental data release completely useless if not dangerous from a self-confidence point of view.

The real reason people still uses OHLC models is because they are given such tools for free from their counterparts (banks and brokers). This alone should make one think twice before using such tools. Also you can decide a time frame but forex and indexes don’t care about time frames at all . Those instruments don’t expire . The only OHLC candles fair usage left today is in option trading because they carry an expiry date and hence time based analysis has some sense. Banks, brokers and market makers exploit this asymmetric information thoroughly giving final users OHLC based analysis tools for free which they know to be ill fated from the roots. between the time passing and an instrument price there is an almost perfect statistical independence rather than a relationship. OHLC analysis tools are also free because your counterpart wants you to use them as the most likely output of such “analysis” is a coin flip. The more people do coin flips, the better for the brokers who hedge the spread among them… Now think is OHLC candlesticks a “convention” or a “convenience” ? This is also why we have then created a proprietary alternative to the common “OHLC candlesticks”. We called our tool “binary pricing model” which is not OHLC related and is not time based at all.

Demonstration: you can debunk OHLC candles yourself. Just reverse the relationship between time and price and you see such relationship does not exist at all: OHLC candles represents time on the X axis ,that is how many kilometers Earth moved around the Sun : in one minute it moves 1800km . Now reverse the relationship: Is eurusd price sensitive to how many kilometers did Earth moved in the last minute ? NO ! Time price chart does not represent a function just a convention. So what is the real relationship between price and time ? Perfect statistical independence. Yet you see the price/time charts on almost any technical analysis models based on OHLC candlesticks .

Example 1 : eurusd doesn’t expire at all , no reason to analyze it in “time slices” . Also you arbitrarily choose your time slice… another mistake. You decide “a time slice exist” and even choose one of them… but still eurusd price doesn’t care about that choice (see demonstration above).

Example 2: if you trade an index , your stops are triggered on price levels , why do you execute signals based on the time passing instead ? The broker side hidden reasons and moral hazard in the above statement is of such enormous size all brokers refuse to answer all stating that putting time on charts is a “convention” but they should say “convenience” instead.

Example 3: in OHLC (Open high low close) candles you can decide the time-frame but this means you also unilaterally decide to add the open and close values to the price feed depending on the frame you choose .Then is you who paint the candles colors to be red or blue not the price feed.
Then you can have a fast frame blue candle or you can have a slow frame red candle…while price did not move a tick at all. Result is you add 2 unilateral variables (open, close) and then build the OHLC candle.

Biggest and most hidden problem is that indicators cross one another for the PASSING OF TIME not for price action reasons for the above quoted “OHLC convention” .

Example 1: on all standard charts have you see the X axis indicating time, perfectly in line with the “OHLC convention” above and thus making any further analysis (indicators, oscillators etc.) totally useless .

Example 2: even if a price feed is blocked and sending no prices, charts still update part of its data set and as time passes : price stays steady but time moves and then… indicators cross themselves, giving you a pure “algebra” driven signal which has nothing to do with market price at all.

Example 3: all technical analysis myths are disinfo by the book : not only pushes traders to the dangerous game of forecasting (which typically ends in losing their unilateral bets against reality) but what technical analysis also pushes traders to forecast are the wrong datapoints:

Most of guys in the wall Street guessing game always try to forecast “today new york closing price” as if it were a kind of Graal. Meanwhile the ones in the knows are perfectly aware that is much easier to forecast the OPENING price instead, (and set their premarket trades accordingly so that when NY market opens their trading is already ended and positions are squared) …but you are not supposed to know… and the reason is so simple is disarming: because if you know… is UNFAIR for banks.
Since they seldom trade on premarkets… they want most of muppets be exposed so can flash all muppets stops to position themselves on the right side.

Conclusion: technical analysis is a proper counter-information tool knowingly biased and working for “the ones in the knows”.

Just because market today closes at a certain price, it doesn’t mean there will be enough liquidity to close your orders at such price tomorrow. If an important news is about to be released your clever mark to market price is totally useless and just confusing as real price moves away from yours. Real market price is where bigger orders are concentrated , not mark to market.

Example 1: What if you had to close a deal and if your position were heavy ? You would discover your real match price to be at the most robust level, not at the price you are seeing on the platform.

Example 2: If you priced your eurusd position “mark to market” yesterday evening, such price doesn’t make any sense ahead of a Non farm payrolls release today. Then your mark to market price is wrong today because was computed with … the OHLC convention quoted above.

The few who know the news act earlier than you do … you often see “informed” price movement ahead of important releases.
When the news release happens the real thing that you see on screens is market dismantling any position structure which blocks its way. Is in the very nature of the market to swallow latecomers positions and chew the news traders. Is all about asymmetric information. Banks and Brokers suggesting customers to trade the news are not very transparent on the concept above.

Example 1: liquidity traps .
Liquidity disappears just before news so you can’t use the news at all , if you try to beat the market your stops get triggered at light speed.

Example 2:
a technical analyst takes 2 days to come up with a decent paper, a fundamental analyst takes 2 weeks to get its report , while a Keynesian takes one month to produce its analytic tome. That would be alright if the information they were trying to analyze didn’t evaporate in the 15 minutes BEFORE it was even released. So while reading those papers always mind these guys are paid either being right or wrong but they are paid more if they bring in customers.
That is: most of analysts are disguised marketeers.

Because charts can’t account news release.
Because charts update when time passes not because market moves.
Because they don’t take information from Order book.
Because if you see it on chart is late to use it.

Example1: linear regression indicator is 107 years old… you really want use such thing in the HFT era ?
Example2: if any broker offers free charting packages, just imagine why he gives you, his counterpart, such a present. In other environment such “charting package” would be called Trojan .

Spread should represent a difference between bid level and ask levels instead it shows a synthetic bid and ask aka: “instant price” showing that bid and ask are close one another. Which is just an artifice.
Example: during a price spike , market is where the spread is . Distance from buyers and sellers can be wide, as they can be concentrated on different price levels while brokers still they sell an “artificial” fixed spread to… bait customers’ orders and their stops.

Leverage is an unilaterally exploitable broker-side hang up game. No matter the platform, you just got a very partial view of how a leveraged account runs while, on broker-side, a myriad of broker-side tricks exists with the sole purpose to transform an ordinary speculation into an asymmetric betting game which always put traders in the gambler’s fallacy casino problem. With today’s broker-side tools for price manipulation the sad untold reality is that as soon as you start increasing leverage, account evaporates. This is not related on which model or strategy you use at all. Is the leverage model which is a scam and flawed by design.

The more you are on the left of this chart… the faster your account is wiped out by the greedy counterpart on your right. That is the real meaning of leverage: while you might think you use leverage to invest, your counterpart perceives you are buying a higher and higher debt.

The higher the leverage, the faster they hang you up with your own money.

Notably also, the reciprocal of average account life is exactly the sector concentration:
the lower the leverage used the more important is the player. No coincidence.

Example 1: if in a month you loose 50% of your account at leverage 20 , just to recover you have to do +100 % probably using a higher leverage.
That means you will likely destroy your account just trying to go break-even. That is often not very clearly explained… as it means a sad fact: once you start losing using leverage, to go back at break even you need to double the leverage and more than double the risk… again and again but the profit ? Not a penny. While the loss : the whole account or worse.

Example 2: what happens if customers don’t get their account scooped up in a few months ?
Broker changes its trade engine and replaces it with a more profitable one. While your strategy or market knowledge stays the same. Sadly, they don’t advertise this on the media.

Example 3: always assume most leveraged accounts get emptied within a few months from inception.
Independently from the strategy used , the broker used or even the skills one can develop on market. Most of times disasters comes from using leverage.
We use this simple formula to explain this little known point to our peers:

• at leverage 5 expect lose all money in 24 months
• at leverage 10 expect lose all money in 12 months
• at leverage 20 expect lose all money in 6 months

Example 4: There are others kind of leverage, indirect leverages for example.
“Collateral transformation” being the most common, often proposed by custodians or brokers. The guy asks you if you want to “grow faster” proposing you a collateral transformation through which you hire the right to sell 4 apples depositing just your fresh banana… problem is that the four apples have gone off (toxic) but when you discover that is too late and your banana is lost too, that is nothing more than a bucket shop scam just re-branded as “collateral transformation”.

Example 5: the muppets butcher house chain: instruments used broker-side to trip customers most hardened stops: kamikaze (leverage 400) are used to nail CFD (leverage 200) to nail Futures (leverage 20) to nail options (leverage 10).
Delivery (leverage 1) can’t be nailed, this is why they don’t sell it.
As it just takes a milliseconds to snipe a stop… tripping stops apparently far away from market price looks expensive but it is not,
where there are no orders it can cost dimes and produce millions, broker-side obviously.
They know how muppets are to react, where they are regrouping, their propension to counter-snipe..etc.
Just the most informed counterpart can win at this game. To make it clear muppets are the dinner.
If you noticed leverage is working reversed, to create profit broker-side and is not coincidence.

Example 6: a typical retail trade engine setting:

(*) mostly waivers: “unfortunately is not broker’s fault if happened …[force majeure list of plausible excuses] and you received the margin call” .
Expect a couple of unilaterally (broker-side) exploitable news events a week, also common is the exploit the Friday close / Monday gap.

Notably:
account manager’s job is to manage the transfer of your account from you to the broker, not the opposite.
Assume the price engine to be hostile and the account manager NOT to be your friend but a broker’s employee.

Example 7: “Most hedge funds fail: their average life span is about five years”. Source: Financial Times
Autoscalp prefers not to comment that extract as it speaks by itself.

Example 8: Geopolitical powers know how to use leverage too.

Think an african bank consortium enacting countermoves against PPP loss
in CFA subjected countries [14 countries who are using FFR , French franc, as core currency in their treasury]

Our view is: there is no active strategy however smart, that can curb losses of the parity purchasing power (willfully)
induced by staying in a foreign bank currency circuit.

No sovereignty, no monetary policy, leveraged lending of primary money supply, declining PPP is unavoidable.

In the long term indebting in a foreign currency will always win against trying to create added value
-within- the indebted country through such (leveraged) currency.

“no soverignity” is a net loss game and that’s precisely why is always used by imperialist powers use it.

From the Roman Sestertium to the 1942 Euro invention (which was originally invented as German occupation currency in Europe).

Trying to improve PPP while subject to a foreign country is a losing game as for that to happen this should be true

cost of borrowing < profitability
K*(1+i)^n < k*p*n

[k is capital, i is interest, p is profitability, n is number of years ]. but the more time passes the higher the spread, the lower the PPP …

If you wish to profit more than the debt you gear your profitability must be exponential too, which in a third world is simply impossible.
So any country subjected to lending at its core cannot improve its parity of purchase power .
That’s another reason why the sovereignty limitation is always imposed to poor countries: they can’t beat the desk
[poor african countries, poor far east countries, southern european countries] and not surplisingly it works great keeping them at bay,

Rather than trying localized temporary strategies to improve PPP countries subject to the adoption of foreign currency
can try other alternatives aka the chinese “panda-bond” that is to index them to yuan rather than dollar or euro but again same flaw.
Someone went up with the idea to index them to Gold but… in 1971 Nixon went live on tv with the famous quote: “gold is not money !” and… We all know he never lied, did he?

Apparently ethical for customers in reality it works against them. As it forces traders to work for “free” when their profits are not growing. That creates adverse selection: good traders don’t accept to work for free. So if a trader accepts it you can be reasonably sure he is to loose the customer’s principal.

Example: a typical disaster occurs when a Fund does an unexpected -25% while its Statute was expressly forbidding managers to lose more than a certain threshold and the Fund abruptly find itself both without proper management to handle the crisis and without rational chances to recover. Unfortunately most of times Funds have to learn the hard way that high quality managers are not waiting in line to enter a structure which left 25% on the ground, whatever their statute says.

This happens because most funds are created with a logic flaw: they try to forecast ROI and ROE projections on expected sales for compliance reasons, rather than create scenarios based on management stress behaviors (Fund statutes rarely include exit strategies for “panic scenarios” ) which in fast markets are the norm rather than the exception. Most of times when a stressed manager is renewed the trust, he doubles the leverage and completely destroys the accounts especially margin ones . High watermark plays an infamous role in this because even if someone could enter the Fund with the will and capabilities to manage the crisis but had to start with a -25% to recover, is quite impossible he will get any performances out of it as customers come first and he would get performances just producing more than 25% or even worse you see a completely incompetent person faking an uncommon skill accepting such responsibility as he has no idea of the real burden he is to carry. In both cases the outcome is disastrous.

Conclusion:
If high watermark is part of the core structure of a Fund, to us the Fund is badly designed and bound to create greater losses and doomed since inception.
Usually we consider this simple base assumption: the more a Fund is client friendly and promoter friendly , the more hostile to managers, the more is likely to crater abruptly.
The best solution would be banning high watermark since start as trying to remove it while the Fund is running would make customers unhappy, thus forcing all stakeholders to rethink what is the purpose of the Fund, if any.

It’s a model taken from the gas physics and badly adapted to finance as implies “random distribution”.

Example: how a gas randomly distributes into a room , is not necessarily related to how volatility behaves , being the volatility often unilaterally manipulated in an extremely speculative manner through a variety of tricks, the most popular of them being: asymmetric information and price lag on news release.

Banks don’t disclose where they are positioned by statute but banks and brokers can see and profile your trades and act against you. They also can change the rules without informing you as you probably signed a contract that allows arbitration against you and modifications on their side without noticing.

Example 1: outsourcing the control of ECN pricing to a third party entity which is in a country that has no market regulations at all.

Example 2: Special orders.
Assume each ordinary order is a text string with tags, with a syntax similar to html. Strings carry all infos to match the order in the exchange: index name, size, limit price etc. Special orders tag are small tags, almost invisible, put inside that message that give an ABSOLUTE precedence on all other orders . Assume a new tag or “feature” is developed for a certain exchange and that if you add this short tag to your order messages <TTL>2</TTL> it means that if your order is not executed within 2 milliseconds is canceled. Since the exchange objective is to match the highest number of orders possible,this order jumps all other orders queue and is executed first. If you ask ten thousand market players to raise their hand who knows about things like this TTL tag it comes out just a dozen do. Most often are the guys who developed such “feature” for that exchange.
[see the documentary “the wall street code” where this is explained very clearly].

Example 3: price apparent univocity
Standard trading platforms are designed to get you enough information just to pay banks their interest for the time passing rather than allowing you to really track the market. Which means if they convince you to look at a chart that you configured yourself, they profit for sure. You can’t and… is by design.

Most of times you think your trading model has one user. That’s what you see one user one password. Meanwhile unless you answer all questions below you have no idea if price is true or not.

There is a whole class of hidden users in providing you the price feed
So before telling a price is true or false must know:

Who is the real user
Who is the apparent user
Who is the hidden user

Who is the promoter
Who is the informer
Who is the provider
Who is the sponsor
Who is the debunker

Who is the slave paying for it
Who is the master cashing in
Who is the thief squeezing them

who is the market rerouting money from
who is the market rerouting money to
who is the darkpool lurking in between

who is the broker creating your pool
who is the market maker matching which orders
who is the owner of the unmatched orders (error account)

who is the carrier lagging which feed
who is the price engine concentrating which data
who is deciding the level of hositlity of the price engine settings

who are the guys building which feed
who are the guys reselling which feed
who are the guys obstaculating which feed
who are the guys lagging which feed
who are the guys supervisioning which feed

… believe it or not, those users never coincide and everyone has his preferred price to suggest you trade at.

So the comfortable red and blue square you click onto is not representing the real price at all: is lagged , flawed and arbitrarily injected 100% but its “dressing” is so  standardized you don’t even notice that.
Also you are NOT given the tools to question it, that is also by design.

So, the more you self-convince the source is fair without checking, the surest price feed is flawed instead. Clearly, any subsequent analysis is just useless since dataset is  tainted.

Example 4: exotic places, exotic banks, centralized scams.
To get which countries… just list all countries capital by concentration of banks respect to inhabitants, keep the top 20.

In all these countries banks form their employees to look customer friendly while what they are really committed and motivated for is just to empty deposits on an industrial scale. Banks provide their employees specific marketing courses to cover what their banks are really doing. When engaged at a business to business level often don’t even fake denial and explicitly admit their true purpose which is emptying the customer accounts in any possible way. While in a healthy market: speculator is king, bank just executes, in these countries the banking system is so deeply corrupt and corruption is rooted at legislative level so much they succesfully reversed the market paradigm to fit their criminal banking cartel in a perfectly lawful way, allowing banks to keep customers at bay, while emptying their accounts through legalized commission chains and keeping customers in the dark of their true intents (typically banks there are just engineered ponzis or bucket shops).

Their “Asset Management Branch” is often just a perfectly legal bank compliant cover-up, to hide their purpose: whacking customers (aka muppets) accounts.
Those banks don’t care at all about Strategies, Algos,Risk and the like they call it compliant if they profit non compliant if they dont. Since their real objective is to shred muppets accounts by any mean: typically inflating commissions on soft dollar based schemes. When all goes south the bank typically blackmails the customer
either he accepts a draconian reduction on its capital or will be signalled to his home country financial police.
This paradigm has been running for a century. Is so standardized there are companies selling courses
to properly train bank clerks in that subject with “special courses” which should be named: “how to keep muppets at bay and prevent whistleblowing and get a bonus on that too”
but wouldn’t be that great for marketing purposes… would it ?

Example 4: derivative bets : transparency is one way only. You must be transparent to play the game (they call this one way only transparency “compliance” but you can’t really audit theirs, do you ?) …while the counterpart had years to prepare its transparency facade and setup the bait.

Since inter-bank market pays you to put orders into it , why you have to pay to access it?
Example: brokers ask you to pay a fee for accessing market instead so it should be called “usage of software fee” not brokerage cost. While brokers get both: volume fees from inter-bank and software fees from you, You even buy the risk in between. To insure they don’t lose.

Example:
For same reason, brokers call their customers traders rather than customers. So customers have the illusion of being a dealing party rather than a final retail user, .The illusion to be dealing with the broker rather than buying his product is very powerful , so customers think they are partners, not targets. They think they are partners while they are just marks. If you ever worked in a broker firm you call the customer a “trader” during the cold call but when he hanged up you call him “muppet”.

Your order gets routed at least in 5 different machines without any human counterpart before finding a match

Example: why brokers avoid explaining is you vs machine ?
You would NOT put orders manually at all if you knew your counterpart were a 3 story wide hyper fast machine hardened in a server farm bunker. Would you ? So they try make it look “human”… after all no one likes playing “Kasparov vs deep blue” if is not strictly necessary.

Your order gets routed at least in 5 different machines without any human counterpart before finding a match

Example: why brokers avoid explaining is you vs machine ?
You would NOT put orders manually at all if you knew your counterpart were a 3 story wide hyper fast machine hardened in a server farm bunker. Would you ? So they try make it look “human”… after all no one likes playing “Kasparov vs deep blue” if is not strictly necessary.

78% of leveraged accounts is emptied within 6 months from their opening. Enough said.

Example 1: this is why brokers use “push & pull” fast sales : to avoid customer awareness before is too late.

Example 2: vertical sniping : “Scheduled Maintenance” warnings appear on platform: on some customers, (not all of them) , when their position is flattened. Those customers might say, no problem I am flat, I can wait… while other accounts are not aware they are forbidden from entering market and thus broker-side position book is getting thinner and thinner, at a certain point broker-side engines can crush the remaining accounts in position at no cost spiking out the remaining positions inside the pool .

Example 3: What a market maker advertises vs real message beneath it.

…”never talk about the fight club” also applies.

Example 4: how a bank screens traders :

most investors think “big banks names hire the best traders”. Wrong. Just ask a HRM guy to debunk that myth
and expect great laughs when coming to details. Want to know what a big bank looks for ? Here it is:

Given the reasons above now try ask yourself : does the bank really care if the “trader” is capable of handling a hostile market in a turmol situation with a complex exposure ? No way.

Conclusion: if the guy is good or not trading the market is completely irrelevant for the Bank who hires him as his real task is not to profit but to mantain customers at bay.

Now, just think the other way round : what would be a a good trader doing in a bank ?
That is maybe the right question to ask but is the one that the HRM guy will never answer as he is paid from the bank… not to disclose but most important the HRM guy is there to make sure you are not aware that there are alternatives and “what is good for the bank is good for you”.

Example 2: trading competitions.

You win if you take a risk so absurd to beat the top 10% of wise traders.
and this alone would explain why they are useless.

Since is in fashion that some “not so wise” head hunters try to use trading competitions as pools adverse selection applies. The winners are not the top traders just the wildest.

Also an extract on Forbes surfaced that considers trading competitions a valid source of screening when some “professors” (who typically never traded in their life) pick brains for big companies.

In our opinion flaws in evaluating trading competitions are so huge that make the competition useless.

We found mistakes such as:

1) “Energy companies don’t want to hire riverboat gamblers”
2) “Prospective employers are not looking to hire speculators
but people who can reduce their risk”

These misunderstanding are so huge that we dedicated a whole think-tank on it.

Since banks evaluate risk from their point of view which assumes borrowing
money to be “necessary” while it is not and mitigating risk which implies avoid taking profits as a mission as bank’s job is to keep customers at bay, not make them profit.
If you judge trading competitions with banking criteria you are doing nonsense since the very beginning.

Since western banks are biased to judge anyone not borrowing money not to be worth investing on (compare that to mudaraba which instead widens the funding if project profits reduces funding if it loses WITHOUT indebting the entrepreneur in between) .

Thus any trader being evaluated with western banking criteria rather than market point of view… is a gambler. In short: anyone not in line with “buying debt” and “keeping customers at bay” is a gambler.

Just for a reminder the worst thing to do to a bank is “crowdfunding” not because your idea is silly or risky but because the bank doesn’t get a penny out of it.

Thus until evaluation methods don’t get in the post flash crash era too…

Trading competitions are nonsense.

Also worth noticing that if you “use speculative instruments to reduce risk”
you are a speculator, no matter how you justify it to the risk manager,
also being evaluated how you mitigate risk on a … speculative instrument is
so absurd that just a professor that never traded in his life might not see the flaw:
Don’t want take risks ? Stay off speculative instruments and that’s it.

Bank is held responsible for mismanagement but not for broker bankruptcy or market failure…

Example: many big names on the newspaper today who “failed” to fill collateral properly and their customers went boom, not them. Also in certain jurisdictions some accounts are insured for a nominal value not the entire account value in case of broker bankruptcy.

But says nothing on the counterpart (kind of risk waiver).
Example: STP means order is routed “as is ” outside the broker but doesn’t guarantee the customer that the counterpart the orders are routed to is transparent, at all.

Always assume a broker , or a smart machine in beween, t be your counterpart, not the market.

Example 1: in broker contracts you must sign a clause where you expressly allow him to position himself and make money against your positions (and specifically you allow a conflict of interest) so he is allowed to give you any price he believes fair, not necessarily market price.

Example 2: the six S of broker-side pricing: sniping, skewing,slippage,spreading,spiking.spoofing.
This is how market makers make money today. Thus being price manipulated against, for example, sentiment driven traders ,
they can forget profiting using any trend following model: whatever the code, the platform, the market, the instrument.
Price is unilaterally manipulated before reaching you, not after you see it.

Example 3:

If a trader is cashing in a profit he doesn’t look at the tiny fraction of pip stolen to him so watchdog can’t say nothing and banks cash in. That is not a secondary issue because this trick alone accounts for trillions of deals per day where that tiny “undisputed” percentage goes directly into bank safes.

This happens either because Watchdog can’t track if every single deal closed at fair price (imagine the cost of that kind of supervision) and because a trader should signal such behavior to the watchdog, with the only result that the profit he was cashing in has to be frozen until dispute is resolved… and also because customers inadvertedly sign a clause that allow the whole chain of price makers to post him the price they think fair. So if you have : broker ,prime broker, market maker… and whoever up the order pipe making the price on your order close, be sure someone is cashing in your pip fraction.
This trick alone speaks trillions a day but it seems no one complained about as this was assumed to be a a structural issue in the market flow but is exactly where HFT comes in. Also this explains why banks don’t want HFT : they run the risk to lose the tiny pip benefits they have been cashing in for decades.

Example 4:
On and off you see a market neutral strategy advertised as top-notch panacea while being it applied through long chain of intermediaries such as a market maker a broker a prime broker and a bank before your orders reach a match. What is believed to be a market neutral strategy is just a contradiction in terms, since none of those counterpart is neutral at all.

Example 5:
explain oil price manipulation process why standard centralized oil pricing fails and where (example Futures) :
The basics of oil price manipulation are quite simple, assume oil price is:

061.70
kxy.zq

q is manipulated by retail brokers / stock market / base currency micro fluctuation
z is manipulated by market makers or clearing houses / secondary news Releases
y is manipulated by central bank / OPEC / Rating Agencies / major news releases
x is manipulated by multiple government pressures or OPEC important decisions
k is manipulated by UN / world powers balances shifts

Examples of price manipulations:

k passed from 1 to 0 for Russia-Ukraine uncertainty
x passed from 3 to 6 for First Gulf War
y passed from 4 to 7 on an OPEC release
…q passes from ? to ? with no reason as is arbitrarily home brewed broker-side on their own advice and unilateral convenience.
In none of those manipulations is included a real will to buy and sell oil barrels with the due reciprocal trust among counterparts a true market would require to work properly.
Oil is perceived as a currency and has same kind of manipulations currencies run into.

Thus CL price is not resembling true market situation just order netting of some unbiased orders mostly systematically harvested in American managed concentrators, orders which stay “anonymous” for some reasons. To participate to that concentrators you have to stick to the concentrator’s rules which are not necessarily in line with fair market behavior: if certain banks can’t profit from your orders, your orders are not routed to the market at all. Which is also evident in analysis tools which still slice price in “time-frames” while in real world I can have a 6 months political turmoil creating same price movement of a 15 seconds market panic. Or I can have 2 oil tankers waiting to dock at a fair price and the price being spiking for “lack of offer”.
Useless say, market matching machines are perfectly aware that those prices aren’t sliced in time frames.

Thus marking centered oil CL price de-facto an obsolete “fake and artificious market” price where a Canadian server-farm producing tons of orders out of thin air backed by soon expiring paper barrels or even by doubtful collateral to be heavier than the official statement of the ministry of oil of an Arab country unilaterally and abruptly deciding to cut production. Often oil is called a “politically cast price” rather than an order match driven price.

Consequences: all dis-informed counterparts using “standard analysis tools and standard oil price” pay the bill of an incredible complex network of inefficiencies you call centralized oil pricing. Inefficiencies which ultimately are the reason why we had to create our own internal oil price feed, which is a proprietary tool, not a freely available indicator , is NOT an opinion… but an algo cluster running in a dedicated server farm and thus we use that proprietary feed among other tools to increment our proprietary algo effectiveness.

Other examples of oil price manipulations:

Another common misunderstanding: oil price is standard , price is centralized in Chicago and NY… spread is fixed etc.etc.
Oh well, not quite. Same deal on oil has a spread costs of 50$ in NY , 30$ in Rus , 10$ in Abu Dhabi and can be even spread negative elsewhere.

Now real issue is probably what you call a “standard price” depends on both control on spread width and volume stability which are definitely not standard and can shrinks and widen either on geographic position AND deal volume or underlying availability or lack thereof.
Often depends who you are, who you know and how good your results are… then you might have access to a choice price not a standard one. Since micro-pricing is taking over (thanks to contract speed always increasing and you can see real-time offering from allover the world on your screen) centralized market makers are losing efficiency respect to local pools. Oil is a sector where market micro-structure is fracturing its vertical market event which is probably having a major impact in the years to come. This is why we expect oil to be one of ther first commodities to have its price redefined by peer to peer networks rather than leveraged bank derivatives.
Example: if you can post your oil barrel price real-time you can choose not to sell it at a bank imposed price.

Other more hidden price manipulations are a daily practice :

If you trade with a tight spread, you think you are trading real-time… sad story. Reality is instead that wider the spread longer the time it takes to go back break-even once entered market at the (spread width) loss.
(assume 10$ spread = 5 minutes lag).

Oil spread on same oil barrel amount is:
5$ US
3$ RU
2$ CN
1$ UAE
-0.5$ AZ
-1$ other troubled countries
-10$ other oil for food countries
-20$ embargoed countries

That means not only price is not centralized anymore but
some countries ask (+) money to trade oil while other countries (-) offer money to trade it.

The simplest conclusion being: with 25$ uncertainty area on a 60$ oil barrel price: maybe would be cheaper for the whole market to admit there is no more centralized price rather than faking selling as commodity at a “standard” price which just represents political decisions and not an underlying good price thus carrying an exploitable inefficiency:
if you insist to assess a wrong value of a good and the counterpart knows, you give the counterpart the chance to speculate (arbitrate) against you with your own derivatives.
Conclusion:
the real problem is that is politically too expensive to admit there is no more centralized oil price anymore but, guess what, market knows already.

Example 6:
Centralized markets have six ways from sunday for running centralized price manipulation practices unseen.
Notably you cannot publicly disclose you think (or know) certain prices are faked/forged/derailed/lagged because they are “certified” which means if you state they are “false” you will be immediately charged with “market disruption” or similar creative anti-whistleblowing charges banks have forced governments to accept to mantain status quo which is more or less: <<We say what’s the price , you swallow and STFU >>…even if you are perfectly aware those prices are fake like a three dollar bill or, like in our case, you can even show in realtime what the real price is while the false price is still being posted.
Since they rule, you don’t, you can’t the truth loud, first because that would expose the real mechanisms at the roots of markets which are simply unavailable for public knowledge and secondly because if you shout it too loud TBTF could hear it and say that you are “willingly disrupting the market “and get you arrested with zero budget effort. They are perfectly aware they steal this way, they just forbid you from understanding first so ultimately that avoids you exposing it. Fun fact you are forbidden from blowing the whistle by concocted ad-hoc created market laws, kind of commandment “thy must accept the centralized pricing” (because TBTF banks provide it) , another unsung truth being: most operators know this but … prefer sip their part of muppets’ blood . More or less you are even forced to call that price forging: “necessary for market stability and transparency” because … you are told is so by the ones who make laws (banks pay governments for that, not the opposite) in order to make it look so… how transparent is that for a centralized fair market?
If you just consider the two words: “centralized” and “fair” doesn’t those alone sound flawed together ? Exactly.
Also if you think the centralized market is fair you just don’t look for alternatives and that’s how forging prices even works on the marketing side for echanges: “our prices are guaranteed” sounds a very powerful money magnet.
The Truth is not so appealing instead, it never is.

Example 7: Always remember “caveat emptor”: 94% of times you see a price on your screen is a bait, lagged or fake one.
We held a demonstration where we dismantled 4000 broadcasted price structures while were still getting posted and less than 250 prices were true at all and less than 120 broadcasted in an effective way to be actually traded
(without lag and without baiting or deceptive purposes).

Practically you compete in an arena who sells itself as transparent meanwhile the only transparent side is… yours.
They can provide you false prices, see through your strategies, your intentions, your risk brackets and lag you at will.
Not quite the “fair market” definition you read on the economic books (read bank financed research) you have access to.

Example 8: the charged ball risk (pinball)
Anything not in restricted access libraries written after 1910 is about bank-o-nomics: bank biased views on the market, not how markets really works. Banks injected interest value everywhere but market doesn’t care about interest unless you are running a leveraged account the bank sips money from… but that’s where those book lead, not where market is.
The kind of shocks market exposes you to are elegantly trimmed by dud theories who in real markets never worked. In reality your liquidity receives same kind of shock a pinball gets in different hurdles in a dynamic environment but if they said that you would never put the token to play in the first place.Market works the same way, liquidity always gets unexpectedly shocked by highly powered bounces , one side to the other (bid and ask), has speed bumps (market congestions), get magnetized (by banks) and released unexpectedly (at netting time),lagged (by market operators) , hits a bump and speeds up again on news (liqudiity and volatility speeds are all but constant). How bankers really convinced universities to indoctrinate all the future muppets (…) that risk can be elegantly trimmed and controlled precisely as a gas randomly distributes in a room (Black Sholes model) is still a mystery, or maybe was a mystery: it was solved in the 2007 crash where they had to admit: overleveraging is out of control market doesn’t care at all about what is smart for banks… but again you are not in the need to know for the simple reason that after that crash, banks leveraged exposure accelerated, didn’t slow down at all, the pinball voltage is getting increased: solenoids hit the ball with more and more power… till you lose.

Because Western banks are filled of euros and dollars only . In Eastern countries instead you can use other base currencies.

Example 1: Any Russian or Chinese broker can buy and sell yuan as base currency but a western trader can’t. Again, you guess why.

Example 2: If many indexes have same daily excursions differentiating in many indexes …is not real differentiation. That is apparent differentiation: it just increases commissions on the other side of the trade.

In above chart you see six months of the daily price range (high-low)/close for 6 indexes we track . We know that they are all equivalent one another but probably you did not. It means that adjusting the trade size allows take the same risk on each instrument . Those indexes are properly weighted at source, this means that apparently you differentiate more if use plenty of them, reality is sadly different. Anyone carries same risk provided size has been adjusted correctly.Assume though that each index should be representing a different market but again, they are all alike and perfectly normalized, thus those indexes are simply artificial and don’t represent real market which by nature is a bit more chaotic than a perfectly normal distribution . That is , most indexes are synthesizable changing the parameters in the same function.
anyindex = k(deltaFX+LambdaVIX)

False , if “the best trading model” existed market would have already failed.
Models applicability always changes with market conditions.

Example 1: back-testing a model shows what a model would do if in the past price was “fair” and market behaved correctly, which is NOT. Back testing of same model in different market situations and timing gives different results: because back testing is a model too.

Example 2: Just because a positive pattern happened earlier there is no guarantee it will repeat again in same fashion, the opposite is almost certain instead. The most informed counterpart has the right tools to profile and exploit locally forecastable events and turn them unprofitable to the little informed counterpart.

Example 3: seeing we didn’t come up with an “instantaneously profitable model” a guy decided to fire us for
“lack of productivity” while real issue was he didn’t even get what we were doing there. So, in return, I wrote him a post-it note in which I wrapped in my office keys and resigned. Guy asked what it was, I answered i wrote on post it, reason why they were to fail and the date of their bankruptcy… and their bankruptcy happened.
Lesson learned? Expertise value can not be univocally determined by an unilateral evaluation especially if the competence of the evaluator is doubtful: often you see the use “compliance” as an excuse for incompetence.

Example 4:
On most algo optimization routines, whatever the algo beneath being machine learning/neural etc. you see that “the target variable is specified by the training data set optimization menu” but that is backtesting flaw by definition! In real market, You can’t decide what to optimize and much less when . In an ever evolving market moving faster and faster against you, all variable must be kept efficient : optimizing one means disbalancing the model.
Which is the reason why stock pickers algos, fund selectors algos and “top traders” (humans or not) always lose in real markets.
The typical outcome being : “the algo had a flawless trade history and a great backtesting but sucks in real market”.

Asset managers and brokers etc. are perfectly aware that any person can ask “customized reports to prove their profitability”.
Hence showing the potential counterpart only profitable trades or just profitable accounts in support to their alleged capability of producing profits is a common malpractice very difficult to debunk.

Example: assume one guy shows you his best reporting , a very profitable one… but that could not necessarily be the only account he has with that broker or maybe he might have many other accounts with different brokers and just show the best one. This is commonly known as “asymmetric information”.

Example: how some ways Brokers lie with their Reports:
what you get in the reassuring word “REPORT” hides a sea where plenty of stuff can be hidden in plain sight, masked and distorted .
Practically the more powerful a client is the less true his statement is likely to be: who owns the database own all its universe.

First and foremost there are people who are trained to alter data-sets so that they are customer friendly although,while not necessarily resembling facts, to even be law abiding and is more than 50 years that these tricks are run and the best exploiters have always been been big banks thus research has gone deeply in the direction to engineer them rather than ban them. Facts are then mixed in ways so complex, artificious and artificially cast in complex systems connections that are simply hard to explain , much less debunk or investigate. Some known examples follow.

A broker has the unilateral power to access and manipulate many databases thing which by itself seems harmless creates almost impenetrable barrage of data to any customer or audit much less watchdogs, either they already know where to look or waste incredible amount of money solving nothing as all goes hidden in a few bytes in tons ot gigabytes .Shredding big database in tiny actionable intelligence has huge costs and , that’s even mode absurd, doesn’t necessarily cositutes a proof. Thus, at his unilateral will, the broker can: derail customer awareness, hinder watchdog control capability, slow customers trade closures, cross customer positions, take private agreement with customers concerning close-to-close netting and hidden leverages or arrange artificially “disputed deals” etc.

Assume a customer does high profit but want to mask his account as total loss. Since is the broker who is the only one allowed to distribute the track records might engineer close-to-close in such a way that a profitable account is apparently losing or vice-versa. But to discover that you would need access to all customers accounts to prove which deal has been sipped from which account, prove which account is connected to the customer, in which way it sips the profit from the main one and all that can just happen with database access not order by order (which would be an absurd effort by itself) but order status by order status for each single order (a single order can switch status from: pending to partial fill, executed, suspended, partially closed at match… and these statuses are variable too.
One might think than when an order is closed… is closed. While after 50 years of “position engineering” it is not.
Even on closure orders were closed or just coupled , netted internally, cleared externally, or just paired etc. etc. there are a dozen of order statuses not just “position closed” and some “suspended order” statuses are very profitable by definition by one one part or another. For simplicity just assume somewhere while the order changes its status someone can sip a tiny fraction of its value now scale it world wide… Trillions? Exactly.
Although you don’t read that on the news media often. Do you ?

Another way is external rerouting: temporary rerouting (parking) orders outside the customer account and make them get back later when netting is favorably or negatively adjusted (Cached STP). Just using different network speeds(lags) for different customer can provide that resut…
or “”dump the parked wagon on the worst possible price and smash customer account”.

Another way to show a thing and hide another are exploitable flaws in margin agreements: which might show a thing on report while the margin agreement was changed or otherwise engineered and not reported in meantime. A similar way is to formally declare a leverage while a hidden agreement uses another one or spilts fraction of leveraged exposure on many sub-account (hidden deleveraged mirroring) .

Also noteworthy, most brokers have a 5% of deals in the “under dispute” status but those disputes can be true or artificial as a customer might like getting his account frozen for many reasons… frozen until allocated after dispute is settled with customer, who might be in ties with broker to keep that deal “under dispute”. Settling a dispute usually takes months while that position in meantime could be allocated to other accounts and provide shadow liquidity which any wise broker knows is one of the most reliable sources of revenues.

Another way is simply switching the account number from one customer to another, (read only copycat account) while one is aware of that the other customer is not . So the losses are real and checked, just belonging… to someone else. As the real loser account would not be informed thus unaware of the fact that his account is used to mask another account profits: the masked account could show losses which don’t belong to him. Also that is almost undedectable. Thus the profit maker might use the loss deal on an account to show his losses (cross close). Again, you you would need a double cross check reports and expose that to prove those deals belong to another customer and again register is broker hands.

Example 2:
asset management model is de-facto a hidden mortgage scheme but is so nasty reality no one even speaks about it. Assume you’re good and profit 2% a month keeping half profits. After 5 years the part money you left to your partner costed you 400% of your profits. Would you really give your money to be managed by someone who is gearing up 400% debt to cover his profits? No way!… Exactly.

Example 3:
Upon doubt always call the certifier (broker) who often simply denies he can certify the trader…
A wannabe trader to us: “I can prove to have a good track record with profitable and robust back-testing…”
Our guy: “yes yes … you can -con- ahem but how many accounts you have with your -accomplice- ahem broker ?

Our guy immediately called his broker on phone:
His Broker returned : “I can’t disclose our customers report…unless is our customer asking his report”

Our guy: ok but can you swear ME that is the only account he has with you… and that you are the only broker your customer works with ?
Broker: “I am not swearing you anything, sir”

Our guy to the wannabe trader: then your customer track record is worth zero to us as you might have (and probably he has!) tons of accounts with dozens of brokers and you’re showing us just the best one.
In short, you can’t rely on counterpart evaluations unless you have absolute control of the information reaching your desk.

Originally it was an audit company who certified your deals . After Lehman , Andersen and M.F. scandals surfaced certification has just become a pyramidal scheme with a bribe on top. Since it has become very common practice to rely on small companies in a former soviet block country, where a simple accountant can also have the Notarized Power of Attorney. Since those countries are now part of the European Union then to “certify” a track record all it takes is an accountant and some stamps. Also is again you telling your broker which deals to send there and be “certified” which ones not and cheer on top: who certifies the certifier ? Its country regulations. Certified track records are worth zero

Example 1:
Do a quick comparison yourself between a guy with a “certified” track record vs a guy with a twitter real-time published track record. Which one you would trust more ? To us publishing deals real-time on twitter is more robust than showing some “certified” ones which are picked up one by one the week after and also manipulated from a third party whose clear intent is to prove profitability.

Example 2:
Why certain funds still use certified track records to evaluate people ?
Probably because their customers are not ready to ask a top down audit to the whole management chain. Telling customers that control process is flawed from top is not a nice commercial for the whole commission chain: the bank, the broker, the fund and the manager and ultimately the customers.

Idea:
Go exploit that flaw. The real point about certification is self evaluation. Faking a good result implies more risks than rewards. Try join a demo (fake money) live trading competition if you can stay on top 10% of the participants you are self-certified and most important you you’re playing fair with yourself. If you’re fair others will follow you is just matter of time not of “certification stamps”.

The grid owner knows which systems profit, which systems just create volume, which systems lose and even when are about to do it. While you don’t have a clue of any of those data.
There is asymmetric information between the trading system grid owner and the retail user who “hires” the system. Way too often the grid owner has a preferred broker also . This fact alone speaks why one should not use such public system grids. Grid owner also knows which clusters of systems are profitable in a given market moment, which ones are temporarily losing instead. Such information is restricted and often sold to his broker or to professional customers but not to the retail system users .

Example 1: why Forex hosting is a scam:
If you run your strategy on a third party hosting service, they know your positions and your margin, they can counter-profile your strategy , resell it , redistribute it and most important they can widen the spread against your specific account if they know your strategy is about to hit. They can widen spread on market closing times or delay your order close a few, very expensive seconds, or most often delay your executions on important news releases addressing the issue as “force majeure” , then they can delay your order routing and… you also pay for that “service” .

Example 2: mirror trading is not what it seems:
There is no such thing as a public profitable strategy. Reason is so simple but noone seems see it: if a grid published a strategy who profited say 1% a day, in 2 months they would send the ECB bankrupt.
Notably enough if your strategy is profitable there are investment banks piling up to run it putting solid gold on it so why publicly disclose it on a grid ? Mirror trading is nonsense.

Example 3: dedicated virtual server running your strategy has a few unsung flaws :
did you know that if the dedicated virtual machine crashes is your fault.. by contract ?
Mind that either broker and their customer are third party to the server farm hosting the system.
Also if you never tried to recover data hosted on a remote virtualized crashed partition you have no idea how complex and slow process it is. They say you can backup from previous machine state, well, provided crash is not hardware otherwise be ready to pick your number and wait for weeks .

Example 4: you can be : cloud / colocated / hyper-fast / run your strategy totally in RAM
Whatever… and still have 2 pips spread that is 4 minutes lag from real-time price. Say:

If you maybe save 4 milliseconds but you are lagged 4 minutes and no one explains this clearly unless you enter in arbitrary pricing deep logic which includes, STP external routing, level by level cleaning, A-Book, B-book, SIP pricing ,consolidated feeds….
To make it short: your stops are being sold to low profile HFT platforms who sip them one by one as a job.

Example 5: the algo bait.

We successfully insured some algos and other intellectual properties against intellectual property thefts, copyright infringements, cloning etc. through a specialized company cooperating with our C.I.O. in supervising and investigating those issues while in the meantime we decided to test the opposite situation:
as a test we have put a deliberately mock-up algo in the cloud and some algo grids deliberately labeled “autosalp” and it has been forcibly stolen in less than 15 days while even being replaced with garbage in another grid.

Proof of concept:
Autoscalp is switching back and forth from Data center in a box solutions / micro data center solutions…etc.
while remote Cloud has been dismissed in an earlier stages.
Quoting our founder:
“once you enter the cloud you know your intellectual property is at risk. Is impossible to insure your algos if you put them in the Cloud or a Grid as since you do it they are more or less “public domain”.
In a sector where most profits reside in asymmetric information, ultimately if you enter the cloud or an algo grid you are practically taking the unilateral bet that there is no one is waiting to steal your algos , that the counterpart hosting company is playing fair and the grid manager isn’t interested in cloning your algo or otherwise reducing your profitability altering your code and that he is not teaming up with your counterpart (bet it a bank broker or market maker) .
Once an algo is in the cloud there are many eyes on it, none of them yours.

Often sold by firms in close ties with a brokerage firm, PAMMs are sold as “a way to mitigate risk”, instead it’s a model that fragments a retail account and its margin even further. We assume that very few retail accounts profit, PAMM is just a way to distribute losses without concentrating them on same instruments and to make smaller and smaller accounts so that margin calls get triggered faster. Aka “diluting losses on a longer period” , thing which delays customer awareness of the real risk he’s taking.

Mirror trading practically means cloning trading signals but is dressed up as “executing same strategy of the best traders”. Mirror trading suffers a known asymmetric information problem depending on customer localization. If counterpart expects your click in a given moment can derail prices for few seconds when your signal appears (he knows it first because signal appears on HIS server before than your remote client). Is that’s legal ? Depends from country to country, but way too often you sign a broker agreement which specifically allows price skewing practice, which is a kind of arbitration.

Example: 200 users want to execute a deal in same moment, server knows and spread widens when signal appears, all user ask same price in same moment, get slipped and executed at the worst bid-ask price among market makers giving a net profit to he mirror trading server . After that, prices resume normal flow.

Some broker companies made even loans out of segregated customer pool accounts . Collectively using unaware customers segregated accounts as a bulk to guarantee their personal speculations. This makes segregated account totally useless. As if broker goes bankrupt or his speculation goes bad, in either cases the unaware clients forming the pool go bankrupt for reasons not even remotely correlated to their account performance . Often an account is segregated for a nominal value, which can be far smaller than real account size.

Just another unilateral lie passed as a convention . Most banks and brokers warmly suggest to close all positions within Friday close.
Apparent reason: possible liquidity spike on Monday morning or price.
Real reason ? Next week they should pay to open them on real market.

Example 1: there are pools that allow trading on weekends. Probably yours … doesn’t.

Example 2: to barely track 1 single index at Friday close, at least 8 fast computers are required . Knowing that , think about this: a medium bank offering 500 instruments with a 20000 customers should have 20 server farm computational power (20 department stores filled with computers) and that just to make sure their positions are handled properly at closing hour or during news releases. Which is not what happens. That would be expensive, for the bank.
What happens instead is that most positions are merged in bulk positions that are wildly chopped on market closures by all other players , day after day.

Creating strategies, signals and models makes you very active in spotting asset managers and brokers hooks, gives also some hints on how and where to check if a broker or asset manager is about to go bust and his level of moral hazard. First and foremost: always ignore linkedin and facebook gossips as all those gossips are most likely “piloted”. They are called pseudo network for a reason: the most informed part decided which information to disclose to whom.
So in our view, the most common ways a trader is “cooked” are :

• Recipe 1: the maverick: pump and dump.
• Recipe 2: the scapegoat: blame the trader.
• Recipe 3: the bouillabaisse .
• Recipe 4: the aquarium: baits, whales, sharks, squids, piranhas, shrimps.
• Recipe 5: the “pssss…. hint!” aka the hype shot.
• Recipe 6: Paint a high-tech name on the box and sell the package with a brick inside it
• Recipe 7: The pseudo due-diligence (all arrogance, no substance).
• Recipe 8: how to spot fake multi billion dollar business guys.

Recipe 1: the Maverick: pump and dump .
ingredients: a rampant ego-driven trader with a few customers, a big multinational , a capital city.

a) A corporation gets you a 2 months full-paid tour of the city making you feel a V.I.P.
b) corporate managers make sure you spend all salary for office equipment, rent, hire fast cars etc.
c) they make sure you feel busy having fun in the meantime the corporation manages your customers
d) company abruptly fires you and send you home even without the customers you previously had
e) company then even blackmails you to shut up or signaling you to authorities for malpractice

Fortunately , most companies doing these tricks end up in this black list .

Recipe 2: the scape goat: “blame the trader version”,
which is in fashion nowadays in big corporations.

a) the lie: corporation says very unpleasantly that your strategies just don’t fit and you’re not adequate
b) the bait: then they change their mind but you will have to work for a very small pay
c) the prelude: they shift tone from hard denial to sweet approval but you must accept the job quickly
d) the deluge: many CVs of their employees flock in your email: they know company is doomed so they look at you for a new job. At that point become aware that company is about to implode.
e) the implosion: their customer care gets slower and slower while customers queues get longer and longer. Disturbing silences in their reports ahead of the unavoidable boom.
Useless to say, at this point is too late to abandon ship.

Recipe 3: the bouillabaisse :

a) the hook: first the trader ,usually a boiled promoter almost to implode, signalled to his sharks from the broker who has access to his account balances by definition
a) the bait: an end client, dubbed trader to avoid him understanding the trick, is emphatically and triumphantly invited to join a surely effective team of seasoned traders for his own broker
b) the trap: the trader has been pinpointed because he is about to go bankrupt
(his broker has specific tools to make sure either it happens and… WHEN )
c) the trigger: when the trader is about to go bankrupt , the team surrounding him reveals their real nature , which is clearly working as I.B. for his broker who will defend the clients interest,
that is the “trader” finds among a pool of sharks dividing his client portfolio.
d) the kick: when the trader is in the most vulnerable position, his broker takes out credit lines and the team forces him to leave the facility. Consequence is the traumatic learning he was simply sharing his office with his enemy. Of course his remaining customers pool is “inherited” by the broker.

Recipe 4: the aquarium : whales,sharks, baits, piranhas, squids and the fee pools.

Is a very rare event that a trader profits but that can create huge costs to his counterparts. So various techniques are used to eat the whale alive. Many tools are available to an experienced counterparts so that he has just to choose which one best suits the profile and the moment:

a1) sharks: many traders start loitering around the whale offspring making him an hostile playground until his implosion for either starvation (too many losses) or suffocation (no new customers) in both cases the sharks will exploit the unavoidable deluge of remaining angry customers .

a2) sharks(alternative): a wise counterpart knows that managed capital has a structural limit either top and bottom. Soon making the mark gear up too much capital, debt and leverage to an unmanageable level will make him implode on his own weight,which is quite easy owning the right tools. At that point any sharks around will get his remaining customers for free .

b) pirahnas:
counter-profile him and take him out of market one stop at a time, like many small piranhas bites.
Any broker-side platform has plenty of tools to hide this specific (very common) malpractice.

c) the bait:
another unsung technique is called “holiday baiting” that is to offer him a holiday in specific period of the years, for example, in july . So that when he goes back to his desk in august , will use some renewed enthusiasm and will trade heavily but being the market orders list very thin,
his stops will be easily taken out from his greedy counterpart. All at once, if counterpart is a heavy market maker; one by one if the counterpart is smaller and on retail side.

d) the squid: a tentacular ego-gifted pseudo-super promoter that will downplay all you have till you sign at his terms. Often too self-centered to really know what he is trying to sell you as his main task is create confidence and confusion, he is often unaware of the real core variables in the company he works for but smart enough not to make questions. The best way to counter this guy is to reply with a counter-sale technique. Something like: “You are making me up man, so I’ll contact your company in one year, If you still work with them I’ll rise my price 20%. If they fired you I’ll propose at today’s price instead”. This way you sell him while he is trying to buy you at discount price creating him a very difficult solution as he must not justify the missed sale but …that he’s been sold too .

e) Fee pools: aka the mis-configured funds. There are plenty of ready on shelf funds that are simply a way to self-destruct capital through shredding it into very tiny bits these funds are called “fee pools” , most often these hardly detectable bad configurations are supported by promoters, brokers or whatsoever ring in the commission chain as they are paid on the volume not on the fund performances . Most of times those funds have been tailored not to make the capital owner aware of such scheme until is too late. A wise mean of judgement is : if it’s on the shelf and ready to be used and warmly suggested by a promoter… most of times that’s not what you need. These fund designs are quite often exposed when is too late, also the counterpart designing the fund has quite often a seasoned experience in creating invisible money traps.
Another way to discriminate is that if you see that the fee structure is way too balanced toward sales ,
it’s likely that’s a “fee pool”. This is why a wise practice is impose your own fund structure rather than using an existing one. Just because some Fund rules existed before you doesn’t mean that is in your interest to keep them. Another very subtle way to keep the “fee pool running” is asking same advisors and consultant to modify it to (apparently) suit your needs, often turns out that you can’t obviously rely on counterpart consultant to do your interest but this kind of conflict of interest is often to subtle to be detected.
Also mind that for them is everyday practice: to open, run, blow and care for the bankruptcy too.
Fee pools are a product of a self referential industry: where the wisest option is to stay out from.

Recipe 5: the “pssss…. hint!” aka the hype shot. A classic boiler room scheme, just one to one version.
Typically a one to one marketing driven hook publicly self-advertised as a new liquidity injection in a clearly boiled fund which is privately disguised and promoted as “not completely doomed” in order to leverage trust with a semi-confidential information from a pseudo-reliable source that a salvage or even a full recover operation is possible, in order first to find then to motivate and ultimately to hire high profile managers for a leverage buyout, such move creates enthusiasm in the newly hired management and while the fresh guys try to tap the flood with very elegant, creative, optimistic, brand new ideas… other more informed guys leave in silence and bring away with them any possible source of liquidity before the atrocious reality of such impossible mission surfaces from the sadly empty pond.

Recipe 6: Paint a high-tech name on the box and sell the package with… a brick inside it.
After 10 years stock market rising would be time to fragment and dilute shares to avoid getting caught in correction, meanwhile some smart folks are instead asserting they will manage the sale of huge orders sizes practically building huge bulk packages of boiled stocks in a nice looking brand new box and sell them to even bigger guys.
Since such practice is clearly forbidden by market watchdogs (aka pump and dump) so someone went up with the brilliant idea that if you call it dark pool … it does the trick and now plenty of those pseudo-dark pools are surfacing but the big box they sell is nothing different than the trick of a nice box with a brick inside it .

• We create algos.
• We are in R&D
• We don’t buy leverage.
• We don’t manage third party accounts.
• We run No Deal Desk, and no I.B.
• We have a very strong legal department

…and that is where usually the Forex cold callers hang up. 20 seconds, not 5 minutes.

Conclusion:
When in doubt ask experts and always start profiling the counterpart: what kind of fish does this seller resemble …is a trick that helps. Keep in mind that a wise counterpart often mixes those tools making them hardly detectable, so don’t expect to unveil a “fee pool” scheme just reading the Fund statute. Also reality says that highest paid brokers have the best lawyers thus evaluating sector transparency on the conviction rate would be a mistake: the best defense strategy of white collars is using more white collars.

Recipe 8: how to spot fake multi billion dollar business guys.

Sellside always manipulates the price at source before the opportunity hits the market. [Caveat emptor].
Banks and exchanges seclude the profitable assets for them and just share the ones bearing biased risks
and then let the traders take unilateral bets on them .
If you know how deeply prices are manifactured at source you know what not to touch…
If you don’t… anything goes but you think you are deciding wisely, instead you are running a second best
on a biased price whose added value has already been extracted at source and transparency? Long gone.

Example 1: Why We don’t trade stocks and their derivatives:
In1986 you could look at EPS and the like but after dotcom crash,
after 2008 leverage implosion and after 2011 flashcrash
the outcome is that price virtualization took the lead.
Which means arbitrarily casting artificious prices to protect
the company value has become standard practice
Government injections to protect main indexes is an even more known issue
“If an index shows a trend on a logaritmic chart is 100% a ponzi” (think S&P500 after 2008).

After 2011 they tried blaming HFT rather than hyper leveraging but then they quitted…
If you notice ULLHFT is just done on the buyside of the stocks
[be it a sell or a buy order] but not on the sell side which is manipulated
at source before it reaches the order book: by either the market, the nomad, the banks
or even the company itself through “comfortable intermediaries”…
If you see the real stock pricing passages to get from buyer to seller
today it looks like a blueprint of a 1972 TV: is complex and definitely not transparent
chain of micro lags … Not qute the “fair market” you hoped for.

Example 2: why We don’t trade Funds:
Because is a Monopoly. Assume you have a pie of 4000 funds to choose from
but you know that most fund are run as a monopoly… yes really,
owned by a single (well known swiss) bank who indirectly controls the whole
Fund market, its pricing and “apparent delocalization”, its trends and subtrends… anything.
Is rational to expect that also the whole sellside pricing structure to be done in-house.
So, if you know that you also know that their data engine can easily
manipulate the sellside prices at source:

Hence even developing the best A.I. augmented “fund screening software on market”
is an exercise in futility because as soon as you start “picking” they start “gapping”.
If you start hammering they start lagging … theirs the engine, theirs the game.
Yes, it’s a game. Who controls the sellside price engine controls the game.
Every dealer knows the trick, Muppets have no idea… and is by design.

Example 3: while brokers offer you “all you can eat” menus:
in short: because We are fully aware of sellside price manipulation.
Notwithstanding the forced brainwashing done by banks on “pseudo-transparency”
and “compliance” in “standard asset pricing model” (which was invented in physics to justify a random
gas distribution in a room but badly adapted to markets… and NEVER modified since).
If banks write market rules and You believe them , they win. Those aren’t market principles,
just comfortable conventions to cast fractional reserve driven, leveraged, arbitrary pricing passed as “rules”.
Done to justify and uphold their compound interestmodel , fractional reserve and over-leveraging driven which allows
unilateral price manipulation at source and, yes, you call that “fair and equitable market”…you,
We don’t. So, We just use instruments whose sellside manipulation of price is just… the hardest on planet:
eurodollar, oil and gold: to derail them for a just while takes many governments treasuries heavily committed to it.
Trillions and trillions just to keep the price stuck… not even trending. quite an expensive game. Ask OPEC (…).
Exposure to keep a manipulative path costs trillions, ruthless political determination and social costs.
Quite an expensive game. Also, multiple governments seldom agree on a pricing structure for a long period of time
and that helps prevent sellside manipulation even further. The harder to manipulate its source ,
the more We are interested in an instrument :
that’s why our algos just cover eurusd oil and gold: not many “dealers” in town.

Fun fact: in many exchanges gold oil and eurusd … still have a pit, not an automated settlement of prices,
and notably the persons running the pit aren’t employees of the exchanges, are government employees…
sounds nasty enough?

If not… think what it means a single bank or market owning all the sellside pricing of a whole sector:
they can litterally cook “pseudo prices” internally and noone can question that as they are making the rules.
Doesn’t even qualify as cooking the books because is by the law, “allowed book cooking by law”… if you please.
Exactly like creating…
CDOs (they know the Fund expires)
CDS (they know what is inside the Funds have no value)

and not only they can set (biased) leveraged side bets on them both but can also create from nowhere…
Syntethic CDOs: fund of funds … and then sell “shares” of them both to the muppets at full price…
See the movie the big short more or less is all about about of synthethic pricing : make believe.
[part1] [part2]

Recipe 10: Lipstick on a Pig: stealing the idea to do an automated Fund from sketch to Float…

aka “Lipstick on a Pig”, these scams were also known as “charged magnets” as they attract capital…
till the power gets switched off… what can possibly go wrong?

These days, floating automated funds is really in fashion and is happening every 2 weeks:
someone climbs the Media bandwagon shouting “If they do it, I can do it too, I can beat the market!”
and that which is precisely the moment Mr Market makes room for fresh meat.

Pros always make it look easy: it looks like magic… but reality is quite different.
Staying profitable in such a extremely dynamic arena is the hardest game in town.
Also, once the muppet signalled himself as potential mark, a completely different process starts:
what is really going on beneath the curtains is far more complex than what he can realize
before reality hits him the hard way: as the whole shows is consisting of waves of lurers,baiters,lenders…
all the financial circus faking they fully believe in his wonderful Fund… for a different purpose though .
Add some accomplices posing as sly advisors and the gullible guy ends up being planted the illusion
that he can really do it but is because the entourage of people tightly connected to the real deal
(which is skinning the newcomer one slice at a time) have built the the right environment for the sting around him.
He is the only one not to see it. Then from now on let’s address him with the proper name Mr market gives to this guy: The Muppet.

When The Muppet has been manipulated enough, He gets so delusional he is really convinced he can do it, or he can steal a working one or … anything goes , that is when reality left the show. Sad truth is he can’t do it and as He tries to steal the right know-how… he get slammed. Such know-how is probably guarded by experienced CIOs who, on purpose, filled the surrounding environment with baits, deceptions, mockup prototypes misinfo and disinfo at any possible level to protect the valuable Intellectual Property, say: “No delusionals muppets allowed, so stop trying” is written on the front door.

Notably the Muppet has not even access to the real deal, VC knows that, while he does not
but that is where it gets so absurd: The Muppet not only thinks he  can override all CIO derailing techniques,
which is ridiculous but he also thinks… He can rebuild all processes from sketch and succeed with no expertise at all and…
even more utterly ridiculous: he even expects to succeed on the stock market!
Which is the most sophisticated, manipulated, biased environment arena ever created by mankind…
otherwise Banks would have concocted something even worse and already replaced the market with it.

What reality will soon tell The Muppet the hard way is that social mumbo-jumbo and wannabe irruence, applied to HFT…
is a bad mix, always ending in disasters on the muppet side … while on the VC side… is really a big deal instead: they have a different picture since the beginning: they know how it works, so they have a clear and forcastable path toward the Muppet sure implosion (read profit multiplier on VC side covertly shorting it).

No matter if The Muppet was self-selected on his own advice, manipulated by greedy advisors or by a sly V.C. luring him in the “borrow more” game: the harder the exit strategy, the surest the scam.

As any VC knows removing the entrepreneur from his chair is the best thing to do… AFTER 2 or 3 years the enterpreneurial project has taken off , definitely not at the beginning… unless sinking the ship is the real untold purpose of the deal and that’s why “lipstick on a pig Funds” always crater at an unbelievable speed. The Automated Fund is just the official excuse to sip the principal capital one stop at a time . Not by chance the entrepreneur was removed at beginning and replaced with a rookie muppet. That’s by design. Hence the typical outcome of the “lipstick on a pig” scam: a disastrous crash …which typically unfolds as follows:

The Muppet (pseudo-CEO) builds the infrastructure on specs that others told him, inheriting some flaws injected on purpose, example: without having a clue on real expertise needed to do it as his advisors are I.T. , not traders, as  traders could warn him the right way: that his Fund survival depends on the initial setup. Just one decimal on the trading spread or on the negotiation costs can hopelessly sink his ship and since The Muppet is no expert: there is the whole financial foodchain waiting for his mistakes:  from the broker to the exchange have six ways from sunday to get that decimal out of the muppet’s pocket.The easiest way: let him run wild by himself and cut his collateral as soon as a plausible deniability excuse comes up (typically a triggering a force majeure clause against him in a low liquidity trading day).
While there is a whole chorus line of people precisely knowing what’s going on , The Muppet has no idea instead.

Ultimately The Muppet gets so desperate to resort to Marketing: a ton of PR stunts: VC presentations ,media, promotions, hiring promoters… as he keeps playing the media drums until the Float happens on a favourable Exchange: London was in fashion , now is Shanghai or Singapore but is same scam. The VC/Nomad or whoever is in charge floats The Muppet before anyone smells what’s really going on or before the intentionally planted flaws in the projects start surfacing: VC is already shorting.
[Stocks are wisely dumped by the VC and his entourage as the project starts smelling “subprime/ponzi” but at a speed that goes unseen for a volume that goes unnoticed and by intermediaries who fake “can buy and hold” but… is all a script ].
Officially the Front-End VC  doesn’t short with excuses such as: “can’t do it by law”… “are waiting for the second investment round”… “waiting for results” : is all P.R. stunts , reality is that who is  in-the-knows covertly shorts like hell till the fund implodes, probably paying the VC retro commissions to keep his stance and posture with the Media.

Also, during the preparation phase The Muppet is forced to hire the “right” advisors… way too early:
often suggested by the VC (who is counterpart instead), lots of friends, “big names” , lawyers, promoters… but no trading experts … as they would likely tell The Muppet he is getting framed. That alone sounds “abandon ship”: VC won’t tell anyone what’s going on neither inside nor outside , bribing audit and advisors to STFU is nothing new, in meantime all the participants to the party will build a one way see-through bell glass around The Muppet, so that anyone outside can speculate against him while he has no idea of what’s going on,  till they all sipped the last drop of blood. Either the Advisors are kept in the dark or not but won’t talk and that’s precisely what the VC pays them for.

Then the script kicks in again as is sure like hell that The Muppet, far from being a specialist, at the first difficulties, will always panic and pull the last resort wepon: getting the Fund managed in an “all you can eat” style: offering instruments (he doesn’t understand) at leverages (he doesn’t control) to people (he doesn’t know) gearing up (bogus/fak) collateral (at an interest he can’t manage) … and why the VC who is experienced in these things allows The Muppet to do these mistakes? Because those flaws are planted by design, a design which the VC knows while The Muppet ignores but his reaction was expected.

The four following flaws are so deeply rooted in the DIY newcomers DNA and are so detrimental that each of the following conditions, if met, simply halves the expected life of the Fund:

1) “Our AI buys the best Funds on market”.
[Just delusional because the Whole Fund sector is monopoly of a single swiss bank. Not avertised on brochures but…
once you know that, you know can’t beat the market… against the market maker].

2) “Our AI buys the best stocks on market”.
[…in the post ULL-HFT era!? Good luck with that ! Is another monopoly but this one is belonging to the TBTF US banks, which, if you invest millions in R&D they got budgets in the billions range , just for (against) you].

3) “Our AI can build strategies on all 20000 instruments on any market”.
[If the above ones weren’t ridiculous enough: that’s just laughable by itself: just for comparison:
We hardly track 3 instruments after 15 years expertise… done the hard way one stop at a time].

4) “Our strategies are the best possible”.
That’s probably the best demonstration The Muppet is a Muppet: aka “the best strategy delusional myth”:
-the best strategy never lasts long, is often a trojan done by someone else to sip your stops.
-if it existed would have been forbidden by Exchanges or belong to a major bank (…)
-if it existed would be held in one of the infamous “restricted access library” which officially… don’t exist.
[…How do We know? That’s an interesting question but you don’t have the need to know…do you?].

Final step: baiting the pig…to get him into the poke: then sell the pig in the poke.

When all the mistakes done creating the Fund and the Float are surfacing, all the VC invited sharks start showing out and start running in cyrcles around The Muppet: revealing the truth: they are not investors, they are speculators: just there to eat their share and to exploit the real issue: incompetence driven inconsistency.
The real unsung comment in the shark-tank being: “Another Muppets on a rocket chair looking for debts! Party time folks!”

Shark-tanks and V.C. are keen on infiltrating (seemingly friendly) at first, utlimately savagely storming the place and ruinning it over by any possible mean: often complacent banks help them indirectly sink the ship while leaving to the ordinary speculators the final blows , because isn’t nice they expose themselves in what their job really is :

first: bait & lure
then: pump & dump.

That’s what you get when you replace the entrerpreneur before The Float.
Practically the “Lipsitck on a Pig Automated Fund” relies on those 4 (four!) scams nested in a single basket.
That’s why is so popular today, is an incredibly efficient, and almost legalized way, to empty investors money at flank speed with almost no legal responsibility: blame The Muppet being the typical excuse.

Eating muppets alive is the real VC job as much as for the Muppet being eaten alive is in his nature: the Muppet is just the last to know.. because is clearly the last in the foodchain: he must be the last to know; as that’s the script for the show.

Long story short, most often than not, backward forensics and audit analysis will show that as soon as the first “reality check” failed VC and advisors started playing the shark game:
buy one share smiling politely  while selling two shares covertly often indirectly till muppet gets busted and Fund implodes.
A trick often hard to spot in time as it increases the trading volume too which means commissions and no intermediaries ever complain on them. If the entourage profits on commissions but loses “a bit” on profitability they don’t care and that also means the delusional Muppet was successfully planted the delusion that “ship won’t sink”… and that is often so convincing even watchdogs look the other way.

Conclusion:
the scripted drama “Lipstick on a pig Fund” is precisely what Mr Market wants: fresh meat, no matter the lipstick.

11) Recently detected scams:

Zurich via London via… “Modus operandi II scam”.
An external intermediary and a bank employee, who even posed as manager, tried get us involved in a money triangulation scheme covertly operated by a Major Swiss Bank. The hidden purpose of the scheme was to find and exploit an expendable strawman (dummy) for an international money laundering scheme.
Action taken: our lawyers promptly filed a Report with both watchdogs: MROS – CFB (CH), MLRO – FCA (UK).
…

London via Exotic places… “Modus operandi I scam”.
We were contacted by an individual who posed as manager for an UK bank he was just employee of, his real job was that of an I.B. / promoter for a market maker in an Exotic country. He set up a defamatory campaign against us as his true intent was to force us to lower our price in order to propose us to another bank , competitor of the one he allagedly was manager of. When requested he failed to provide a mandate from either side and could not get the deal signed: the scheme collapsed exposing him and his accomplices.
Action taken: our lawyers informed both banks of the wrongdoing of that employee. A report to FCA (UK) was also filed.
…

London via Exotic places…”flying shuttle”  – bucket shop scam.
An Asset Manager running several funds on behalf of a foreign bank asked us if We could provide him our Algo feed.
We asked his trade record to check if our algo feed could integrate with his strategies. As he realized our level of competence was far above the average… started behaving elusive, rude and offensive. So, We used our Mimic Algo to counter-profile his Report and expose his decisional model based on his trade results. The Mimic Algo exposed heavy inconsistencies: too many easy profits were instead stopped at a loss. That created us the doubt He might be running a “flying shuttle“: a bucket shop fraud hidden in running a syntethic fund whose positions keep bouncing between two fully visible Funds: the fraudster (posing as Asset Manager) can cash-in some profits indirectly taking the opposite side of some positions and wilfully close the deals when Customer Funds lose and his hidden Fund profits.
Given the high probabiliity that the guy is running a scheme, We declined his offer.
Action taken: our lawyers signalled the self-appointed “asset manager” (a bank employee) to his bank.
…

Lausanne-Geneva: “Modus operandi III scam”.
A self-promoted Wealth Manager (an ordinary lawyer) tried persuade us he had prospect in a major bank
but as he kept postponing signature both on NDA and NCA We contacted the Bank He was allegedly
working with (or spending the name of) just to discover he got fired several years ago.
Action taken: our lawyers promptly filed a Report with local watchdog: MROS – CFB (CH)

Zurich to London … “flying bankers” and runaway money:
Someone moved from a swiss bank to a British bank  took his clients with him… and thought would not get caught…
Delusional. Reality is: Muppet has been tracked 1 week before resignation.
Mind Banks ultimate objective: aovid money leaves the bank, whatefver it takes (…)
so : when a client leaves: expose him, when an employee moves: discredit him.
A bank has 6 ways from sundaday to ask for sequester of a customers’ money and even keep  15% as prize
and keep the whole sum under management until end of trial (5 years or more).
Banks do anything to make sure money don’t leave the bank. Thus on banking side, burning runaway muppets just costs 1 stamp …
Former employee changes codename and becomes muppets as soon as leaves the bank.
Banks do it on purpose as is banks making financial laws, forget politicians they’re there to deceive people are in control of “something” it is not.
An unsung universal banking law is: Muppets are grease for the railroad on which the bankiing steamroller runs.
Some muppets are dumber than others but ALL muppets work for the banks, either they know it or not.
Now you can easily guess why the so called “flying bankers” or “cross border lawyers”
have always been the most valuable source of sequesters.
Action taken:  nothing new, both watchdogs: MROS – CFB (CH), MLRO – FCA (UK) are aware of such malpractice.
…

Zug-London: latecomers and their ponzis: “Force Majeure scam in a Ponzi” redux:
as soon as FCA made Bitcoin illegal in UK… a rotation of dishonest bank employees and a few sly “Fund Managers” tried to convince us that they had a situation, a spectacular idea: help them convert Fund assets in Bitcoins or blockchain related stuff… probably just in time for the FCA sequester … then they would have put up a sad “plausible deniability” show: blame the manager, blame the broker, blame the trader. Ultimately, as soon as force majeure clause were to be risen, they would have come up with a big smile and the real deal : “surprise! Muppets pay the bill !”
Action taken: none. Nothing new.
…

Worldwide: a list of companies who said “We don’t need yours, we have better algos”.
We tracked their performances after 5 years: probably their models weren’t that good…

Losses are in USD. The names of the companies above are disclosed to prospective partners only, after signing NDA.

Comment: bankruptcy is the typical outcome of “circular reporting”, a deadly flaw not every CEO knows about.
Often the CEO support Staff, rather than doing a proper comparison among algos just runs a pro-forma one and make up their conclusions without a proper dataset as support. Staff people often act either in their own interest or on self-referential biased prejudices, thus in the long term end up hurting both stability and profitability of the company because as their CEO completely trusts them will never check their conclusions thus trusting their (forged) report.

Action taken: none as within 5 years most of those companies bankrupted.

This should summarize many points :
Most price engines can allow or deny price and spike filtering , this is done arbitrarily depending on customers liquidity , available collateral and of course, his importance.

Evaluators often fail to properly represent a system profitability and confuse the trader who then becomes over-confident in his new wonderful freshly developed system. System evaluating software packages are models themselves , hence they often fail too.

Example 1: Some system evaluations are particularly intriguing. it shows 33 % monthly profit on paper trading but this system performs just 3 % monthly on real market.

Too many differences between demo and real system evaluation to be explained verbally, more or less:
quality of execution, quality of order opening/closing, direct and indirect slippage and down-time.

To translate a “demo system” in the real world we prefer apply this translation for each deal done :
realprofit=demoprofit/4 -2*spreadcost -volumefees -tax if system survives deserves further evaluation.

Example 2: way too often is the broker who is giving you their trading system back-testing package because is broker is interested boosting over-confidence in your system and make you trade more and faster, not because your system is good but because they profit on any deal you do either you get a loss or a profit.

This is why is hard to spot where is the catch because quite often the catcher himself has no idea where it hides.

Example 1: “the retailer” : summary of a real phone call about an attempted sale to us.

Seller: – we can offer you …low latency… ultra fast platform … proprietary liquidity..
Our Guy: wait wait.. How much you pay me for the additional risk of executing my stops FASTER ?
Seller: – No no, Sir , you are to pay us for getting you our service…I assure you is the best …
Our Guy: ..aha. You execute my stops faster and I should pay You ? go figure !
I keep my money, thanks. Go scam someone else! Bye .
–hang up–

Example 2: “the server colocator”: summary of another phone call about an attempted sale to us.

Seller: — our colocation plan includes server colocated in broker-side server farm
ultra- fast connection to virtual machines locally connected to the broker..
Our Guy: you can’t be serious saying you sell ultra low latency hyper fast colocation , that is milliseconds lag… to people that you know got 1 pip spread— as it means 1 minute delay, c’ m on…
Seller: — I didn’t get it … we offering you a dedicated environment , micro wave carrier with a dedicated channel and satellite relay… a hyper-fast transmission and environment…
Our Guy: Wrong! Listen up . Assume you got 1 pip spread you have not five or fifty millisecond not even a few seconds away from market price , you are lagged at lease one MINUTE !
Seller: -how do you know that ? I didn’t know myself about that…
Our Guy: Of course, you are not supposed to know…but you sell it anyway, right ?
–hang up–

Example 3: a corporate seller trying to sell his “Trading specific business intelligence package”

Seller: –…our Business Intelligence package is a specific tool that through a wise analysis model gets you ,
the final user, strategic valuable information about your competitors and their…
Our guy: Wait…wait I already spotted a nonsense every two words…
Seller:– please feel welcome to expose your view…

Our guy: OK. First problem:
If a global analysis model existed big data would be shredded and sold in profitable small “end user friendly” chunks not in analysis packages.
Another problem is that such info would be sold at high price from known, well informed parts with a pseudo-social front end to other maybe less appealing companies with huge funding beneath them. If you think that harvesting public or semi-public data and building a model around them is giving you decision ready data-set you live in the 1980s. Any decent company with a decent CIO knows that is wiser to disseminate discordant infos rather than coherent ones as that simple move transforms data miners in garbage collectors, as far as I am concerned your Business Intelligence falls exactly in that category. Then my conclusion is that your Business intelligence package is a pseudo big-data harvester casting conclusions from garbage collected data and also runs an analysis on that, which is self referential to say the least>>.

Seller: (upset) –sir, are you…ahem a competitor of ours…how do you know all that stuff?
–hang up–

Conclusion:
In those cases it took us 30 seconds. to spot the trickster and 15 seconds to get you aware of such trick. Real point is: will the seller ever be aware he’s selling a scam or he’ll retire after 40 years in sales with his golden watch without having ever known what his real job was ? Because that’s what some companies are after : making sellers totally alienated and unaware of the real product they are selling so that they don’t even know their true responsibilities. That guy was selling a risk and asking us to pay it.

They should stop giving others advice until they lost at least 5 millions , of their money.
No matter if they got a Phd or whatever preposterous piece of paper they bought.
Unfortunately Mr Market doesn’t get scared by such papers.
Most of times trading coaches are employed by your counterpart (broker) so watch anything they say. Is also quite common for them to use coaching sessions to sell you something. Strange enough: they are always employees, not financial entrepreneurs, even just for that they have no idea how to make money, of course, except selling such “coaching” to you. They are paid to hook customers and make them spend more possibly on their firms but they are NEVER paid because they make their customers profit. Why ? Here lies the paradox, which is called adverse selection: if one were a good speculator he would never accept a fixed salary to explain others his own skills!

Example 1: assume you are a big customer and after joining such course you understand that the instructor is really valid in making you profit , then you would pay solid gold to get him into your firm . Hence, if one is a trading instructor and still sells courses means he’s totally incompetent.

Example 2: Reality check against con artists:
Since banks seldom disclose statements of their customers, track records are easily faked and penal records get cleaned every five years, there are a few practical ways to spot con artists but we know that the average life of an asset management company (4 years) or a fund average life. We just split it in two the expected counterpart company life expectancy for each of the below statements we discover true.

• his personal background is consistent of previous failures
• starts postponing appointments and is full of due date advices
• accepts any task but closes none and just delays others
• starts changing his phone numbers like a girl changes her clothes
• starts appearing on tv and newspapers for reasons more consisting of self-advertising rather than true interviews
• uses red herring marketing techniques sponsoring fast cars and taking pictures of him surrounded by hot girls
• uses mesmerization as leadership technique (to be surrounded by yes men rather than true partners)

Typical usage of the above method:
If just one of the above points is true : expecting bankruptcy in 2 years.
If all six are true: expecting bankruptcy in a few months.
If none of the above is true… but something doesn’t match: better check again.
Also a bit of common sense also helps in reality check: is normal that ex partners will hate you. The opposite is not normal instead.
So if his ex business partners …still love him… well something just doesn’t fit the frame and the information you are receiving is likely to be biased. Broadly speaking, most of these guys are so self-centered in mastering communication skills that simply fail to cope with reality checks.

Example 3:

How not to organize a trading room:
Assume you visit a trading room and you are astonished by their efficiency:

• broker-client relation is reliable
• information chain is perfect
• corporate commitment is stellar
• compliance is peculiar
• service is flawless
• tasks are sharply defined
• risk management is outstanding

Still you feel those guys have no idea which business they are in . So , when you disclose your view on them
to their C.E.O. explaining plain and simple that he’s likely to go bankrupt soon, he doesn’t seem to care.
Then the real issue surfaces: traders who lose money are rotated, while the heads controlling them are not.
This creates an adverse selection: one who learns too much is fired as much as one who loses too much.
Diverting responsibilities toward subordinates inadvertently transforms them , a profit source,
into an useless bad management damping mechanism, which ultimately is a true highway to hell .

A healthy rotation is to change 1 team leader every 10 traders hitting the road but you’ll never see this applied in banks, asset manager or funds. Apparent reasons are, being afraid to lose customers, lose know-how, lose volume… real hidden reason is they all prefer a disastrous structure implosion rather than a healthy rotation.
After all they are not owner of the structure they work in, they are just managers and they just care for wages and bonuses. If the structure implodes they’ll migrate elsewhere ad restart the loop.

Synthesis: if a trading room structure resembles a yes-man-chain, disaster is imminent.

…why financial tv shows are just commercials.

the cost:

• TV programs don’t host you for free .
• Most fund managers are forbidden by contract disclose what they do, go figure on tv !
• To be hosted as “guest” you must pay. Higher the sharing , higher the price .
• For the mere fact of being in TV he needs customers and he does not trade.

the cover up:

• when one says “sell” on tv he could be buying instead , so that :
  if he is right you join him , if he is wrong he profits.
• If the guest was previously wrong not only he never says so during the tv “interview” but also removes youtube videos about the previous one.
• Neither guest nor anchorman are connected to a polygraph but are both… in sales.

the hidden sponsor:

• If a show hosts you free is because your view coincides with their sponsors’ one.
• If you are invited in a tv show you must early submit your view for “supervision”.
• The anchorman binds you to switch subject when he (his sponsor) asks you to.
• You are invited again if the sponsor is happy, not because you’re a good manager.

Example 1: you’ll never hear this on a financial tv show:
“last time you said a thing so absurd i got 2000 people wishing to ask you damages…”

Example 2: you can’t sue them for attempted market disruption or disinformation

Example 3: just google for “native content”… that’s the commercial they sell as news.

A peculiarity worth mentioning when speaking about “trading books”: there is no trading book at all.
Any succesful trading book would be forbidden knowledge and big players know that.

No trading books are really about trading, what they are about is lucky shots of rookie traders
who after (eventually) gaining some dimes, reinvented themselves as librarians.

That’s just how information works today :
if something really works and could hurt banks: goes under wraps in case you didn’t notice.
Banks don’t like when you profit, so they give you bad intel when creating your knowledge basis
so they avoid the risk. They like to keep your ideas in a “safe banking environment” so you just
get efficient.. in buying debts, not profiting.

Think about it, how come there are restricted access libraries … for economics !?!
Sounds quite strange, isn’t it ? Denied patents, sealed patents, or forbidden knowledge and the like
Some special permissions are needed to read certain books, some even dating 500 years or more.

Example: the very concept that views economy as an electric field, is forbidden knowledge.
You didn’t know about that. Why? …You see no books speaking about it … but it works
just need some fantasy to re names banks “accumulators”, companies “engines”, liqudiity “electrons” etc.
why they don’t say it works…? Because is their job. “If it works hide it before it gets to the public”.
You are not in the need to know , how to profit, you are supposed just to gear up useless debt instead
and keep trying so you buy more debt: that’s their work. keep your learning curve flat.

By absurd: if you trading book gave you good ideas, banks would lose money if you used that.
If everyone were using that model : the compound interest based model at the base of the
banking system would collapse instantly. :
the innovative idea at the beginning of the XX century was at the core of every bank,
a thing which today we simply call “ponzi scam”.

That banking model is today commonly known as “ponzi scam” but they don’t write it this way
in economics books, they mix it up, they split it so you don’t get it.
isn’t healthy for (what you think is) economy you really understand how it works.

Both fractional reserve and compound interest are the scams every bank relies on,
then after 1910 any book about “economics” talks about “banking economics” instead.
Is different. Thinking as Bank-centric is useless on market-side:
you need to deal with the (unfair, biased, very informed) market not with the “compliant” bank.

Hence the “trading books” We suggest are about strategy, NOT banking (pseudo) strategy:
Sun Tzu “The art of war”
Von Clausewitz “On war”
…”Psychological operations in guerrilla warfare tactics”.

Anything written by someone who won a hostile in a dynamic environment goes.
Anything written by some bank clerk or librarian faking is a succesful trader does not.

Market is not ” a bank compliant , equilibrated exchange of goods for values” is a fight. An unfar, biased game against the most disinformed counterpart. Game changes while you play, rules changes , definition changes, values change so much so that the “fog of war” is a proper way to define a true market environment.

Just start naming that correctly, can find the proper book. What you need is not about trading, is about fighting an uneven asymmetric war. Same strategies that work in asymmetric wars work in trading but nobody will ever says that aloud:

“Trading the market is fighting an asymmetric war.”

Just trash the pseudo-banking strategies every muppet sells, replace it with real experience of real generals matured on real battlefields. That is exactly what AI is doing these days to get ahead of humans. AI has not same reading limitations and information access limitations humans have. It can opt-out moral constrains and ethics, can access any available info instead. It can easily discern what is PR from what is real info, what is disinfo what is counterinfo, can you ?
Probably AI will write the best books about trading (is said a smart AI is running S&p500 since 2008)…
But you won’t have access to it.
How’s that for your “trading knowledge” expectations?

Banks and brokers are fully aware that trading is difficult.
Is the hardest game on planet and the most iniquitous game possible.

Example: in major trading corporations every trader must undergo a very intense trading course to forget all “common knowledge” about trading. Plenty of ethical issues surface as soon as that trader realizes that in a big corporation he can make money either profiting and losing customers’ money.

End of second part of internal interview .

First and foremost, nomatter if you are floating on an exchange or not, if you are a true profitable company, you should be already aware that beating benchmark is hard and in the long term it never works.

Secondly: creating algos is incredibly time consuming: if you think you can’t code, if you code you can’t trade, if you trade you can’t think. Anyone saying can manage, trade and create algos… is a sad clown.

Third:
In 2018 average hedge fund performance was -6.7% [source: New York Post].

So just to reach breakeven it just means you must be +6.7% above the average which means you either are in the top 20% of hedge funds or are trying making it up with tricks: leverage, soft dollar, bucket shop or a plain ponzi and with these premises, expectations fall to disaster level and is a statistical certainty such Fund will end in the -70% range within 4 years, another sad fact. All retail broker Ponzis blow, all Bank ponzis blow, even central bank ponzis will (in a few years) just do bigger blows at the end. Once the make-believe loop is started there is no way back: once you start making it up it will ALWAYS get worse. Everyone knows, noone cares. Why ? They all profit.

Sow hy these things still happen you might ask…
Because Mr Market is very creative in recycling same scam dating back to the early 1900s.
When “Ponzi” (aka fractional reserve, compound interest indebting of masses … etc.)
was a financial “innovation”. More or less process is always the same: disinform the buyside, get them under a monopoly, indebt them with their money, so will stop making questions. Banks know this trick very deeply and exploit it every day.

In fact most muppets have no idea how hard developing an algo is.
They think the average bank guys knows how to do it, wll, He just knows how to get his wage out of your pocket, nothing about how markets crush every algo every day.

Curiously even the typical Fund customer or even Fund partners have no idea about that. If you knew how to develop a succesful algo would you REALLY work for a fixed wage and enrich someone else’s bank ? No way. Not difficult to understand but hard to admit. Is socially efficient (read politically correct) no muppet is ever told about that. How fun is that?

To run a profitable algo: you must expect to fail 400 prototypes in the process.

Hint : Von Clausewitz understood war as an information problem:
information redundancy, saturation, bias, overinformadion, disinformation, counterinformation, lack of information and misrepresentation and fog of war.
Also all of the above are subject to lags. So, in each profitable model all piece of information must be trimmed in each moment in each strategy and checked for consistency in the market.

In short: if you think your Fund “just developed a few algos but good ones”… be sure is 100% make-believe. And if someone revealed the attitude to lie to you, why should you believe his algos ?
Sad truth is that the ratio of profitable algo vs losing algos is 400:1 .

Probably some smart pseudo tech guy in the “Fund R&D department” assured you he can cope he will beat the market, beat the benchmark and whoever in between… and this is where it gets fun spotting the liars:

So, how about focusing on the lie itself to spot the flaw at source?

The typical I.T. lie is easily spotted when you ask the guy if he can “personalize” the algo:
if answer is yes, algo is 100% a fraud.

Once an algo is “live” can’t personalize nothing. AI can hardly keep it running … Sad truth.

Another tool of the trade to check for fraudsters is ask a “small adaptation”
can you edit the algo to respond to this … performance / index / market…
If answer is yes, algo is a fraud.
No way you can adapt let’s say 16gb algo running live you change just one variable:
mayhem can happen.

Another typical psaudo-algo fraud is social investing which is a nice way to rename
social engineering against muppets. Banks know that, brokers know that… muppets don’t.
Social investing means putting all eggs in same basket , then whack the basket, brokerside.
and blame… the muppets ( with force majeure clause

Another very human attitude to say “yes We can manage that” because is nice to the … muppet. If you ask you Fund if they can develop a new algo for the next trimester or even some faster way if they come up with “yes , can do in two weeks” , algo is a fraud (and they know that). These things are simply impossible: flawed ideas and waste of time.

Let me add our Expertise on that :
since 2003 We NEVER succeeded to apply one algo to a different instrument or market.

That is the reason We run 1200 algos: because they cover all possible market statuses happened up to now: including unexpected news release, flashcrashes, exchange faliures, regulatory changes, monopolistic positions… of the 3 instruments We cover [eurusd, oil, gold].
Our view: any Asset Manager or Fund runs less than 400 algos for each instrument he covers: chance he bankrupts in 4 years is >90%.

Another way to spot if your Hedge Fund / Asset Manager is making it up is to ask transparency on the algo process: just ask him the very unpolite question: “how does his algo works”: if he discloses that to you, he owns no intellectual property on it and is probably making it up on the go or even given some mock-up to show you from the real algo owner who usually is not the last muppet in town and knows that “how does it works” means “how can I copy that” and the mock-up serves a precise purpose: in case of accidental disclosure any thief would hang himself up running that algo.
So the only answer you should get when asking how does the algo work is: none of your business. Any other reply shouts: fraud.
Typically, marketing guys are extremely proficient in pretending know-how but at the third technical question they sink in their own lies, takes less than 2 minutes to spot fraudsters if the guy knows what to ask.

Now, play the opposite role instead: think as the algo owner , the real owner.
The algo owner has a very precise objective in mind: make sure no muppets learns nothing to protect his know-how and doing that
baiting, hijacking, spoofing, derailing, deceiving,delayng disinforming, mocking and counterinforming are the norm… anything goes.
He must become a Counterintelligence manual on legs just to keep his intellectual property. Counterparts never play fair in this sector.
by personal experience most fund “behave as if” with no tech at all. They pretend and Mr Market slashes them one stop at a time.

Another way to see if your Fund really owns what he is selling you is if at a certain point of the discussion “Non Disclosure Agreement” or NDA comes up as an answer. Can’t go past that.
If you can pass throught the NDA, whatever the trick you use, be it money, promises, anything: if you pass through the NDA screen and he does disclosure, the Fund is a fraud and they own nothing: an algo owner would never , never ever disclose you the real process: Deception is the norm.

In short: if it took you years to develop an algo would you allow any muppets on planet to join it so that ANY decently capitalized counterpart could make you all a herd and skin you all? No way.

Anyone in the algo business knows that: Muppets always pay the bill. Algo owner always sets the rules. Brokers and banks just play middlemen. At core there is Mr Market: let me repeat that, at the center there is the Market, not the customer, not the bank, much less the broker. Putting customers at center is the kind of lie just a marketeer can come up with and truth is market eats customers alive.  Sellers just try to hide it.
Market is not a person with a PC but a 2 football field computer room with a dedicated power plant and ultra fast connections whose only objective is to sip your stops. In conclusion: the algo owner is a firewall separating the Fund from the disaster.
They know, you don’t. They don’t want you to know that.

A nice example to focus:
think a 4 football fields wide car building firm: how many people you think are working
in the building process? In the eighties it was thousands… today, just one . All robots.

If production line gets halted, self-reroutes. If a robot breaks, other robots fix it.
You know what is the only remainig person in the fabric doing? Security.

Is making sure noone gets closer to the robots and steals corporate secrets (algos).
Competitors might reprogram other robots with same algos, steal the whole production chain.

That is why the security guy is not even allowed to see the robots upclose himself.
Now think again: is the Fund really owning algos they sell you?

A hint: the car dealer has no idea how the robots built it.
He is not in the need to know that no humans at all built the car he is selling you.

A Bank decides to clone an algo as its advisor says “reverse engineering that algo is clearly the cheapest way” exploiting the self-assumption <<we have the right I.T. guy to rebuild the model better than the original >>.

Which is obviously a false statement: if their I.T. guy is so good at trading…
why does he work for a fixed wage… in a Bank??? A sad story is likely to unfold in two possible scenarios:

Case A:
The bank hires the I.T. guy to reverse engineer the algo (clearly not in good faith). He then clones the algo but is noteworthy that either he fails or succeeds the Bank is never told about it. He will ask the Bank to use the algo in any case . As he would instantly get fired if he admitted the algo he hardly cloned doesn’t work properly.

The Bank then tests the cloned algo which typically starts profitable then loses more and more as the time passes because the cloned model, without receiving the original updates, loses the alignment with the optimal market configuration it was designed for. The more the time passes, the higher the losses for the Bank, the more customers complaints start flocking.

Outcome: after a disastrous threshold of losses has been reached the Bank fires the I.T. guy and might even call the original owner of the algo asking for help . That is like stealing something and then even blaming the owner because the stolen good is defective, thus the Bank might receive no answer at all or even get sued for theft.

Case B:
The I.T. guy successfully clones the algo , which works flawlessly and create profits but when the I.T. guy realizes the real potential that the algo has , he immediately resigns from the Bank and starts selling “his” tool to others including the Bank competitors: other banks . Typically done through an intermediary.

In any case, after a few days that he halted the algo from receiving its original updates, the algo gets misaligned from the market situation and then the algo starts creating more and more losses to the Bank, then the outcome is the same as the case A.

Case Analysis:

In both scenarios: playing dirty against the algo owner always plays against the Bank itself.
Is not just an intellectual property issue, is also an entrepreneurial mistake:

From an entrepreneurial point of view: you can’t take out the entrepreneur from his own business idea in the initial phase, as this means dooming the business to failure since inception, an event which any startup expert would clearly define not just impossible to rescue but probably even impossible to salvage.
If you take out the entrepreneur from his venture you set the basis for a disaster.

From the ROI point of view: playing fair with the algo owner would have been cheaper faster and smoother to the Bank and probably much more profitable. This is why an NDA is an useful tool if properly applied and is working for both sides of the deal as it sets the basis for reciprocal respect, the track to follow and the milestones. Typically the NDA is also an useful cluster contract for future undisclosed agreements too.

From a stake holders point of view: things get even nastier. Since no NDA has been signed is definitely not in the algo owner interest to keep secret the hostile behavior perpetrated by the Bank or, why not, ally with a few brokers competitors to make the bank liquidity get wasted. If you know and algo is flawed you don’t need a bank liquidity to whack the bank.
You can capitalize the flaw and short them with their own money (snowballing their margin).

Set aside the responsibility the Bank would publicly face if going to court for cloning the algo! That is exactly the kind of drama Bank stockholders hate as it clearly speaks management failure. Another nasty outcome, managers won’t probably admit the flaw since they know
They stole the algo, if the algo owner killed the bank… will they disclose they knew it? No way.
and that’s as nasty as it can get if you steal something you have no idea how it works.

From a Clan dynamics point of view:
In some sectors you hava a clan or families controlling the output of a stream flow good (plastics, oil byproducts etc.). The algo creator ultimately was creating profits for the clan, not for the bank. If the bank speculates against the algo owner, endangers the family.

The bank stealing the algo from the owner plays against the clan itself thus the bank might risk seeing all their deposits withdrawn as the attempt to steal the algo is discovered.

Also as soon as the algo owner reports to the clan of having been stolen the algo from the bank, this might shed light on a deeply hidden opportunism: same bank who stole to the clan once, might do it again in the future and could have already played unfair in the past thus that is important as the clan is now aware that such behavior is likely to occur again. Which might turn the Clan not only into choosing to suddenly close all the deposits in that bank but ultimately creating to the bank a major market shock, leading to a massive shorting of its stocks.

Conclusion:
All of the above cases are far more expensive for the bank
than respecting the intellectual property of the algo owner.