About

Hi, I’m Mike and I'm really into automated and algorithmic trading systems.

When I first started trading over 20 years ago, I found it frustrating having to schedule the time to trade in an already busy life; I was constantly interrupting something else I was doing, and sometimes that was sleep. I always seemed to miss the big trading opportunities.

Another thing I found difficult was the psychology of trading. Like many other traders, I read stacks of books, and attended courses like Van Tharp’s Peak Performance course and the Trading Game Mentor program. These helped a lot and improved my trading, but the psychology was still a conscious effort to deal with.

The third thing challenge was to trade more than one system at once. Being in the right place at the right time for one system was tricky enough - and that increased with each additional trading system. So diversification was tough.

Trading like a machine

Many trading books promote the idea of trading like a machine. That is;

  1. Define your rules.
  2. Test the rules thoroughly so you know what to expect over time.
  3. Then execute those rules reliably without emotion.
I’ve developed software for my entire professional life so I know that these three steps describe exactly how a computer program works, so using that experience and my Applied Mathematics university education, I started to convert my trading systems into computer programs.

It's easy to trade like a machine when a machine is doing the trading...

Trading Minions do the tedious stuff...

When I turn a trading system into a program, I call it a Trading Minion, because I literally have a minion (a computer program) selling, managing trades and back-testing for me.

With Trading Minions operating over multiple trading systems, in many markets, on different time frames, 24 hours a day, I no longer need to worry about missing signal or a trade opportunity. I don’t need to pause my trading when I’m travelling, and I no longer feel ANY of those trader anxieties.

This blog

My blog is here to chart my exploration of automated trading. Since these are systems that I'm trading personally, it's a private blog. But sometimes an idea surfaces as an article that's OK for public viewing. You'll see these on the home page.

Certifications

Stanford University Machine Learning

RG146 - General Knowledge

Foreign Exchange General Advice Certificate

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