Dunno quite what all the amazement is about...
This is the first time ever that they have had that...
and we are only talking about one quarter and a firm that doesn't put on just a couple of trades / day but instead thousands, meaning you just have way more opportunities to end the day net profitable, and, more specificaly, they are also using an algo to
frontrun orders which helps things along nicely...
But as far as their now again sizeable prop trading goes: a Uni buddy of mine, Uli, was one of the first to get hired there way back when they opened their new office in Frankfurts Messe Turm in the early nineties and he traded there there for almost ten years before moving on and, what can one say, all the usual loony conspiracy theorists apart, in their discretionary prop trading they don't do anything else anyone else isn't doing...
one of their best and most profitable currency traders was a gal called Mei Ping Yan who traded off of 5 min charts and went looking for elliot waves (Paul Tudor Jones likes those too btw9) and had a hit rate of below 50%, which she made up for with great risk / reward ratios...
You had everything there from guys and gals just looking at the order book to people trading off of patterns, using bollinger bands, moving averages as trade filters, etc etc.
They understand the obvious, that trading is just a probability game, no more, no less.
Grasp that and you can eventually move on and start a fund to make really big money.
"Superfund's origin dates back to 1991, when Christian Halper and Christian Baha developed a software system for the technical analysis of financial data. Within two years, this program became the leading provider of market delivery software in Austria. This success led to the development of the Quadriga Investment Group, created by Christian Baha in 1995. Today, the group has more than 280 employees worldwide. The quadriga Group launched its first alternative investment product for private investors on March 8, 1996 called the Quadriga Beteiligungs - und Vermogens AG". In 2003 the Quadriga funds were globally unified under the umbrella brand name SUPERFUND. Today, the group has more than 1.5 billion dollars under management from more than 55,000 retail and institutional investors."
http://www.superfund.com/
Technical analysis:
Trading without emotions
Sound managed futures funds like Superfund funds are based on proprietary, fully automated technical trading systems. These eliminate poor investment decisions which are often the result of human emotions. A vast range of technical indicators and historical prices are analyzed by the computerized trading systems to automatically generate buy and sell signals.
http://www.superfund.com/HP07/Superfund_Trading System.aspx
