New to trading

[hhiusa]

The futures strategy is macroeconomic yeah, I don't trade on the news but instead have a rough 'equilibrium' in mind of the correlation of different asset classes. The core of my strategy basically looks for price discrepancies in these correlations. There are a few other things I incorporate but this is the main principle. I am midway through an economics degree now, how useful did you find your macroeconomic principles? The stuff I do as part of my degree is all mathematical models and to be honest it is useless as far as trading goes.

The fully systematic portfolio is as you have interpreted. It runs through a Ruby application (I used Ruby because I picked it up a few years ago when I started developing web apps for other projects). It basically uses historical price data that it grabs from yahoo api and I scrape the company information of the exchange website. It also incorporates some secondary variables which pertain to some companies, where the theory I have is - it is somewhat predictive of price in the right circumstances - and it has shown positive results so far. The biggest pitfall I have at the moment is that the data I scrape from the exchanges doesn't contain companies that went bust - and yahoo api doesn't store price data for these companies either. This has caused a survivorship bias when I am backtesting it so I am currently looking for solutions to this. It can run itself completely though, I have all the parameters for trade entry working and am looking at the best way to implement a trade exit now. More than anything, though, the project is a lot of fun.

The £6 is fine or I would have changed it, Jarvis are a great company and have always worked well for me. I would pay the small premium of £6 just for the peace of mind that I am using a good company. I trade through one of their subsidiaries, XO. I said Jarvis as XO is lesser known, and they operate under the name Jarvis in all correspondence.

Are you only using Jarvisim as a clearing house?

You said you have a rough 'equilibrium' in mind of the correlation of different asset classes. Have you incorporated these into algorithm yet? Does it decide when to trade or does it just amass information for you to make a decision?

The stuff I do as part of my degree is all mathematical models and to be honest it is useless as far as trading goes.

This statement thoroughly surprises me. More than a few people here have said they don't mathematics to trade, which is interesting because in the US, a great deal of proprietary trading firms have hired astrophysicist and chemists for their mathematical knowledge in those areas to be applied to finance. I have found math to be extremely helpful.

Why are you using an API from Yahoo? Doesn't Jarvisim offer you access to their servers or can you contact or ping the LSE servers directly? I have a contract with NYSE. I can also use my broker's APIs to download historical data for all the equities on the any exchange in a database.