Thank you IIyaKEightSix!!!! So, you don't deal with money at all. Is it like glorified IT ?
Don't deal with money at all? The people I worked with did deal with money. But at the end of the day, what the heck is money in a backtest? It's one line of code. You wanna start with a million bucks?
initialAllocation=1000000
Ten thousand bucks?
initialAllocation=10000
If everything goes absolutely
spectacular in the setting up/backtesting phase, then and only then do you start off in small-sized lots, and watch those positions like a
hawk to make sure it's doing what it needs to be doing. On top of that, the trading software you use matters a heck of a ton, which I'm by no means an expert on, but the man I worked with once upon a time right now is in the middle of changing platforms, so it's no negligible detail.
Yeah, from the 10,000 foot view, you have perfectly cleaned data that reflects the market you're going to trade in, and you can just read some white paper, implement a backtest, and suddenly you're going to be rich.
As they say, the devil is in the details, and the details take hours upon hours of work to get right, to the tune of thousands of lines of code, and having to hire an intern if not a full-time analyst just to mind that stuff.
So yeah...quant trading isn't so much trading (the
machines do the trading, you do everything else), as making sure the machines can do the trading while you watch to make sure the algos do what you expect them to, while at the same time groping around in the dark for new ideas, and also writing a bunch of scripts to do other research work for you.
So the question is, do you like to work on writing code all day, chasing around bugs, creating iteration after iteration of the same basic code to do that one thing perfectly so that your new strategy can make a few hundred dollars a day in the beginning if all goes well?