Joke’s on us: JForex DEMO 2.13.6 is out of whack

I hope this is a April Fool’s joke but it isn’t. As shown, the Dukascopy JForex DEMO platform version 2.13.6 released this week is causing havoc to my strategy. I tested my contest strategy, which has been running fine for almost a year, but is now failing left and right. Even though this is only happening with the DEMO platform (the LIVE platform is a stable release and is running fine at the moment), the fact that they published a buggy version for us developers as guinea pigs is upsetting. JForex developers are clients too, after all.

Dukascopy JForex DEMO 2.13.6

Today is day 1 of Quantisan, the company

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

G. B. Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

While cramming for the CFA level 1 exam the past 3 weeks, I can’t let go of the fact that I’m leaving my work out cold on the table. This sense of urgency feels like every minute that I delay my trading system development projects, bits of them will fall apart.

This weekend I finished reading through my Schweser study notes from cover to cover, to cover to cover, and repeat that 3 more times for a total of 5 books. It’s certainly useful and interesting material. But I can’t see the value of cramming for 3 more months to memorize everything in even more excruciating detail. No term will be without a definition in my head and no problem will be without a solution on my BA II Plus calculator. Just so I can say that I passed my level 1 exam on my resume.

What the curriculum offers is information, but what we need more in this world is wisdom.

I stand by my belief that credibility is as important as experience and skills. However, that doesn’t mean that I need to head for the path most traveled. Why can’t I be unreasonable and push my limit to do what I’ve always been set out to do.

Credibility can be gained from attaching professional designations to your name, but it can also be gained from simply achieving results in the real world. So this morning, before going to work, I took the first baby step in turning this little hobby of mine into a real business. I registered a business entity with our government.

After 10 years of trading, 5 years blogging about the market, and 3 years in trading system development, today is day 1 of Quantisan Systems!

And this — is how my business got officially started. My plan towards unreasonable goals in a world of reasons is finally set in motion.

Open sesame with three more letters

I apologize in advance if I occasionally disappear in the next 15 weeks.

My study guide for a professional exam in financial analysis arrived last Friday. I spent most of this weekend studying as I need to squeeze in 300 hours of studying time between now and the exam in June. Topics of the exam range from professional standards to investment analysis to asset management.

This is a major commitment as 300 hours in 3 months is no joke. Fortunately, I am familiar with a majority of the material. Unfortunately, most of the details I have forgotten already as level 1 of this exam covers the very basic. For example, I haven’t heard terms like price elasticity and marginal cost in 10 years.

The quant section, at least, I am finding it to be a breeze as I finished skimming through the 400 pages of material in a few hours and realized that I don’t need to spend anymore time on statistics or technical analysis to answer the practice questions.

Having said that, I do not take this exam lightly and will have to put most other work on hold. This is a difficult decision because having spent hours and hours in the past few months over our trading system, it is coming to shape. In fact, I just tape-out a major component of it last Friday.

Studying with this curriculum would provide me with a big picture perspective of financial analysis. Still, I would rather spend the time to study pertinent works like Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd, or Time Series Analysis by Hamilton, or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson et al. (aff.), some classics on my shelf that I still couldn’t fully appreciate yet.

Better yet, I want to finish my trading system prototype as soon as possible because I’ve learned so much in bringing these systems (having gone through several incarnations already) to life than anything else I have done previously. However, it is also because of my desire to do this for the long term that I need to take the time to garner some industry recognition.

As superfluous as doing an exam might seem for my outside-of-the-box approach to the market (mostly out of necessity as I have neither the bank roll nor brain cells to directly compete with the sharks), the fact is, to be successful in this industry, I need experience, skills, and credibility. The latter of which is something I lack. Neither Graham, Hamilton, nor Adelson can provide me with credibility that these three letters can — CFA.

2010 Links of Quantisan.com

Quantitative Development

• What is a trading system?
• My interview at Dukascopy in Geneva
• A sign that you are truly enjoying what you do
• On technical analysis and fuzzy logic for mechanical trading
• Data Scraping the Toronto Stock Exchange: Extracting 3,660 companies’ data
• A brief comparison of double arrays for high-performance numerical computing in Java
• A failed experiment with spectral density estimation in R
• EC2 t1.micro overloaded by JForex

Manual Trading

• Early bird does not get the worm in forex trading
• Work harder, trade fewer in a long and excruciating trading drawdown
• How to stockpile a trade position one step at a time
• On reactive trading and why I don’t make market forecasts anymore
• Why should I care about other markets if I only trade ___?
• Visualize and Grow Rich
• I didn’t miss a boat. I missed a freakin rocket!

Where Good Ideas Come From Johnson