Just some updates as to what I'm up to. I've been fully immersed in research and development mode for some new systems and technologies. This could take a few months. I am also deliberating rather I should revert Quantisan.com back as a pure blog again and separate QTD on its own domain. Quantisan.com has too much random topics and history that makes it difficult to keep a consistent message as a company blog.

Many people dream of making a cash cow trading program and be set for life. The reality of the business, which is just like any other profession, is that you need to be persistent and persevere. You really need to enjoy the work to be able to keep going at it day after day even if nothing that you do seems to work at a time. This video by Tim Harford explains why success starts with failure. It rings with my previous post on why the secret to trading system development is to fail faster.

Harford's three principles of success:

1. Fail a lot.
2. Fail affordably.
3. Fail and fix early.

Yes, this is still Quantisan.com. In case anyone is visiting and noticed the different design. I've made some major changes to the website over the weekend for both aesthetic and technical reasons.

1. Professionally designed. The previous theme was something that I hacked together over a weekend. It's actually pretty bad under the hood as I had only learned PHP scripting to write that theme. This new theme is a minor tweak over a professional framework. It enables more flexibility to the page layout. Expect some major changes to the front page in the weeks to come as this personal blog transforms into a company site.
2. Reduced computing resource hog. I disabled a number of Wordpress plugin modules as the theme has already taken care of things like search engine optimisation.
3. Optimised page loading time. The code for the new design is also optimised for faster page load times with built-in optimisation of javascript and css file loading.
4. Geographically distributed content delivery network. As forex is a global endeavour, the readers to this blog is quite geographically diverse. While the site is hosted in the U.S., I want to ensure the readers from Germany and India (8% of my readers) have a smooth browsing experience too. The use of a CDN to mirror contents around the world makes this possible.
5. Bad traffic filtering. A significant traffic on the web is due to software crawlers. Some of them post spam comments on my blog or copy my copyrighted materials. I added a server-side security control service to block all those unwanted traffic. This increases security and reduces unnecessary server load.

You might have noticed that aside from point #1, which is purely aesthetic, everything else is done to improve page load time for readers to this blog. The result is that the new loading time is down to about 4.0 seconds. Whereas the old site took around 8 seconds to load. You might think this cost a fortune. But it still costs less than most small websites out there. The old site cost me \$30 per year to run, including everything from domain name registration to web hosting. The new total is still only up to \$70 per year. The key to the savings is that I made use of a free network enhancement service (cloudflare.com) and exploited my remote server and network optimisation knowledge acquired from the long nights of administering a remote trading server. Technology is cheap nowadays. The real values are in the ability to deliver on that technology to bring about even greater return. This is what drives everything I do at Quantisan Systems.

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. [caption id="attachment_4974" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Dukascopy JForex DEMO 2.13.6"][/caption]