TuringTrader’s Felix Bertram — An engineer's approach to investing in the stock market

TuringTrader’s Felix Bertram joins us in Episode 3 of Smarter Trading to share his quantitative approach to investing in the stock market.

We discuss why he decided to build a backtesting engine from scratch, the importance of tools and rich reports for traders to truly understand how they’re doing, ingredients to profitable momentum trading systems, and a whole lot more. Please enjoy this episode!

Key learning points

• Traders need comprehensive reports and tools in order to measure and improve their strategies
• It’s important to consider how efficient your allocating your trading capital
• Markets like to throw surprises that you can’t possibly account for ahead of time
• Running a meta-portfolio of separate strategies reduces the chances all strategies fail at the same time
• Focus on one simple market concept at a time without making it too complicated
• Markets are not as efficient as people make them out to be
• Backtesting strategies unlocks insights that would take a discretionary trader decades to learn
• Tips on getting started to code and testing trading strategies
• Always compare a strategy performance versus a benchmark

Learn more & connect with Felix

• Follow Felix here
• Visit Felix's website here

Learn more & connect with Evan & the Trade Risk

• Browse the Smarter Trading podcast catalog for this episode's show notes and check out past guests
• Watch this episode live on our YouTube channel
• Follow @evanmedeiros on Twitter
• Follow @TheTradeRisk on Twitter
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Show Notes

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:35 Felix’s background
• 4:05 Felix realizes professional money managers weren’t doing that great
• 6:40 How Felix begins investing his own money: breakout strategies
• 10:30 Felix realizes he needs better reports and more metrics to improve his trading
• 13:35 TuringTrader project is born, a new open source market simulator
• 19:00 Felix’s book recommendations that influenced the next phase of his investing
• 25:40 The benefits of having multiple systems instead of just 1 system
• 32:32 The dangers and risks of backtesting
• 37:20 The benefits of backtesting and quantitative trading 
• 42:30 Do you need to understand why a strategy works?
• 44:50 Base requirements needed to trade a new strategy
• 47:00 What it means to trade successfully
• 51:00 About the TuringTrader project

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Please keep in mind, all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Evan or the Trade Risk. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Please review our complete disclaimer which applies to the contents of this podcast.

Thanks for listening!