The Personal Side to Trading System Development (Part 3)

Understanding trading system development as a wholly individual pursuit makes me better understand why my past attempts to organize a system development group failed.

My universe of potential prospects started with the limited number of people worldwide who trade. Out of that, I was looking for people with a significant amount of time to devote to system development, which perhaps necessitates people without other full-time jobs. Out of that I was looking for people in/near the city I live in.

Those meeting these criteria were about to be further stratified by what means I was going to use to find them. I tried Meetup.com, which produced three people. Where else? Craigslist? Twitter? Facebook? Maybe some were locatable through each with the others reachable through other avenues unknown to me.

The remaining handful were ill-suited to work with me because I demanded a degree of open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, and substantial freedom from commercial influence (e.g. trader education companies, affiliate programs, etc.). I also insisted they use my preferred software package since I had already spent 18 months arduously trying to learn it.

But wait: THERE’S MORE!

Other excluding factors were also lying in wait: requisite amount of money to trade, brokerage platform, desired markets to trade, desired time frames to trade, attitudes toward fundamentals or other potential means to generate trading candidates, etc.

The generality/specificity monster was rearing its ugly face again because ultimately, I found nobody to work with!

I will conclude this discussion in the next post.