Algodeal Blog

Enabling intraday strategies

2010-05-11T17:02:00.004+02:00

Dear users,

we released today 1 min bars on our back testing grid. This really opens the door to intraday trading strategies on our platform.

We are trying to keep a steady pace on releasing new features. The top of our todo list now contains features such as mixing different bar sizes, allowing our users to follow their strategies in paper trading every day, adding non price events such as market open or expiry notices.

We had tremendous feedback from our users who tried our support, keep challenging them. I hope you will enjoy the new features in this 1.2 version of Market Runner.

Benjamin

Hard Figures

2010-04-12T10:54:00.004+02:00

Following our opening I wanted to share with you a couple of figures.

Over the last 6 weeks :

350 people have signed up

they performed over 50 000 simulations on our platform

All mails sent to support@algodeal.com have been looked at within 24hrs

a large number of the features requested have been implemented

Thanks to our users for this intial great success!

A new wave of features will come out soon, keep challenging our support for more.

Benjamin

One step beyond

2010-03-29T10:05:00.006+02:00

The natural next step after deploying our backtest platform is starting to trade. In the next couple of weeks we will reach out to our best scoring users to offer them a free ride.

We will allocate a small amount of capital, circa 50K€ per strategy, with friendly conditions.

In a nutshell before we trade using the capital of our investors we will use ours with very flexible conditions for the users.

How does this work?

- Post us strategies
- Users with strategies scoring north 8 will be contacted
- Users will be asked to pass through our risk constraints and further detailed backtesting
- A subset of strategies will be selected and users will be offered to enter into a non-binding agreement. The main point being they can pull out with a one week notice and we will stop using their strategy
- We allocate money to strategies, trade upon their signal, share the profits

Sounds like a good enough deal?

Visit www.algodeal.com

Let's talk about fees

2010-03-17T10:50:00.000+01:00

We've just posted here in our support / FAQ pages how Quants working with Algodeal are getting paid.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

2010-03-15T11:28:00.012+01:00

The beta has been out for a month now, more than 300 people requested an invite since then. Thanks to all our brand new users who have been willing to help us pull this off the ground!

Adding value to our platform

Our aim is to bring our platform to a satisfactory level in terms of pure alpha generation. The general idea is to allow our users to easily and quickly test new ideas without adding any overlay of complexity in terms of money management/risk constraints and answer the simple question "is there some juice in this strategy?".

In the very short term more libraries such as Ta-lib or libSVM will be added and support for 1hr OHLC bars will be there too. In the backlog we also have requests on libraries such as Weka and simulated annealing which could be great features added to our platform. Extending the asset class to equities is also a big demand, it will come in time too.

All this comprehensive package aims to facilitate fast and efficient basic modeling of a strategy. If anyone has more ideas in this space please share with us your thoughts.

The next big step

Once pure alpha is found, does it survive to the real world? Our approach is to give the possibility to stack on top of strategies different constraints. This opens the door to a large set of tools, encompassing different layers entangled one into the other:
- multi-strategy
- risk
- money-management
- impact

This compound of functionality is a big step and we are working on making this as user friendly as possible. The API is not completed yet and we will go through a similar step by step launch allowing our users to tell us where to take our software.

Send us your comments or wishes in terms of new features, they are really looked at and we try to implement the most demanded ones. We will publish a comprehensive roadmap which we will update initially in short cycles of two weeks, widening it later on.

Thanks again to all our early adopters.

Benjamin Filippi
Managing Director

Trick or treat

2010-02-25T10:36:00.007+01:00

We've had a great first week of opening. The enthusiastic response to our business model, the number of people requesting a login, the behavior of our system. All went really well.

We anticipated we would get questions around three topics: asset classes available, tools and libraries, privacy and security. Guess what? Home run, got questions on all of them.

This post is probably the first one of a long series regarding security. Concerning the other two topics, it is only a matter of aligning priorities of clients to our capacity of development.

Is Algodeal a threat to my intellectual property or is it helping me growing it? What ensures me they are not going to steal it, sell it to third parties or worse? To answer these questions, all the companies which have tried to apply an internet paradigm to a traditional business field had to go through the same process I am.

Let's look at one company facing a massive privacy issue: Google and its Gmail service. Google stores impressive amounts of information related to the private life of millions of people.

Their offering was breaking the classic rich-client software mode; emails are now accessible from anywhere and changing PC is not a nightmare anymore.

How did they made users confident? By communicating a lot on their privacy policy and tools they were putting in place. They had no choice: Google have complete access to Gmail data; there is no way around it. It took some time but users ended up understanding that the tradeoff was in their favor, and that Google would not read or sell their emails.

The vast majority have now adopted the Gmail model and they get the leverage of the proven Google technology.

How does this apply to Algodeal? Well, I went to talk to my tech team telling them I had a lot of pressure from users regarding privacy and having the code source posted to our servers.

The answer came back very swiftly. I was told that, whatever the format used to transfer the strategy to our system, there was always a way to decompile/crack the strategy. Sending strategies inside DLLs or encrypted libraries would not bring us much. Reality is, the strategies are on our servers and we have to defend our strict privacy policies:

When you use Algodeal services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your strategies and personal data and either to correct data or strategies if it is inaccurate or for deletion purposes.
Algodeal runs posted strategies against historical data sets and creates performance reports, such as the scorecard.
Algodeal may contact you in order to enter into an agreement allowing Algodeal to use your strategy.
Alogdeal will not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.
Algodeal requires opt-in consent from clients to access their strategies in order for Algodeal employees to operate, develop or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.
If Algodeal becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, the buying or newly formed entity will be bound to maintain the privacy policy rules of Algodeal.

How many of you have a Gmail account? Well, those who do should be able to understand the trade-off between posting source code of a strategy to Algodeal and leveraging the platform investment capability.

Don't have an Algodeal account yet? Get one here.

Benjamin Filippi
Managing Director

Opening of Algodeal (private beta)

2010-02-16T15:21:00.006+01:00

As of today, we have started to give access to our system to the people in the waiting list. All invited users can now use the system we have been working on for months, with the same computing power as our in-house experts.

If you were on the invitation list, you should have received an email by now. If not, get in touch with us.

IMG_1143 by Thomas Sly

Our tool helps you design automated investment strategies. It can execute strategies on your own computer, or submit them remotely to our grid for a more powerful simulation environment.

For a quick taste, our website can also do some limited online strategy edition.

What now?

If you've received the confirmation email from us, feel free to install our tool and start writing your strategies. Support is available on our support site, along with tutorials.

If we have sparked your interest, you might want to browse the slides on our website, as well as the screenshots and explanations on the support site. To go further, please request an invitation. When we will feel comfortable with giving wider access to our system, you will be the first to know.

As for us... we are back to adding more features. Oh, and maybe fix some of the bugs that just might appear.

Talk to you soon!

Beta site now public!

2009-11-18T14:08:00.003+01:00

We have just made our beta site public!

What you'll find:

a description of our platform
a description of our commercial proposal, and how you, the quant, can profit from it

You can also request an invitation. Users with invitations will be first to have access to the platform. Grab yours today!

Sneak peek at our homepage

2009-10-20T17:17:00.000+02:00

As we get closer to the first public release of our website, we thought we would let you have a quick look:

The two green blocks on the bottom left point to some explanations of our offering. The third block is were you'll be able to request an invitation. As for the fourth block, well... for the moment, it is just for the happy few that already have access to our system!

These pages will be available to the public in the coming weeks or days. A public beta should be coming just a few weeks later (maybe a bit earlier for those that have requested the invitation).

Nearly there!