I am planning to start up a small independent private Quantitative Trading part-time business focusing on Options. How small is it? Probably with just US$ 3,000 initial capital for trading and additional US$ 7,000 to fulfill minimum account opening requirements. Let's see how long can I sustained with this mini amount of money.
As far as trading is concerned, I'm most inspired by:
- Jeff Augen's series of small booklet focus on options trading
- Ernie P Chan's book on Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business
- Cao Ren Cao's articles & books (HK financial columnist and independent investor)
- Jesse Livermore's books
- Alexander Elder's book, Trading for a Living
- Van K. Tharp's book, Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom
- Oliver L. Velez and Greg Capra's book, Tools and Tactics for the Master Day Trader: Battle-Tested Techniques for Day, Swing, and Position Traders
In order to start my business, I need to spend time learning two software tools:
- Interactive Broker's trading software, Trader Workstation, nick named TWS
- algo-trader, a GPL'ed open source Java Algorithmic Trading System based on Esper, InteractiveBrokers and FIX - http://code.google.com/p/algo-trader/
I cannot learn TWS until I open a brokerage account with Interactive Brokers. I choose IB due to low commission, international trading and API support for Algorithmic Trading. I guessed I will first spend more time dealing with algo-trader. algo-trader is available since August 2011, it is not a mature tool. So, I am prepared to dig into the source code and get something working. I expect I will contribute some code and patch to algo-trader when I'm developing and testing my trading strategies.
Running a private business, will I be lonely? To some extent, yes. Top traders/ investors make lone decision all the time. On the other hand, I may get interaction with active members in algo-trader. Perhaps as his reader, I could also interact with Ernie P Chan at his blog, http://epchan.blogspot.com/ .
