Build Alpha

As I am sure you all know 99% of this industry is comprised of crooks selling you misinformation that just doesn’t work. The key to trading success is finding an actual quantified statistical edge. I eventually came to the realization that a human alone cannot trawl through charts and find an edge, a machine learning approach is required. There are a couple of packages out there that use genetic algorithms to data mine for strategies. I tried three of them and was unimpressed. Build Alpha doesn’t have a free trial and I followed Dave on Twitter for about a year before I felt confident enough to try a blind buy. It was scary but I am SO glad I made the plunge. BA is great. It’s more than just a piece of data mining software, it has a lot of different tests in there that help you reduce the probability of your strategy being overfit. Having been in this game for a couple of years now I have coined this phrase: “overfitting is as easy as breathing”. It really is. And you need every tool at your disposal to help combat it.

What is arguably better than BA itself is that when you purchase BA you get access to a lot of extra material that isn’t widely advertised on the webpage. BA comes with a whole bunch of built in indicators and it generates trading strategies based on a fairly simple reusable template. The template is about 2 pages worth of code in EasyLanguage so you can wrap your head around it in a day or two even if you are just a beginner like I was. The indicators and basic algo template that come with BA are worth the price of admission itself. I won’t say which indicator is the best one, but there is one in there that is absolutely spectacular. I use it in nearly every single strategy I have and I have not seen it documented or coded anywhere else. And once you’ve generated a few strategies with BA you will get a sense of how the template gets modified with each new strategy. Once you’ve got that down, you can make manual tweaks to the code and make things even better.

On that note, it is important to realize that Build Alpha is just a tool. A very useful tool, but the quality of algos that you develop will still be a function of intelligent user choices. For my first few months playing with BA I was generating overfitted strategies that had amazing equity curves and now I can tell you that you can’t just use it like that. If you end up generating a strategy where it just looks like random rules pieced together, chances are it will be an overfit strategy. But if you generate a strategy where you can see why it would make sense, then you are probably on to something good. “Oh! Yes I can see why you would try to short here” “Ahh yes it’s going long on overextended dips during this regime. That makes sense”. Those are the types of thoughts you want to have in your head when doing strategy development. It can’t just be pure algo magic.

But how did I develop this intuition? A huge part of the BA experience is immersing yourself in Dave’s training videos, reading around the private forum, and going through Dave’s custom statistics pages. You really get inside his head and learn how he thinks. Volatility filters. Time filters. Time based exits. Only a small number of rules for the entry. So much more. He’s the only guy out there putting out this type of material. By buying Build Alpha I learned to think more like Dave, and once I started thinking more like Dave, my trading improved massively. Dave’s tech support is legendary. I like to joke that he is as fast as Commander Data. I often get responses within 5 minutes regardless of the time of day. He’s gone beyond the call of duty multiple times now offering me helpful tips on how to find edges on the timeframe I like to trade. This dude has already made his millions. He’s not here to profit off of you. He is here to give back.

If you’re still losing money in the market stop screwing around and just trust Dave. You’ll learn more actionable information from him than getting a PhD in quant finance. He’ll change your life.

Dave’s customer service is the best I have ever experienced. I do not think I’ve ever waited more than 10-15 minutes for a reply. The software is absolutely incredible. Check it out for yourself.