$25 Million A Day

That's pretty cool.

It's too bad that when you make some serious money, others have to get into your business and see what they can screw you for in order to reap some benefits of your hard work. Ah, the tribulations of being an honest worker, all the liars come out to punish you for being good.
 
What we all wanna do is to copy the guys 'n gels at GS who didn't have a single losing day in the first quarter of the year...

But if you can't get access to them, fading their actual calls is the next best bet.
 
That's pretty cool.

It's too bad that when you make some serious money, others have to get into your business and see what they can screw you for in order to reap some benefits of your hard work. Ah, the tribulations of being an honest worker, all the liars come out to punish you for being good.

lol, you talking about goldman?
 
ig index also dont have losing days some quarters.

Of course mainly having retail clients, their profits are not on GS scale.

but still its a nice business to be in, earning the bid/ask spread and taking the other side of your dumb customer positions.
 
ig index also dont have losing days some quarters.

Of course mainly having retail clients, their profits are not on GS scale.

but still its a nice business to be in, earning the bid/ask spread and taking the other side of your dumb customer positions.

Yep. If you've got a bit of capital you can set up your own sb/dealing firm. A lot of bigger firms will give you a skin (that you can self brand) and will do a profit share.
 
Well - if you co-locate a server at the exchange, see orders coming in before they hit the exchange and front-run them - how exactly would you have a losing day ?

If you tell me Goldman are making money every day and not having any losers, we can come to the following conclusions.

1 - Goldman are clearly NOT using the techniques that any member of this site uses
2 - In all likeliness Goldman are abusing the system

Anyone that thinks they are just good at interpreting price action is a fool
 
Well - if you co-locate a server at the exchange, see orders coming in before they hit the exchange and front-run them - how exactly would you have a losing day ?

If you tell me Goldman are making money every day and not having any losers, we can come to the following conclusions.

1 - Goldman are clearly NOT using the techniques that any member of this site uses
2 - In all likeliness Goldman are abusing the system

Anyone that thinks they are just good at interpreting price action is a fool

They are abusing the system every which way they can with the SEC's blessing. Of course both the SEC and FED employ many ex-Goldman executives. Just a coincidence I'm sure.

Peter
 
They're doing God's work, and I'm sure He is happy with their achievements.

But seriously, not ONE losing day? It's beyond the realms of probability. Let's say you have a 95 pct chance of making money on a given day, then the chance of NO losing days over 62 days is 0.95^62 = 0.04, thus 4% chance of no losing days in a quarter if you have the (simply astonishing) probability of 95 pct for making money. Ok, my arithmetic here is a bit crude, but you get the idea.

In fact, it's not until you get to 99 pct chance of making money that the odds for a no-lose quarter rise to 50 pct.

Ok, so they're market makers so it's more a case of capturing bid/ask rather than taking proprietary risk per se. But nonetheless, it's a mindblowing statistic.
 
What makes you think they are trading directional strategies as a large proportion of their trades ?

They are an MM - but it seems that being an active MM is going out of fashion right now, this is probably the fault of those pesky HFT algos.

The problem is - people tend to think within their own domain. Of course, within the domain of any member of this site, 3 months without a losing day is exceptional.

Given quite a few billions, the ability to manipulate prices and to step in front of trades and then it doesn't seem like such an outrageous proposition.

Of course - limit Goldman to MACD, stochastics and a moving average crossover to trade off and their performance may deteriorate somewhat.
 
We know it's unusual because no other bank comes close to this, so either they have unfair advantage, they are simply better than anyone else or have been sensationally lucky (or all 3).
 
i don't disagree that it's a cracking performance but when you make markets in illiquidi instruemtns you can charge great edge. and yes, if they were trading from pin bars or cuckoo clouds i suspect they wouldn't perform so well.

you pay the best you get the best. and despite the fact the world hates you people come to you first for a price.
 
As someone once said --- who is the man who has done the most for Barclays?

Answer - Fred Goodwin. He outbid them for Amro. Without him, Barclays would be on life support.
 
Dunno quite what all the amazement is about...

This is the first time ever that they have had that...

and we are only talking about one quarter and a firm that doesn't put on just a couple of trades / day but instead thousands, meaning you just have way more opportunities to end the day net profitable, and, more specificaly, they are also using an algo to frontrun orders which helps things along nicely...

But as far as their now again sizeable prop trading goes: a Uni buddy of mine, Uli, was one of the first to get hired there way back when they opened their new office in Frankfurts Messe Turm in the early nineties and he traded there there for almost ten years before moving on and, what can one say, all the usual loony conspiracy theorists apart, in their discretionary prop trading they don't do anything else anyone else isn't doing...

one of their best and most profitable currency traders was a gal called Mei Ping Yan who traded off of 5 min charts and went looking for elliot waves (Paul Tudor Jones likes those too btw9) and had a hit rate of below 50%, which she made up for with great risk / reward ratios...

You had everything there from guys and gals just looking at the order book to people trading off of patterns, using bollinger bands, moving averages as trade filters, etc etc.

They understand the obvious, that trading is just a probability game, no more, no less.

Grasp that and you can eventually move on and start a fund to make really big money.

christian-baha-2.jpg



"Superfund's origin dates back to 1991, when Christian Halper and Christian Baha developed a software system for the technical analysis of financial data. Within two years, this program became the leading provider of market delivery software in Austria. This success led to the development of the Quadriga Investment Group, created by Christian Baha in 1995. Today, the group has more than 280 employees worldwide. The quadriga Group launched its first alternative investment product for private investors on March 8, 1996 called the Quadriga Beteiligungs - und Vermogens AG". In 2003 the Quadriga funds were globally unified under the umbrella brand name SUPERFUND. Today, the group has more than 1.5 billion dollars under management from more than 55,000 retail and institutional investors."
http://www.superfund.com/
Technical analysis:
Trading without emotions
Sound managed futures funds like Superfund funds are based on proprietary, fully automated technical trading systems. These eliminate poor investment decisions which are often the result of human emotions. A vast range of technical indicators and historical prices are analyzed by the computerized trading systems to automatically generate buy and sell signals.

http://www.superfund.com/HP07/Superfund_Trading System.aspx
 
The HFT/flash orders/front-running is risk free. thats the reason they are not losing. There are losing days in prop trading, and in market making, no losing days in HFT. Specialists in the pits get sanctioned for frontrunning orders, but the only difference between them and firms that use HTF is the HFT firms have paid (ie: bribe) to have their computers co-located so the SEC turns a blind eye. If anyone still thinks the stock market is free market capitalism they are woefully misguided. The markets are rigged so certain firms can skim money off of everyone else essentially risk free.

Peter
 
Top