Hi,

For scalping/market making futures what system would you recommend? Gary Norden's or John Grady's?

Eventually I want to automate it completely for my own personal use. I know many people think is impossible to automate Grady's, but I disagree. With Machine Learning we can have autonomous cars, so I am pretty sure any complex discretionary system can be automated.
Once said that, the "easier" the system the better. For both of you who have done both? Could you answer at least one of the next questions?

- Which one will be easier?
- Would you recommend Norden's? I already know Grady's. I am trying to decide if is worth paying the new manual offered.
- I plan to use it on any futures, but which one do you think can be applicable to crypto futures (i.e in deribit.com where there is a lot of manipulation)?

Thanks a lot in advance!

If you go to the Jigsaw page for the Gary Norden book you will see they have a quite extensive Non Disclosure agreement on the sign up page. It includes the right to remove access to the online manual site from a customer that breaks the NDA terms, and for the recovery of legal fees.

I would suggest anybody who has paid for it isn't going to risk losing their own access by discussing it here or online in general. Hopefully they also have the personal integrity not to do it offline either.

I agree. NDAs have to be respected, but I can ask for comments like "I would go for Gary" or "Impossible to automate both , don't ask me why, but Gary would be easier", or "Stick to Grady's"...

I have seen the manual, I do not think it is worth the money being asked. Way overpriced with limited detail. Basically you get a manual with idea's on how to scalp, there are some samples but limited detail making it very subjective. $999 what a joke!. While some good points are raised, most of the material has been seen elsewhere on the web. Don’t waste your money.

GinTrader 

I have seen the manual, I do not think it is worth the money being asked. Way overpriced with limited detail. Basically you get a manual with idea's on how to scalp, there are some samples but limited detail making it very subjective. $999 what a joke!. While some good points are raised, most of the material has been seen elsewhere on the web. Don’t waste your money.

Wrong. I'm actually a customer, and have enough finance/trading experience to firmly state otherwise. It's worth more than every cent; you just have to be smart enough to comprehend it, and then practice a lot. We're talking about QUALITY here, not quantity. Also, screenshots aren't needed if you're good at visualizing from proper text interpretation. I even think it shouldn't be open to the general public.

And of course it's not information that you can get anywhere else over the Internet; much less for "free".

To be honest, all the most successful market-making outfits are algorithmic. I'm sure that you could take some of Norden's ideas and work out an algo for them. I'm thinking about taking steps to receive alerts for specific order book, and correlation phenomena that I consistently use to pick off ticks and to set up 'dual action' trades. By going back and programmatically trading manual market-making ideas you will likely find greater edge. You are not fighting with other algos in the millisecond war, and you won't be subject to human error. What you will likely miss out on are the advantages of being a discretionary trader, finding trades that are based on pure flow phenomena and not necessarily on the type of data that algos trade best. I don't think machine learning is there yet.

I will be working on some of these concepts sometime this fall. Right now I have a lot of learning to do. I want to beef up my understanding of quantitative finance, statistics and stochastic calculus before I dive in. I would say that coding wise, I'm just at the intermediate level. I do have some interest in the visual coding offerings that some platforms have to code algos, but I worry about the performance of these platforms.

Hey,

Quick update. I decided to give it a try and bought Gary's course. I just finished reading it twice and took notes. Haven't put it in practice yet but I think is fairly priced. I have been developing trading systems for almost ten years and learnt a few things from the manual that forced me to really change my beliefs. Without going into specifics and given my background in AI I think it is possible to automate most of it. Worst case scenario I could do a "greybox" with a GUI to make adjustments intraday. As a Quant Developer, I hate having to look at the screen and strive for full automation, but if the system ends up being as good as it looks, who cares if for a couple of hours a day I need to make adjustments constantly...

I wish I had read it at the beginning of my carreer. I wasted too much time implementing algorithms with technical analysis. I think some of them work, like in the Max Trading System (for Forex) but Gary's method sounds, a priori, way easier to automate than the Max Trading System, which I tried to do and stopped after several months full time at it. Visual patterns are really difficult to get right, in my humble opinion. It's easy to take a discretionary decision as a human just looking at a chart full of indicators, but translating that perfectly into an algo with rules... no that easy. Some friends tried to feed indicators into neural networks with mix results. Probably that is the way to go if you want TA.

Probably NoBsDayTrading is as good as The Scalping Manual. But I decided to take the Norden's path for now.

Hopefully I will be able to give you an update in a few months. Too bad we cannot openly discuss it because of the NDA.

All the best guys! We should collaborate more!

Mig.

What we need is for you guys that bought the course but disagree on it's worth it to get together privately to discuss specifics. Maybe you will come to different conclusions after talking to others about it.

Signed up to the forum right now. Maybe we should ask Peter Davies if it would be possible to create a discussion forum in the members section of the Jigsaw website for all the people that purchased the manual.