After a lot of fluffing around over many years, I finally decided to make an effort and this trading thing seriously.
I still have a full-time job and enjoy it (most days) so my focus will primarily be on systems trading. Something that I can manage with just occasional checks and adjustments. I also just finished the book: The Man Who Solved the Markets by Gregory Zuckerman and Im convinced that systems trading is more my style. It really is a great book and I can highly recommend it.
Although I have played with some of the software packages out there and developed a couple of basic systems, Ill start from scratch and slowly build on the process and logic, one step at a time.
I purchased a StrategyQuant (SQ) license a couple of years ago and (for now at least) will only use that to develop strategies.
My initials goals (but will likely be tweaked or changed where I hit a brick wall):
1. Broker: Tradestation (TS) on a VPS so that I dont need to keep my PC at home running (and risk one of the kids messing with it)
2. Instrument: Futures
3. Markets: (TS codes)
AD, BO, BP, C, CD, CL, EC, ES, FV, GC, HG, JY, LC, LH, NG, NQ, RTY, S, SF, SI, SM, TU, TV, US
4. Number of systems: TBD but would like to trade a portfolio of uncorrelated strategies
5. Timeframe: At this moment, Im leaning towards 30 min/1H and to close all trades by 15:00pm.
The reasons for that is the margin requirement to hold overnight trades on multiple strategies in futures.
If this doesnt work, will probably go longer term and trade the e-micros but that will limit the number of strategies to only 4. Maybe include FX then? Will see how it goes.