@Bernard Madopp

To help preserve the original content of Fawce's thread, i moved the main part of my post in response to your comment to here, as follows

As to your comments about secrecy and your statement that: "IP is 99% value of quantitative finance", i would say no, probably not, and for 3 good reasons:

1) Firstly there are only certain types of algos that really "need to be kept secret". Those are the ones that, usually through extensive data mining, manage to find some very well hidden patterns that are not particularly robust and will soon be arbitraged away if other people discover them. Other types of algos exploit market behavior that is "hidden in plain sight", often related to underlying macro-economic phenomena (e.g. government interest rate & currency policies) that tend to be long-lasting, and such effects do not get arbitraged away (or at least not quickly) even if lots of people do know about them.

2) I would contend that there are probably a lot less "secrets" than most amateur traders / system developers / algo writers imagine. Pretty much everyone with experience has read the equivalent of all of the info in Quantopian's lectures, and all of the "New Trading Systems & Methods" by Perry Kaufman (already in its 5th edition way back in 2013), and probably a few hundred other books & papers besides. Good trading results are not necessarily about "secrets" at all.

3) Finally, as a trader, i would venture to say that a very large part of quantitative trading success is related at least as much if not more to good implementation / execution rather than to clever IP. It's not so hard to come up with what look like very profitable trading strategies, but they often just don't work, and a large part of that is due to all sorts of real-life effects rather than IP. There are brilliant academics in the area of finance who cannot trade at all, and a few well-known cases where such people have lost a LOT of money (their own and that of other people) due to poor trading habits and/or poor risk control.

So, at least from my perspective, good trading is much less about "secrets" than i think you probably imagine.

With genuine best wishes for your trading / algo writing. Tony