David Bush has over 20 years of experience in the financial markets. He never had any formal education in finance, and was actually a professional musician for a number of years.
In his twenties, David decided to switch careers. He was able to become a successful discretionary trader after overcoming challenges that all new traders have to face. He transitioned into a quantitative trader and moved on to find new ways to exploit market opportunities. Since then he’s taken the first spot of Battle Fin’s “Sharpe Ratio Shootout”, which is an international quantitative finance tournament.
What’s Covered in This Interview:
- Why David decided to pursue a discretionary approach to quantitative trading, including his first steps when making the change.
- What David did to determine optimal exits, and how to discover shorter holding times to get superior results.
- What is the Monte Carlo tool and how it can help traders learn about their strategies by looking at the results of numerous theoretical equity curves.
- Challenges that come with hard trading like efficiently managing capital, geometric position sizing, and having an approach that is not as time intensive.
- How using multiple systems such as overseeing trades can help eliminate a single point of failure.
- What simple question to ask so you don’t end up cutting corners.
- Some advantages when entering the quantification process if you come from a discretionary background.
- How you can find out if it’s a robust strategy, and why having less rules means you’ll perform better.
Links and resources mentioned:
- Fortunes Forumla – David recommends this book as it pushed him to quantify his trading.
- Trend Following – David also recommends this book to learn about traders who were behind the Turtle system.
- The Physics of Wall Street –, This is the third book David recommended that talks about the evolution of quantification as well as different players in the field of quant trading.
- Quant Forum Interview – An interview with David Bush and his success at BattleFin.
- Alphatative.com – Visit David’s website.
- @Alphatative – Follow David on Twitter.
