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Toronto-based Collective2 trading strategist James Leigh believes that, as a trader, you absolutely need to let most opportunities pass you by. Most traders believe that they need to do everything, when the opposite is true. "Slow down and think long-term" Leigh urges. "It's said the deal of a lifetime comes around every 90 days". James Leigh's popular C2 strategy, Correlation Factor, is a highly backtested sector rotation strategy that picks 5 sectors of favorable strength and stability (US equities not including energy and minerals); trends across the various sectors are updated daily where upon detecting a 'stale' trend it rotates into something more favorable.  In episode 12 of Top Trader Radio, we dive into why James believes his strategy has outperformed the market, the benefits of a sector rotational strategy, and how to keep your losses at a minimum.  "Everyone wants to invest in something long-term...but, before it becomes a good long-term trend it needs to be a good short-term trend."

It took a high school business teacher's stock market competition to inspire the interest of Danny Merkel, a portfolio manager and founder of the 'The Momentum of Now' C2 trading strategy. Danny's successful 10-year career in trading (mostly individual stocks of a wide variety, across many sectors) is methodological and rules-based: cut losers, let winners ride.  In Episode 11 of Top Trader Radio, Charley explores Danny's rigorous systematic approach to trading, the best advice he's ever received, the benefits of varying stocks across many sectors, and even dives into the future of Bitcoin from a trader's perspective. At the end of the day, Danny says, you need to learn to think in terms of the next 1,000 trades; position sizing and a little perspective is everything.   "When it comes to Bitcoin, you need an exit strategy. If you don't manage the risk, it could end up really bad." Danny Merkel Trade Leader, The Momentum of Now Danny Merkel is a trader from Toronto, Canada with over 10-years of experience. He applies Trend Following strategies to individual stocks and ETFs. You can connect with him on Twitter or follow his 3 strategies on Collective2.

This week our host Charley Wright welcomes David Stephens, a Silicon Valley software director and C2 trade leader to the podcast to discuss his background, start in trading, and his popular long-only strategy SystematicBlue SP500.  David prefers indices over individual stocks, an approach that he believes to be of much lower risk with less dependency on ‘market noise’. It’s important, David says, that every trader find what works for them.  According to David, whose day job has him working regularly with the likes of Nasa, BMW and Boeing, the amount of trading advice out there can be overwhelming. At the end of the day, be it mean reversion or price action, nobody can argue with what is working for you. 

Four years ago, Richard Metzger went from designing the logic that goes into cell phones, computers and electronics to designing trading algorithms for his own venture AlgorithmicTrading.net. The results in just a short time have been impressive.  In Episode 9 of Top Trader Radio, Richard and host Charley Wright cover a broad range of topics from why to avoid perfection to how to use inversely correlated instruments to hedge. Richard has algorithms for a variety of market conditions but within each strategy he advocates for simplicity when possible.  Richard offers one of his marquee strategies under the name Swing Trader ES TY on a privately branded Collective2 site.  "Always remember, don't let the perfect become the enemy of the sufficient ... because back-testing is only a small part of the battle. I've coded over 300 algorithms, almost all of which did poorly when applied to live trades. A few stood out as gems and those are what we offer to our customers today." Richard Metzger Founder, Lead Developer, Quant Algorithms LLC Richard spent over 10 years as a logic designer engineer at Fortune 500 companies including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Qualcomm. In 2013, after trading on the side during his entire career, he founded AlgorithmicTrading.net (now under parent company Quant Algorithms) to capitalize on his expertise in algorithm development, finite state machine coding/design and advanced mathematics. Richard has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with a computer science emphasis from Boise State. 

GD Singh is CFA Institute member and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst who, along with his team of research contributors that all boast similar credentials, manage dozens of strategies, each with a different risk/return profile designed to cater to a specific type of investor.   GD founded HedgedEquity in 2015 to provide access to signals from his portfolio of strategies that specialize in low volatility, alpha seeking equities, ETFs and futures strategies that are non-correlated to the traditional equity and bond indices.  Episode 8 of Top Trader Radio features host Charley Wright interviewing GD about the approach, market and personal philosophies, and style that drive his investment process.  On Collective2, you can find his strategies under the user NTLLC including Emini Short Term, Allcap Stocks Long Only, and SP Swing Trading among others. GD’s proprietary multi-instrument, multi-time frame trading strategies have been published on Collective2 since 2015. Our fundamental belief is centered around the fact that markets are inherently inefficient and often create pockets of opportunities for astute investors. GD Singh Founder,  Lead Portfolio Manager, HedgedEquity GD Singh is the founder of  HedgedEquity.com, a proprietary research entity that develops sophisticated ‘model’ portfolio strategies for the global investment community.  GD is a Chartered Alternative Investment analyst with over 20 years of trading and investment experience. He is also a standing member of the CFA institute. Born and raised in India, most of his prior experience was in technology and software companies having sold his first company at a young age of 22. He transitioned to managing his personal portfolios several years ago and decided to bring his strategies to the global community via his newly created venture – HedgedEquity.com. Mr. Singh is the lead portfolio manager and is assisted by a team of 6 CFA/CAIA charterholders, who help him in his research efforts. 

In 1995, Brad Pappas formed Rocky Mountain Humane Investing, Corp (RMHI), an independent Boulder investment advisory firm to cater to Vegan and Socially Responsible Investing.  RMHI was the first investment adviser in the United States that focused exclusively on humane and environmentally screening as part of a socially responsible investing philosophy. In Episode 7 of Top Trader Radio, Brad and host Charley Wright talk about the investment approach behind several strategies tracked on Collective2 including Optimized Partners I and The Vegan Growth Portfolio.  Topics include trend following, what makes a market worthy of investment, and the common question of whether socially responsible investing means sacrificing performance.  Brad's proprietary ranking and trading systems have been public on Collective2.com  since 2013.

Alessandro Cocciola designs and develops quantitative, mechanical trading strategies that utilize proprietary measurements to determine the market regime along with a scoring system for S&P equities. His flagship strategy Carma Stocks is a mean reversion swing trading strategy that filters for oversold and overbought stocks. The strategy trades only highly liquid stocks, both long and short. In Episode 6 of Top Trader Radio, Alessandro and host Charley Wright talk about the investment approach behind Carma Stocks, the importance of matching trading methods to your personality, lessons learned about liquidity from the perils of 2008, and the characteristics that have lead to Alessandro's success as a portfolio manager. 

Software Architect Daniel Tochner wanted a way to backtest, optimize, and execute multiple algorithmic trading strategies at a portfolio level. When he was unable to find a platform that was capable of the heavy lifting required to meet his needs, he set out to design and build it himself, and IQBroker was born. In Episode 5 of Top Trader Radio, Daniel and host Charley Wright cover the features and benefits of the IQBroker software which was recently selected as Collective2’s first Preferred Trading Platform.  Daniel explains how IQBroker allows multiple strategies, within a single portfolio, to trade multiple symbols, on multiple exchanges… and to use multiple bar-types, news feeds, RSS feeds, and fundamental data. The result of over 11 years of R&D, IQBroker is one of the most powerful and feature-rich broker-neutral trading platforms for equities, futures and forex. IQBroker has received rave reviews from quantitative and algorithmic traders all over the world. 

After numerous failed attempts at discretionary trading, Paolo Geronazzo returned to his IT roots and began developing rules-based trading strategies. Many years of rigorous back-testing later, a mean-reversion strategy targeting the S&P 500 E-mini Futures emerged as "the star" and ANTARES SP500 was born. In this episode, Charley and Paolo go into great detail about the workings of the strategy and the methods used to succeed with a contrarian strategy in what has seemed like a relentless bull market. Hint, ANTARES SP500 has more than one way to shine.  

This week host Charley Wright spoke with John Netto, a professional, independent futures trader based in Las Vegas. John has managed risk in the global markets, the world of sports as a teenage bookie, and as a United States Marine.   Charley and John covered many topics, including his 600-page book “The Global Macro Edge” and his view on the three dimensions of measuring returns, the 3rd dimension being his namesake  - the Netto Number.

Listen as Charley talks to Matthew Klein, the CEO of Collective2, an investing web site where great traders from around the world ask Collective2 to track their brokerage results in real-time. Then other investors can “subscribe” to these traders, and automatically follow their trades in their own brokerage account. Collective2 was founded in 2001. It has more than 100,000 registered users and 15,000 published strategies. Over $75 million dollars of investor capital is connected to the Collective2 platform.

Charley interviews Mario Randholm, Trade Leader for the options premium selling strategy R-Option.  "This business is about risk management. You could have the best models .. but if you are wrong with risk management, you will not succeed."