An interview with successul trader Gianluca

Hello, could you introduce yourself? What is your profession?
Hello, I am a Threadripper self-employed person with a passion for technology and trading.
I am a sports teacher also, so I like nature and spend some time fit and training myself, it makes me free from stress, and gives me more energy mentally.

How did you start with algo-trading?
I started with algo trading firstly in 2000 with Metastock and Call and Put options, which had some liquidity issues that screwed my systems so I paused. I re-started more seriously in 2016 when I wanted to try to get some profit from forex trading, initially buying Eas from Marketplace.
What happened is that I bought a lot of them, and almost all of them start to fail very soon. So I started to indicate what could be the issue, using manipulated data I found out how to see if an EA could read the data name, and using data shift I found out a lot of EAs that were pure scams. For sure the major part was overoptimized and some even curve-fitted.
So I started to investigate how to create an EA  without going through a manual process, but with the help of software.
I was very happy when I found Strategyquant in 2017/2018 and waited the exit of SQx to be able to use 64-bit calculation power of multicores CPUs before buying the software ( at that time only 3.8 – 32-bit was available but SQx was already announced)

How long it took to be successful, and what was the breaking point?
When I bought SQx I decided to use it extensively, without going demo or live. For one year I tested and retested and tried to demonstrate how the finals strategy could behave in the future. So I decided to pretend to live one year before, and be in 2018, while we were already in 2019. I never generated/retested/robustness test any of my strats in 2019.
When all workflow was finished, I then made the portfolio, of course, looking at the correlation, and then retest the strats on 2019 year and see if the strats were profitable.
If not, re-do the workflow from scratch with new ideas, and cycle the above scenario once again.

Gianluca’s live track-record obtained from real account

What do you like the most about algo-trading?
That it’s a pre-plan you prepare before, and you don’t have to be in the live action. It’s stressful for me to be a manual trader. I can’t stand it. I am not one of them, I feel comfortable if I let the strategies do the work.
I think the motto trading is like going to war and you need many soldiers (strategies) is perfectly fitting the idea of trading.

What is your favorite StrategyQuant X feature?
The CP (custom project) that allows us to prepare the workflow from the “A” to the “Z”.
The process of creating a workflow is what I like more and only with StrategyQuant X become easy and doable without programming skills, and this is also ideal for time-saving, this energy and time you can deliver to other tasks.

How long are you using StrategyQuant X?
I bought my licenses in 2018. I tested for 2 years before going live.
I am still trading the strategies built in the years 2019/2020.
I am trying to improve my portfolio nowadays by adding more strategies and more markets.

Are you primarily trading strategies created in StrategyQuant X?
This is true, in the last time I trade ONLY with StrategyQuant X.
There are several reasons:
I think the strategies generated are broker independent and can run without the issue of trading conditions (slippage, execution time, latency, requotes) on all brokers.
You know they are Robust, because you created them, so you can trust them more than the ones you buy.

Could you tell us more about the workflow which you are using for creating and selecting the best strategies?
I think there are no shortcuts. I mean why have fear to delete a good strategy, if that one does not pass one of your Robustness tests?
I am very disciplined and motivated to use only the ones that survive all the passes I use.
Just to mention some, I do multi markets retest, all MCs, SPP, and WFM, I never optimize, I have good reason to believe that better to archive a good performance with many Robust strategies, than nice looking that can probably fail.

What is your philosophy for creating an optimal portfolio?
When I create a Portfolio I follow the universal rules, no secrets here: Choose more markets to allow us to have different correlations, and I look for stability and less DD. I Never look at max performance.

Are you using strategy parameters recommended by optimization or do you use a different way?
I don’t Optimize to get a better- looking curve, I optimize as Robustness test only.
Actually, I started in January 2023 to let run 2 different versions of the same strategy, one with no optimization, the other sequential optimized.
So I need to wait 1 year to see the results, maybe we can make another interview later ? 🙂

Every portfolio sometimes suffers from drawdown. What is your approach to overcoming it and maintaining confidence in your robots?
I use a simple rule: if the strategy starts to bend the curve, I check the backtest to see if it reaches and goes beyond the max DD. Looking at the main scenario is helpful to avoid to deleting/removing a strategy, that in the past already  had the same behavior. So no need to remove it.

Is there any source of knowledge that you would like to recommend to other traders?
I don’t have a particular book because I didn’t read anything. I checked all StrategyQuant recommendations and I sticked to them.

Do you have any tips about what to avoid or be aware of in algo-trading?
My tips and recommendation are to have patience and discipline, don’t think trading is a sprint, because in-fact it is more a marathon.
With these words I mean to let the strategy run and trade and don’t touch them for at least 1 year.

Would you like to share some recommendations to other algo-developers, what to focus on, etc.?
Use every button of the software, every drop-down menu and tab, explore every aspect of this Formula 1 car, the setup is really huge and your idea can make the difference!
Time dedicated to this task is the best one, be genial and think out of the box, your thoughts need to have a chance and be under test at least!