Strategy Frameworks vs Black Boxes


The push to write this article in particular came due to numerous amounts of similar questions that come in from NinjaCoding clients and visitors who want to buy strategies published on the website. In his article I will try to answer some of the most famous ones that get asked almost every time.

I mainly provide frameworks where I see edge that have been tested for some proof of concept in one way or the other. Please understand the concept of my project correctly. I am not here to test everything I release and review and bring it out into the world ready to be turned on. That is simply impossible.

My aim is to provide inspiration and knowledge. I produce the idea and the code behind. There is risk involved in absolutely every single release. You can burn the account and at the same time you can become a very wealthy person. It all depends on you. My aim is to provide the instrument but it is up to user to take it to the next step which suits his personality, character, risk management and trading approach.


Are these strategies "ready to trade" out of the box?

This is my favourite one in fact! I always want to answer, yeah, its ready to trade, it has been back tested throughout with tons of stress applied, it has been on sim, live, montecarlo, walkforward and all possible test variations that you can imagine and it also keeps on running , trading and making money and guess what, you also get the source code and the best fit parameters for any symbol of your choice and all of that for just 99.99$. Sounds like a perfect deal yet?) Just plug'n'play and chill! Sometimes I think maybe that is the way we should sell our strategies, just make a one pager with all these shouting details and boost up a campaign on traffic, just make people believe that something will work with zero effort, turn it on like a TV and watch it make you a living. 

Unfortunately we don't believe it works like that, we don't believe you can buy a black box and it will work for everyone just like that. However you might get lucky and turn it on in the period of it making new equity highs for a while but overall if you don't want to get engaged in the process and think you can play a passive game, our strategies are not for you. Sorry.


Do I have to conduct extensive testing on my own until I find the most optimal settings? 

Yes you do. We used to provide a few templates with our strategies that showed good WFO results but they would get out of dated at some point and became irrelevant. We thought that would justify the sales for people who wanted to rent the strategy without the need to get too much involved with the process.

Overall this would mean that we need to maintain all our strategies constantly and retest and review their performance. This is a huge span of work that we are not able to provide, especially with a price that can be afforded by most people who want to learn, explore and grow.

Mostly, when the strategy is published we do run some proof of concept tests so that people can understand that the idea behind is worthwhile exploring. Our aim is to motivate our customers to get engaged in learning the logic behind the strategy code. We also provide complete strategy source code review for those who are motivated to extend the code or learn the strategy coding principles we follow.

Do you offer a free-trial?

There is no trial simply because for most of our products we offer source code with code review straight out of the box. 

Can you share performance metrics?

We do not share our private fund performance metrics, however some of the strategies that you would find on the website are used extensively in our private fund for trading. 

In your video you are showing good results on a period of time but the strategy might show bad results on a different period of time.

When I read this comment under one of the videos I was actually quite happy that people start realizing this obvious nature of strategy design and we don't have to explain over and over again that you cannot make a strategy work forever, there will be periods of doubt and forgiveness, there will be periods of happiness and joy. Our aim is to educate people and make them understand that there is no magic pill here, we are sharing the concept, the code and the inspiration. We are not here to solve everybody's problems so they can relax.