STA Blog

I attended the Technicals to Trading Systems conference that the STA held on the 18th of April. Although this was not entirely my “wheelhouse” as a more traditional chartist, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Firstly, I want to say that I was completely blown away by the calibre of the speakers. They were truly outstanding, and to have such a great group of speakers in one place and access to such an enormous amount of knowledge and experience was quite frankly a privilege. But more than that, the conference delivered on so many other levels, from the variety of people attending to the networking opportunities. I met everyone from students to private investors to seasoned professionals. I even had one guy say he knew who I was because he recognized my voice from all the podcasts I do as a content editor (which made me feel famous!).

I was thrilled to realize that some people had flown in just for the event. We had one lady attending from Florida and some from Germany, Ireland and Slovenia, and it was so nice to actually see them in person and chat with them. I was really surprised that they didn’t just opt for the hybrid option and actually wanted to attend the conference in person.

Although this was our first one-day conference, it did not feel like it. The organization of it was just so professional, and our thanks should go out to Eddie Tofpik as the facilitator and host who kept the whole conference running smoothly and on time. I think he did an amazing job, together with Katie Abberton and Vandita Chisholm, who helped to keep the whole day running seamlessly. Everybody I spoke to thoroughly enjoyed it, and in fact, the whole conference felt pretty buzzy to me.

I received some great feedback this morning from someone who flew over for the event, and he thought it was excellent. He enjoyed the talks, the speakers, and the chance to meet other traders, network, and hear alternative perspectives. I also spoke to someone who watched the event online, and he said that he is looking forward to getting the recordings so he can go over some of it again because it contained such great information.

There were some clear themes coming through from several of the speakers such as keeping it simple and not making it too complex and to be careful with the data sets used to back test. I found what Rob Carver does in this respect was pretty interesting and Perry Kaufman put great emphasis on the robustness of any system was another theme. I just loved the way he admitted stealing some ideas from his wife (I personally thought this was hilarious!)

Jessica James talk about inflation and the fact that the Bank of England has 800 years (yes you heard that right!!) of inflation data that is freely available! was a golden nugget of information just tossed into the middle of her talk.

Some of the highlights for me were that we had absolutely fantastic speakers on the panel, and their level of expertise just shone through. It was so interesting to hear their thoughts on what is next for systematic trading. And there were some little things like Trevor’s point (and Mathew Verdouw made a similar point) about back testing is where a lot of people start and may not be the best thing to do; and there was a slide at the end Jason’s talk giving links and places to go to learn more about Python that I just thought that was great – I love anything that involves saving me time!

I also felt that the presentation by the AlphaMind guys, where it just felt like a conversation between them and us (the audience), was a great end to the day.