A new service for retail investors

Here is a new low-cost service called Alerts4All that offers technical trading signals for retail investors. You can, for example, have an alert sent to you every time a "Double bottom" pattern occurs.

A much more advanced version of the service will be rolled out soon -- I saw a demo today where you can backtest your strategies online, combining different fundamental and/or technical variables as entry or exit signals. They also have some built-in models for you to adapt (e.g. a model based on The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt.) More interestingly, you can look at other people's trading models and their historical and/or real-time performance.

Matlab or Alphacet it is not, but I think it will be quite useful for many retail traders. It might even be useful to professional traders who want a quick-and-dirty way to test out ideas.

Trader tax proposal will be the death knell for statistical arbitrage

U.S. Congressman Peter DeFazio, introduced H.R. 1068: “Let Wall Street Pay for Wall Street's Bailout Act of 2009”, which aims to impose a 0.25% transaction tax on the “sale and purchase of financial instruments such as stock, options, and futures.

Ladies and gentlemen, 0.25% is 50 basis points round-trip. Few if any statistical arbitrage strategies can survive this transaction tax.

And no, this is not "Wall Street paying for Wall Street's Bailout". This is small-time independent trader-entrepreneur like ourselves paying for Wall Street's Bailout.

Furthermore, this tax will drain the US market of liquidity, and ultimately will cost every investor, long or short term, a far greater transaction cost than 0.25%.

If you want to stop this insanity, please sign this online petition.