I guess that's getting close to the question we asked in last month's headline "Nanoseconds for All? UBS BizDev Says HFT Will Diffuse to Asset Managers (when do mom and pop go low latency?)".
From Forbes:
Six flights up in a dim, grungy office building in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, Christopher Ivey is working on what he thinks is the next step in the evolution of trading. His efforts also serve as a subtle reminder that the current bull market seems to be a bit frothy.HT: The Big Picture
Armed with $4.5 million in funding, the 2011 Harvard grad recently launched a Web-based platform called Rizm, designed to let individual investors with no coding skills build computer programs that select and trade stocks automatically, similar to the trading programs used by quant funds and high-frequency trading firms.
The pitch: For $99 per month investors get quick cloud access to sophisticated algorithm-building tools and the capability to back-test strategies. You can easily generate rapid-fire executable trades, sans emotion, and place them with an e-broker. Suddenly the notion of blasting out math-driven trades like über-successful quant hedge funds, such as James Simons‘ Renaissance Technologies, are a few clicks away.
“If you can only follow five trades a day, because that’s the mental bandwidth for a human trader, now run it against 500 stocks,” says Ivey. “Or just let it run on your five, and go spend time with your daughter and hang out, because it’s running for you.”
If that sounds like trouble–amateurs turning their financial ovens to high and then leaving the house unattended–you’d better get used to it. This is the natural evolution of the self-directed trading boom that started with Charles Schwab and the deregulation of commissions in 1975. Cheap technology and sophisticated engineers have disrupted almost every other aspect of Wall Street. Now we get hedge fund tools for the masses. Besides Ivey’s startup, EquaMetrics, there are at least four other companies offering programming-free algorithm builders that sport slick names like CoolTrade and Prodigio....MORE
Tangentially related:
"New Baby Boomer Hobby: Trading Options"
Anybody else getting that Danse Macabre feeling?...Equity Trading Technology: Good Luck Puny Human
