Читать книгу Quantitative Trading - Ernest P. Chan - Страница 15

Here is the biggest and most obvious difference between quantitative trading and other small businesses. Marketing is crucial to most small businesses—after all, you generate your revenue from other people, who base their purchase decisions on things other than price alone. In trading, your counterparties in the financial marketplace base their purchase decisions on nothing but the price. Unless you are managing money for other people (which is beyond the scope of this book), there is absolutely no marketing to do in a quantitative trading business. This may seem obvious and trivial, but is actually an important difference, since the business of quantitative trading allows you to focus exclusively on your product (the strategy and the software), and not on anything that has to do with influencing other people's perception of yourself. To many people, this may be the ultimate beauty of starting your own quantitative trading business. Of course, if you plan to manage other people's money, marketing will be more important. But even then, I have learned that a good investment product (a.k.a. a consistently profitable strategy) practically markets itself. Conversely, even if a superstar salesperson managed to market a mediocre product to an unwitting customer, retention of that customer is going to be an uphill battle.