One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to during my 2 hours of commute time each day is "How I Built This", it is a podcast in which Guy Raz from NPR interviews entrepreneurs and innovators. In a recent episode, Guy was interviewing Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Jimmy referred to a quote from the software community, "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" (quote attributed to Eric S. Raymond 1999). This quote, referred to as Linus's Law really speaks to my vision of a community of amateur automated traders. If you read my first blog about my vision (and if you didn't, now you know anyway) that I believe expert advisors can be developed, modified, and decommissioned all in a relatively short time and be profitable. I envision a team of traders with multiple abilities that manage a team of expert advisors. The EA's don't have to be perfect and withstand any market condition, just the current market conditions (provided other parameters such as trade side are efficiently managed). Anyway, back to Linus's Law and how it pertains to my vision. The quote speaks to the value of a fresh perspective. Most coders know that they can be banging their head against the wall trying to de-bug a program but once they finally swallow their pride and ask their buddy to check it for them, the bug is usually promptly identified. This principle is a key part of having a flexible team or "robot pit crew." With a team of traders debugging and back testing expert advisors to be ready to "play", development and testing of the EA's can happen at a quicker rate. For example, today July 16th, we could be preparing for some specific events we might expect to see on the August NFP Report. With an efficient team, we could definitely identify a strategy, build, and de-bug an EA in the next couple of weeks to be ready for the big day.
