Ready to level up your trading? Tune in to hear from professional traders — from quantitative to fundamental, day traders to trend followers — as they share practical advice, tips, and insights on investing in the stock market. Join Trade Risk’s Evan Medeiros every other Monday as he chats with guests to help you become a smarter trader.
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Ready to level up your trading? Tune in to hear from professional traders — from quantitative to fundamental, day traders to trend followers — as they share practical advice, tips, and insights on investing in the stock market. Join Trade Risk’s Evan Medeiros every other Monday as he chats with guests to help you become a smarter trader.
Cesar Alvarez — Building quantitative trading systems to trade the stock market
Smarter Trading
54 minutes 10 seconds
4 years ago
Cesar Alvarez — Building quantitative trading systems to trade the stock market
Our guest today is Cesar Alvarez. From 2004 to 2013, Cesar was the Director of Trading Strategies at TradingMarkets.com and Connors Research. Cesar has developed strategies for private equity funds, authored multiple books on trading, and was a Software Engineer on the early versions of Microsoft Excel. He is well known in the quant community nowadays for his blog, Alvarez Quant Trading.
In this episode we talk about what it means to be a systems trader. Why Cesar willingly leaves money on the table in order to be fully systematic, and why it’s so important a traders personality matches their trading strategy.
We then get Cesar’s research process, how he finds ideas, develops systems, and then maintains and reviews those systems.
Please enjoy this episode with professional trader Cesar Alvarez.
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This episode is sponsored by Investor’s Business Daily. IBD has helped investors navigate every market cycle with their time-tested methodology for over 35 years. Right now Smarter Trading podcast listeners can get their first 2 months of IBD Digital, a subscription service that gives you access to IBD’s proprietary market analysis and top trade ideas for only $20 by signing up at investors.com/evan.
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What you'll learn in this episode
0:00 Introduction2:50 Cesar’s background and how he got started6:30 Director of research with Larry Connors9:18 Why Cesar moved on from discretionary trading12:50 Cesar’s current philosophy and way he approaches trading15:05 Why Cesar knows he’s leaving money on the table being fully systematic19:10 Research piece: how often does a 5% pullback turn into 10% or 20%25:20 Research piece: trend versus momentum trading strategies28:15 What is “good enough” for Cesar to use as a trading system32:05 Classifying trading systems: mean reversion, trend, momentum, rotational35:05 Matching personalities and trading systems37:20 Mean reversion strategies and stop losses39:45 strategy review and thinking about system optimization43:30 Seasonality as a factor and intraday trading strategies45:55 New quant traders and learning how to code
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Ready to level up your trading? Tune in to hear from professional traders — from quantitative to fundamental, day traders to trend followers — as they share practical advice, tips, and insights on investing in the stock market. Join Trade Risk’s Evan Medeiros every other Monday as he chats with guests to help you become a smarter trader.
