Daytrading on Steroids

I’ve posted this article before on my old site and thought it was fitting to re-post it here. It’s a story about a company called Tradebot Systems, Inc. CEO David Cummings, a former commodity pit trader and programmer, built an Automated Trading System, or Tradebot, which trades between 50 and 100 million shares a day! Wow!

Tradebot trades 50 million to 100 million shares a day. Anywhere from 1 billion to 2 billion shares trade daily on Nasdaq.

That means billions of dollars worth of equities pass through Tradebot’s software-driven trading system each day. At any given time, you might walk in and see that the firm has traded 20 percent of Yahoo! Inc.’s daily volume. The stock doesn’t stay for long: Tradebot starts each day holding no shares and ends each day holding no shares. It makes profits in the fractions of pennies on each share by quickly buying and selling. When all the gains are added up, you might have a $50,000 day, Cummings said. It’s day-trading on steroids,” he said.

All the money is the firm’s. It has no customers and uses no outside capital. Instead, Cummings is slowly ratcheting up the amount of trades using Tradebot’s profit each day. He started with $25,000 in a spare bedroom of his house in 1999 via San Jose Business Journal.

This is my ultimate goal is to build an ATS like this and I’ve found a worthy partner to do it with. I will be teaming with an experienced daytrader and high level programmer in the second half of the year to build a system like. I’ll be bring my expertise in Neural Net’s and AI to the table, hopefully we can make some money doing this!



Date
May 17, 2007