hi Nortibahappy to discuss your thoughts on Algo trading ... but...

hi Nortiba
happy to discuss your thoughts on Algo trading ... but not really sure what you are trying to say in your first few paragraphs. Correct me if I am wrong but I think you are refering to the predatory trading that almost all Instos, market makers and other boutique HFT funds do these days. Arbitrage, flash trading, ghosting or similar are almost no brainers for these big boys because most of them are the actual exchange, especially FX, and it almost guarantees them income. I dont recommend anyone try to bother with this type of thing unless you sit on a FX Spot desk in an IB and have some brilliant coders working with you.

Now I take Algo trading to mean anything at all that involves an algorithm and Quant to mean anything that uses anykind of quantitative analysis (simple or complex) to arrive at some decision or set of decisions. You can still have successful algo trading strats based on some simple rules and deployed through a automatic platform and have little in common with the conventional HFT guys.

I started this thread to find people in Perth who can do this or who want to do this or have great ideas but dont quite have sufficient coding skills or who are great prop or discretionary traders but suffer the wide spreads of retail trading platforms.

With regards to dark pools and position aggregation, there is nothing that can hide you except false signals ... but hey if they know your strategy they are more likey to just follow it rather than battle you (dont ask how I know this).

I see there is much more to algo trading than just that indicated in your message - however definitely it is what the news headlines appear to latch on to these days.

anyways good discussion on the whole algo thing ...