The burning questions, in celebration of explosive growth

The community has exploded in size over the last few weeks and months.

I’m going to be honest, I’ve always hoped the Discord Community would grow, but I didn’t expect it to get this big, this fast. We’re over 1750 members at this point! Its wild to me that so many people want to join the discussion on Algorithmic Investing, so I want to thank you for the contributions you’ve made to making the community a fun place to hang out, and an incredibly valuable resource for anyone interested in Finance, the Stock Market, Crypto, AI, and anything that touches those topics.

The explosion of new members has made me to reflect on the intro process to Algorithmic Investing, and Composer itself. With this in mind, this one is for all the newbies. The people finding their way around Composer. I’m going to lay out the FAQ that we get in our Newbie Help channel over on the server. It’s not intended to replace the FAQ provided by Composer. (Seriously, check it out. Its very helpful and well written.) This is more of a compliment, an addition, than a replacement or anything like that.

With the sap out of the way, lets hit the most common question first:

I’m not in the United States, how can I use Composer?

Currently, Composer does not support international accounts. If you really, really want to run a strategy, you can find someone in the Community to post their trades for a symphony, but that is about it.

Can I trade Crypto/Futures/FOREX?

You can trade any asset listed on the NYSE, NASDAQ, or BATS. This means no Futures, no Forex, and no Crypto, which given my personal view of Composers use-case, is ideal.

How Do I trade on intraday timeframes?

Simple answer - You don’t.

Composer trades once daily, assuming your conditions for trading are met. Between 3:40 and 4:00 PM, the logic of your symphony is run, and a determination of what and how much to trade is made. If you feel like you need to hit the eject button and liquidate a symphony prior to this window, you have until the beginning of the window to do so. Composer, for better or worse, is not that kind of trading platform currently.

How do I build a strategy that buys and holds for a length of time?

Email [email protected] to signal boost this request!

In my opinion, when designing a symphony it’s best to stop looking at Composer as a trading platform. You aren’t setting “Buys” and “Sells” as a trader would recognize them. When building your strategy, you set conditions in which the portfolio rebalances into a given set of assets depending on what conditions have been met at that time.

For the above reason, I look at Composer as the most advanced, most detailed, and most technically enabled Portfolio Management tool on the market. Since making that mindset shift, I have found myself much more able to create compelling, theoretically sound symphonies.

“Hello Composer Staff, who can I talk to about partnerships?”

We aren’t affiliated with Composer, outside of being the meeting place for power users and people who just really like to talk about stocks. I can’t offer any real support or a direct line to Composer the company, the best advice I can offer is emailing [email protected].

Why can’t I see the option to allocate to cash?

You cannot directly allocate to cash, anything you see in a backtest or live trading listed as USD (that isn’t the Semiconductor ticker) is a leftover as a result of non-fractionable shares. In my unprofessional opinion, just use SHY/BIL/UUP/GLD. Better yet, a basket of all 4! They serve the same purpose the majority of the time.

How do I integrate FRED data in to my strategies? Orderflow data, anything like that?

Email [email protected] and tell them to move it up in their roadmap! The more of us that tell them to do it, the better the odds it happens faster.

Currently, data is limited to tickers listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, and BATS.

If I invested in a symphony that someone else created, what happens if they change it?

If you’ve invested in it, nothing happens. When you invest in the symphony, a copy is created that is entirely under your control. If you were to just follow the symphony however, any changes the original creator makes will be reflected on your follow page!

All of the strategies you people make look really overfit, is anyone actually making money with these?

Yes to both questions. When you look through the Symphony Database of about 1500 community-created symphonies (again, not Composer created, verified, or sanctioned. It’s all Community-Created madness in there) there are probably 1400 that are absolute overfit trash. But in those 100 that aren’t overfit trash, you get gems like Golden Dragon and TQ3 For The Long Term. Nothing in life is easy, and that’s why this newsletter is named The Hard Road.

Its a predictable consequence of gathering 1800 people who range from actual quants at trading firms, data scientists, rocket scientists, engineers, coders, day trading veterans, on and on to average every day people, like me! Not all the strategies are good, let alone functional, but that is why Garen and I started this newsletter, as well as our Premium Edition which showcases strategies that have been run live for extended periods of time in an attempt to validate their logic.

We can discuss how exactly to tell if something is overfit in another edition, but I’m running out of room here.

I’ll definitely be doing another one of these going over the concept of overfitness, and anything that you tell me about down in the comments, or over on the Discord Server!

Looking for a deeper dive?

Check out Garen’s in-depth course, or 1 on 1 coaching!