Vince Notardonato had finally realized his ambition of trading for a living even before he started using the NeuroShell DayTrader Professional. He had previously worked for a firm at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where he did yield spread trading at the Eurodollar arbitration desk. He liked his job, but he wanted something more – to be his own boss and to fully profit himself from his skills. Furthermore, he wanted to computerize his trading systems, realizing that analytical models were the future of successful trading.

After taking the step of trading for himself for a living, he did fairly well, but he does even better with the NeuroShell DayTrader. “Before NeuroShell I needed to trade 15-20000 shares per day to make $1000; now I can make the same amount trading less than 10000 shares. That’s a considerable cost savings.”

Although Vince now has very profitable systems, he is quick to point out that profit isn’t the main reason he enjoys the NeuroShell DayTrader. “What I like the most is the flexibility. When I have an idea, I can quickly try it out. That way I sort out those ideas that work from those that don’t. I filter out the noise in my systems, so to speak.”

Vince switched to the NeuroShell DayTrader after he read a review in Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine. He was intrigued by the possibility of adding artificial intelligence to his trading systems. He has had the system about a year at this writing, and all of us at Ward Systems have come to regard Vince among our favorite customers because of his pleasant telephone personality. So we decided to try to find out his secrets. We were not really surprised to find that there were no big secrets – just sensible traditional trading systems carefully augmented by genetic algorithm optimization. Vince hasn’t even gotten around yet to trying neural nets.

We asked Vince for some details about his systems. “I just day trade listed stocks, long and short,” he explained. “I usually open about 20 to 30 positions a day, and I start exiting a few minutes before the market closes. I don’t hold overnight.”

What about Vince’s indicators? “I like to make sure volume is increasing when I go long, and when I go short. So I use a lot of price and volume indicators, but my favorite is directional movement index (DMI). I have quite a few moving average crossover systems. Oh, and I use trailing stops quite a bit in my NeuroShell DayTrader systems.”

As is our usual custom, we asked Vince whether he uses his own intuition to override his NeuroShell models. “Almost never,” he stated flatly. “I have several years of thinking and testing in my systems, and I don’t want a momentary impulse to override all of that.”