023: David Bush – The transition from discretionary to quantitative trading & how to optimise your strategy (Founder of Alphatative)

I was fortunate enough to speak with David Bush, an extraordinary, seasoned trader with 20 years experience in financial markets.

David comes from a non-traditional background, and what I mean by this; he has no formal education in the field of finance. In fact, he is a music graduate and performed as a professional musician for many years.

But as you’re about to hear, David changed paths during his twenties to become a trader. After overcoming the initial challenges that all new market participants endure, David did well for himself as a discretionary trader for many years.

But with an urge to optimize his trading approach he gradually transitioned into a quantitative trader and went searching for new ways to exploit opportunities within the market. From there David has gone on to take out the number one spot of BattleFin’s ‘Sharpe Ratio Shootout’ (an international quantitative finance tournament), with over 3000 competitors.

During our interview David brings a really insightful take to topics such as the transition from discretionary to quantitative trading, how to eliminate a single point of failure by trading multiple systems, and how the Monte Carlo tool can teach you a lot about how robust your strategy really is.