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Is it harder to come up a new idea for a trading strategy or is it harder to actually implement the system to perform those trades? Not being in that industry,

Is it harder to come up a new idea for a trading strategy or is it harder to actually implement the system to perform those trades? Not being in that industry, to me it seems like the easiest part is coming up with a new trading idea. The hardest part would seem to be actually implementing it without bugs. Therefore, I'm not sure if noncompete clauses really provide a super-significant amount of value. Even if you left a firm with a super good trading strategy today and wanted to implement it elsewhere, you're still going to have to perfectly re-build it, which is probably not trivial.

22SAS 4y ago
Both. If one is on a competitive exchange or a latency-sensitive asset class, need to be both smart and fast. Also, strategies change all the time and are mostly the domain of quants and traders. What they did a year ago, could very well be history at the firm they worked at. I'd say an idea that generates alpha is tougher. I have seen firms like XR have great technology, but sucky ideas. They were fast, not smart and hence they didn't make a killing like their competitors did, due to all the volatility in the last three years.