About the Nirvana Club
Greetings!
I'm Ed Downs, the Founder and CEO of Nirvana Systems, Inc. and I'd like to welcome you to the Nirvana Club information section.
The Nirvana Club is a very unique group of OmniTrader users who are involved with Nirvana in advancing the power of OmniTrader. Nirvana Club members enjoy many benefits. They gain access to ARM technology and other proprietary Nirvana Products and participate with us in the development of New Products. And they belong to community of like-minded traders.
The primary goal of the Club has been to create Trading Systems that are sufficiently accurate to engage the markets in fully-automated trading. The Club reached this goal in 2007 with the introduction and automation of NSP-31 and other ARM3 Strategies. We continued to enhance the performance by adding Pattern Recognition, and then with the addition of our new consensus block to ARM4 in 2009. Now, with ARM5, we were able to dramatically improve the Genetic Algorithm, or “G.A.” With this new technology we have achieved unprecedented accuracy & profits. This is a very exciting juncture for the Club!
The story of the Nirvana Club begins with the founding of Nirvana Systems and the development of our first Trading Robot.
History of the Nirvana Club
Back in 1987, I had studied Technical Analysis for five years, and was convinced that profitable trading could be 100% automated. It was that conviction that led me to form my company, Nirvana Systems, Inc. But, rather than re-create my own Technical Analysis software, I decided to create a software robot that could run the other software, from the outside, to achieve this goal.
That is, rather than write a Technical Analysis program from scratch, I planned to use existing programs like MetaStock™, TBSP™, AIQ™ and CompuTrac™ to harness their analysis power. In other words, use those programs to find signals and then automate everything else.
You may remember the T.B.S.P. ads, saying, "You could have turned $6,000 into $8 Million trading index options using our software." There were similar ads for other programs. With my software robot, I could automate and test the heck out of them. If one didn't work, I'd find another that did. I was very excited.
1990: KLATU is Born
We spent about two years developing KLATU™ - named after a science fiction character in the movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." We added a telephony speech device from Texas Instruments so KLATU could call up a trader when conditions were met, and verbally inform him or her of a signal, such as, "The S&P just hit an MACD intraday buy signal on heavy volume." The trader could answer back, "Buy 2 contracts at market" and KLATU would reply, "Acknowledged. Two at market... Fill confirmed.."
IT WORKED! We placed KLATU with a number of traders who began engaging the market with it. In 1989, Frank Taucher, author of The SuperTrader’s Almanac, conferred his "Product of the Year Award" for our creation, because he could see the enormous potential of it. The feat accomplished by KLATU has never been duplicated by any other software company.
But there was a problem. The trading software we were driving wasn’t powerful enough. I automated and tested programs like T.B.S.P., AIQ, MetaStock, Telescan (and others) and quickly discovered that they would not generate consistent profits in mechanical trading.
The Time To Join Is Now!
I tried writing my own systems using CompuTrac. But I quickly realized that indicators don’t work very well across a wide range of market conditions. Writing a purely mechanical trading system using ANY toolbox program was extremely difficult, if not impossible.
1991: The Director Series
In order to keep the company viable, we created automation products using this new software robot technology. In 1991 we wrote and released specific utilities for MetaStock, Telescan, and AIQ... The Director Series. These products gave customers the ability to run massive tests on these programs (which they thought was great!) and enabled us to grow the company from 5 staff members to about 25.
While this was going on, I continued looking for that "magic" trading software that would really do the job. Our new utilities helped us a great deal, because we could mechanically back test lots of other software. And we did. But, nothing emerged with enough power for automated trading.
I began to realize we had to create our own system, because none of the existing packages automated the really important technical methods, such as Chart Patterns. Not to mention the fact that they were all based on fixed indicators and tools, and did not adapt to changing markets, which I decided was essential.
1993: OmniTrader Development
In late 1992, we started the OmniTrader Project. We began the task of writing a Windows trading program with automated analysis, built-in portfolio, Trading Game, and fully-automated signals based on the "voting" ideas embedded in our Director utilities.
A key component of OmniTrader’s original design was the Adaptive Reasoning Model, or ARM for short. The ARM approach is the method of adapting trading systems to markets, which is achieved in OmniTrader through the use of a back test on each trading system.
The benefit of this method is you never have to select which systems to apply – OmniTrader does it for you, automatically. We continue to get letters from customers who are amazed at how much it does, and how little we charge for it!
1996: The Nirvana Club is Launched
Still, I needed more accuracy in the Signals. In mid-1995, I discovered that by applying specific market measurements to trading signals, it was possible to measure the probability of a given signal being "correct". The approach was a big challenge, because it would involve billions of measurements and certainly many experiments before seeing any real results.
We could clearly see the research path to get to the next level of performance. But once again, our development had been slow because our programmers had to concentrate on the next version of OmniTrader to stay competitive. Venture Capital was expensive and time-consuming.
The answer came to me when I realized that our customers would enjoy participating in this development, and certainly would enjoy using the resulting products. Such a partnership would allow us to provide meaningful focus on Adaptive Reasoning Model 2. And, we could offer tremendous value for those customers who participated.
So, in 1996, we launched The Nirvana Club – and over 350 members joined on the initial announcement! This gave us the capital we needed to move forward with our research. We hired more programmers, got bigger, faster computers, and began crunching numbers.
The method I devised for combining Market Factors using Artificial Intelligence was very successful. Each year since the Club was launched, we have been developing and releasing ARM technology to members. Our first big milestone was hitting my initial goal of 70% signal accuracy in ARM2 Release 2 in 1998.
For ARM2 Release 3, we applied a commercial Neural Network to existing signals, providing a further boost in performance. For ARM2 Release 4, we worked on a specific pattern recognition project to produce VTL-B (valid trend line breaks), which again boosted performance. You can see charts from these older versions of ARM on the technology section of this web site.
2004: ARM3 - The Next Generation
The method I devised for combining Market Factors using Artificial Intelligence was very successful. Each year since the Club was launched, we have been developing and releasing ARM technology to members. Our first big milestone was hitting my initial goal of 70% signal accuracy in ARM2 Release 2 in 1998.
For ARM2 Release 3, we applied a commercial Neural Network to existing signals, providing a further boost in performance. For ARM2 Release 4, we worked on a specific pattern recognition project to produce VTL-B (valid trend line breaks), which again boosted performance. You can see charts from these older versions of ARM on the technology section of this web site.
2009: ARM4 - Mechanical ARM Strategies
In 2005, we released several new products to members including ARM3 on Chart Patterns and Intelligent Exits in Trade Plans. We also completed the first version of OmniTrader Professional powered by OmniPilot. And in July we held our first robotic trading competition - RoboCon - for members. The winning Strategy made an annual equivalent gain of 160%!
In 2006 we began using real exits in our Strategies, using Trade Plans and in 2007 we began providing profitable, Mechanical Strategies to members. The release of ARM4 in 2009 improved our Artificial Intelligence technology so dramatically that we were beginning to regularly see Strategies that exceed 80% accuracy. And now with the advancements of ARM5, our Artificial Intelligence continues to learn as new market data is introduced. There is no other organization on earth with trading technology like this!
And we haven’t even talked about the automation benefit that all members enjoy. Members have access to OmniTrader Professional and OmniPilot to automate these powerful Strategies! Many are using this new technology right now to set up their own automated trading accounts – precisely what I had envisioned when I started the Nirvana Club.
2010 and Beyond...
After ARM4, we continued to improve our Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network, creating a Deep Learning version in 2022. Each version is smarter, more accurate, and offers more benefit to our users.
The Benefits of Membership
I started the Club to fund development of the Ultimate Trading Machine. But a wonderful outcome of doing this was the creation of a community of OmniTrader customers who understand and support our mission. I continue to get letters from members with great new ideas and insights into how they are trading and how we can improve the software. And members share information with each other, too. The open interaction on the Club Forum is fabulous!
The Club is a savvy organization of traders from all over the world who are dedicated to our mission. Many of them have been staunch supporters of Nirvana since "the early days". All members gain access to the Nirvana Club Membership Directory and Forum. You will enjoy the opportunity to network with these members, who freely share their insights on the private site.
The Club has greatly enhanced the development process here at Nirvana. We regularly post products for testing and solicit feedback from members through our Forums, where we discuss current research and features for upcoming versions of ARM technology, OmniTrader and VisualTrader.
Now, let's talk about tangible benefits. When you join the Club, you receive the ARM technology that matches your membership level. You also get our most advanced Strategies and Trading Platforms.
See Benefits of Membership for a complete list of all Nirvana Club Benefits.
The Ultimate Trading Machine
The Ultimate Trading Machine is the "end goal" of The Nirvana Club. The original definition of UTM was "a machine that is so accurate it can trade the market automatically." When we launched the Club, we refined it as "any mechanical Strategy that generates 80% accuracy and a 3-to-1 Reward:Risk ratio (average profit divided by average loss greater than 3.)" Assuming trades last 1 week and the average win is 3% (average loss 1%) this performance will grow an account about 200% a year without using margin.
One of the Nirvana Club covenants, in the Nirvana Club Agreement, states that if and when we create a Strategy with this level of performance, only Nirvana Club Members will have access to it. The good news is, we are now seeing MECHANICAL TRADING PERFORMANCE that beats the Accuracy Requirement and the Reward:Risk ratio in separate Strategies. We believe it is now only a matter of time before we improve performance to the point where we have one or more Strategies that hit our UTM performance goal.
The good news is, we've have already achieved my original goal. It is now possible for Members to automate our ARM4 Strategies using OmniPilot! We have been looking forward to handing out buttons that say,
"I don't work... my computer supports me!"
Thanks for being a Nirvana customer. As an OmniTrader user, I know you already understand where I’m going with our products, and I appreciate your support. I want to encourage you to join our group of Nirvana Club traders. A Nirvana Club Membership is an investment that will pay dividends for years to come. See How to Join to find out how you can become a member.
Thanks again and best of luck in your trading endeavors.
Ed Downs
CEO and Founder
Nirvana Systems, Inc.