Bill Cruz and Ralph Cruz: Rescuing charting from the dark ages

摘要

Bill and Ralph Cruz learned chaos early. Both born in Cuba during the Castro revolution, they escaped with their family to Miami, where their father, a successful lawyer in Cuba, worked as a hospital orderly and then as a librarian to give his family a new life in the United States. Perhaps it was this background that spurred the young men to get interested in the markets and turn chaos into order. Whatever made the founders of Omega Research, today TradeStation, find interest in the markets, it was their early losses that prompted them to try to quantify what they learned. "What started SystemWriter was our own need," says Ralph Cruz. "We got excited about trading and so we did what most traders do, read a lot of books, went to a lot of seminars on how to make decisions on when to buy and when to sell. After all this research, we thought we knew what we were doing and put together our start up capital, which was our life savings at the time, about $2000, and within a short amount of time we lost about every penny we had. This was the early 1980s when PCs were just getting started. It made us realize that a lot of times you read about things in books or hear things in seminars and they sound great, and may be great, but you don't know until you put your money on it. We thought there [must be] a way to test ideas before we put our money on the line. That was the genesis of SystemWriter."