Michal Zaremba isn’t just another trader. He was the first to go live on AlgoCloud with real money — and he’s been pushing the platform’s limits ever since.

In this exclusive interview, Michal shares exactly what’s working in his trading, why most traders fail, and how to build a portfolio that survives any market condition. From strategy selection to using AI and no-code tools, this is a must-watch if you’re serious about trading smarter.

His advice is clear: don’t rush. Learn. Build confidence. Understand your strategies like employees — hire and fire them based on performance.

🔥 If you’re thinking about algorithmic trading or already building strategies in StrategyQuant or AlgoCloud — you need to hear this.

🎥 Watch the full interview now on YouTube — and take your algo trading to the next level.

transcript:

I started my trading journey in 2017 and Strategic One in my opinion is great
prepared to be automated, but the discussion with AI, the portfolio is the
key. Every strategy before going to the market should be tested in different
market regimes. Why you decided to invest such a lot of time into AlgoCloud and
into trading with AlgoCloud? Stability of the platform. I can now don’t look at
AlgoCloud for a few days or weeks and I have no problem.
So hello everyone, welcome to the next podcast where it’s my pleasure to
introduce to you Michael who is very experienced trader, long time experience
and actually he is the first AlgoCloud user who started to use AlgoCloud with
real money. He also helped us a lot from the beginning to take the
product to the next level, to simply resolve all bugs. He is very precise and
it was my desire to bring Michael and give you the experience to hear him.
He is very inspiring, he has precise access to the markets, his view on markets is
something I think which is great to know and see and to be inspired and to be a better
trader. So hello Michael again and I’m glad you are here and as first I
would like to ask you if you can introduce yourself and with your
background, career and how you basically get to the Algo trading. Sure, hi everyone I’m from
Poland. Before trading for many years I was doing business. I was responsible for
17 years for commercial activities in quite dynamic software company. That’s
why I can recognize a good software. I love technology, I love automations
but I’m not a coder, therefore I like no-code solutions. I started my trading
journey in 2017 because I realized that I work very hard for my money but I do
nothing to let my money work for me. Then I investigated what options are the
best and started investing and swing trading at the moment. I was studying
the markets every day and noticed that I’m really passionate about trading
and in this moment, it was 2017-2018, my passion about markets began. I tried
different approaches to find my way. I tried CFDs, tried Forex. I was trading
futures for a few years. I did an institutional trading course based on
order flow. I was also day trading stocks for one year in a trading room with
very experienced traders. Day traders and I realized that day trading is not for
me and from the beginning I gravitated to systematic approach and to
automation because I was doing it for my financial freedom but also for
time freedom. Automation and StrategyQuant and AlgoCloud are giving me
more freedom in this space. I’m quite experienced StrategyQuant user
because I bought two licenses of StrategyQuant in 2018 and since then I
experimented with different approaches, different styles of algo trading also.
Thank you. Thank you for the introduction and you already told, I’ll continue, that
you are testing different, you started to test different approaches in algo
trading and so let’s move on and I’m sure that the users are interested what
kind of strategies are working for you well, what you are experiencing that is
working in markets and what strategies simply you trade. If you can give
us some insight into it, it would be great. I tried many different approaches to
trading, many different strategies types. I like experiment and of course I can
recommend for stock market, I can recommend starting from some reversal
strategies because they have high win rate and for the beginning it is quite
good to have higher win rate strategies but of course I like momentum
strategies, we can call them trend following also. I like breakout strategies,
I like to search for different biases in the market. I was developing and I’m
developing also seasonal portfolio but this is more difficult one I think
because you need to have a lot of seasonal strategies at the same time but
I can definitely recommend for new people I can recommend with reversal
and momentum approach. Thank you, could we maybe stay a bit with those two
strategies and talk a little bit more. If some user want to create such
strategy, let’s say momentum, what’s the best way how he can start and start to
test it, some ideas or where to find for inspiration or just generate it.
What approach you prefer and what is your starting point when you start to
think about such strategy? I have many different starting points, let’s say so.
One I can definitely recommend are books. Read the books, read about people who are
very long on the market and try to recognize the strategies and to code
them because it is not complicated. Using strategy quant it is really very easy if
you will understand what’s going on and for sure you need to have to build some
background because nobody is having that background before, maybe
programmers but not definitely. I was learning it step by step and I can
definitely recommend to search for some shared concept, let’s say so. It could be
a book, it could be a white paper sometimes, it could be of course market
observation. If you are a trader looking for the charts you will spot some
interesting behavior of the market and you can make this observation
in a few lines of, in few blocks, let’s say so, using algo cloud or strategy quant
and check is it an edge or not. But of course you can do also a data research
like seasonality pattern are based on data research. There is also
possible to take a ready strategy from someone else and of course a
strategy quant is able to generate strategies and the new way of
discovering strategies I can highly recommend and I think it will be very
useful in next versions of strategy quant and algo cloud is the AI research. I use
AI for strategy ideas also. Yeah, so if we can stay a little bit with this AI
because it’s interesting and right now at the moment when we are recording this
interview we are just finishing implementing AI into strategy quant and
obviously it will be developing further. So everyone knows
chat-gpt, it’s a very well-known noun. So if we have chat-gpt, if I can ask you
how do you use it to have idea and maybe recognize that it
always answers something. So to get idea and maybe review a little bit if it makes sense or what would be your approach there.
My general approach is that we need to learn how the market behaves and I know there are a lot of
experienced traders and they will look this in interview and for them this is
obvious thing that they are looking for some specific behavior of the market
then try to exploit it by a strategy. But of course using AI, I think that the new
capabilities that we have as traders now to use AI to discover the special or
unique patterns let’s say so. Then discussion with AI, with chat-gpt or
other large language model is of course one of way for doing it and I hope we
will see soon in algo cloud and strategy quant such capabilities and strategy
quant in my opinion is great prepared to be to be automated about this
process, about the discussion with AI and I hope in 2025 we will see serious
implementation about this. But at the end of day in my experience we need to
understand what kind is this strategy, why this strategy is doing well or not
doing well. We need to understand. Strategy is like employee for me. I need to know
my employees. I can hire them, I can fire them if they are not working as
expected but I need to understand them and this is very crucial part
because during generating process, robustness checking process, during the
live trading process we need to know what the strategy is doing and this is
simple to understand if you develop yourself as a person who
understand step by step how the strategies are doing. This is not
something you can develop in few weeks. You can develop it in
years of experience and my general advice is give your time, not be too fast
in this process because you will need to understand how markets are doing,
what they are doing but you have so easy tools nowadays like never
before to do it. But give your time, give your time.
It’s generally a good recommendation. There are no free money.
You simply have to do your job but as you mentioned right now
you have quite good tools and you can be very efficient if you are using them and
move on fast. We created some strategies and they are
evaluating well and now I would like to ask you what is your way, how you think
about portfolio. Let me explain more. There are few approaches. Someone is just
watching correlation of strategies to complement each other but then for
example in the second interview with Christos he is very focusing on the
correlation has to work well but also he is focusing on market regime and he
strictly divide the portfolio into different market regimes and
then the strategies complement each other. I would like to ask you if you
can explain which way you are thinking about composing portfolio. Maybe not
really money management also but let’s say more from the point of view of
the logic of the strategy or how the strategy works. What works for you and
what do you think? We could talk about portfolio for several hours I think
because of course the portfolio is the key, is the real target to have
portfolio and correlated strategies. But one thing is the initial choice of
the portfolio of strategies to trade and another part is the
cyclical portfolio management let’s say so. But to say it simple I like to have
at least 10 to 20 robust strategies which I understand and have been tested
on demo account. This is important part not because we need to know what
the strategies are doing. Are they trading as expected let’s say so and this
strategy should have many different drivers. This is the key and as
you said it means that some of the strategies should work on in different
market regimes of course. I like to use correlation coefficient and search
for negative correlations or low correlation of course. I’d like to use
monthly correlation by loss. This is one of my measures let’s say so to
measure correlation to check the correlation. But also the key point here
is exposure because you can have for example strategies that I trade are
trading once a month and for one day and you need to know what is the exact
exposure and this is one problem in strategic quant for now for stock
picking strategy because we don’t have such tool to measure the exposure
the historical exposure on the on the portfolio level and also on the on the
single strategy level. But I created great portfolio Power BI analytics about
about portfolio and and also single strategy exposure and it will be
available for free for for Agocloud users then you can visit my website and
and check there is information how to download. This Power BI and
we created also a few other Power BI analytics. They are giving additional
value for Agocloud users I think. But the exposure part is also very
important in terms of portfolio because we can have a lot of strategies they are
not trading so much. They are maybe not giving us a very big CAGR annually but
of course if they are using very little capital we can combine them in the
larger portfolio and this is unique unique possibility of merging strategies
different strategies types. Understand. So to summarize it the correlation has to
work well and also you are you are focusing on exposure to simply run
simultaneously different systems which trade different time or not too often
and then achieve compounded annual return better through this way and also like
you are checking the market regimes to not be exposed to… Yeah of course of course this is my
standard strategy development procedure that every strategy before going to the
market should be tested in different market regimes and I have few ways to do
it but simple is good then check the strategy in bull market, bear market, in
high volatile market, medium volatile market, low volatile market and and if some
strategy is not working in different market regimes I usually filter this
market regime for this strategy and this is the way I can highly recommend.
Understand. And you meant that the users can find your portfolio tool, your portfolio tool, the
website algohub.com and so and I know I visited the website and I know you and
your work so what else they can find on this website to let’s say move on on
their way of algo trader? Yeah I created the website because I was the first
person that went so deep into algo cloud and I would like to have some space to
share my my strategies you can you can find many of my strategies some of them
are free some of them I paid but I’m also sharing my researches about strategy
development process about costs I experienced using my my algo cloud and
and alpaca and other articles I will share many articles in the in the future
so then feel free to visit algohub.com
I especially like your article about trading costs and your study about slippages because Michael really measured the market and did a lot of
observations to find out what is the optimal cost of trade for the
certain broker especially CFD they might be not aware of the costs but you
can have good strategy but simply the cost is too high then you will not
success you are fighting fight like losing war so so there it was great that
you you did and the two different symbols and you made some great
infographic about it I can highly recommend to watch everyone or even
maybe not the trading stock picking or stock X stocks yet how how do you how
it’s expensive real expense let’s call it a real expense not just a marketing
material expense of the trade is and and then you can easily also find my good
solution for you and I could do one of the brokers which is simply it’s fine
for you yeah this I can highly recommend the source and and let’s move
to another question and I would like to ask you why you choose algo cloud why
you decided for this solution because they are like for stock picking I think
there is not other solution right now for the newbies or for the retail traders
you can do stock picking well but just as program if you are programmer and
still you will have to you will have to go through some obstacles but you also
work for bank in for institutional trading let’s say so you can compare we
have over your market and why you decided to also like decided to invest
such a lot of time into algo cloud and into trading with algo cloud yeah this
is many many reasons why I can tell you the first main main reason for me to
move to algo cloud was of course the the the idea of trading not the single
instrument but the whole portfolio trading and the backtesting and the
robustness of such strategies is much better in my opinion than in single
instrument just from the beginning you got in you got possibility that your
strategy will work much better than a single the robustness is one one of the
first reasons in my opinion but the second very important reason was the the
stability of the platform I was starting with with algo clouds many parts of algo
cloud were not working properly two years ago but the stability of of trading was
very important for me from the beginning and the platform platform was
very stable I can I can I was trading algorithmically for over two years using
trade station for example using VPS and and trade station and for me it was
horrible time because of platform stability maybe it is only my experience
but every second second day I had some stability problems with trade station I
had strong VPS but something were wrong maybe it was too much strategies at the
same time of course the the intraday data are doing much more problems we can
but in algo cloud in last year in 2024 I had one day when algo cloud had a
problem with and it was fixed the same day but all the all year the platform
was working very stable and I can now don’t look at algo cloud for for a few
days or weeks and I have no problem and I know every strategy is working fine in
my in my experience of course but of course it is in my opinion much easier
to find good strategies on stocks then for futures for example and this is the
second reason and for forex for CFDs of course okay let’s focus on on the
futures I think that that it is much easier you don’t need to have such
complicated data setup because stocks are of course they are traded on stock
exchange data and trading is full transparent
additionally you have you have 30 years plus history to backtest not only maybe
10 years for for futures as usually you can generate because we are working on
daily data this is something at the beginning different for many people
because the natural path is to try to catch something much faster yeah faster
faster more trades more robustness but the the cost the cost trading costs are
very high if you are using smaller intervals you must watch for for high
frequency traders and manipulations on the and I know a lot of about this this
topic because I was using order flow techniques in in futures and intraday
plays intraday plays are different than multiday plays but the number of signals
you can get because of the stock universe trading and you can get signals
from the whole market screen the unique features that AlgoCloud has are is the
on-bar open trading and on-bar closed trading even the the advanced platforms
like Amibroker where you can code similar strategies but this is very
difficult for for new persons for for advanced programmers only but you can
you can not get so so so easy like in AlgoCloud the on-bar open and on-bar
close possibilities this is an edge you can you are getting just like that in
AlgoCloud what can I say more you can deploy strategy in two minutes and this
is amazing for me this is really amazing deploy and monitor I can highly
recommend the DLOG because for for me the DLOG capabilities was the crucial
part of of AlgoCloud and because I got a lot of trust what AlgoCloud is doing
just reading in simple simple English and math everything step by step in
inside the platform thank you it was long list long list of advantages and
yeah where when we decided to create this platform I close I think like four
years ago and we started to think about it we simply want to deliver something
different and the mission of the our company was always to bring us best
functions and possibilities to as many traders as possible therefore we started
with the no-code in the strategic one but then obviously you told many users
are using brokers like TraceStations and I have personal experience with
TraceStation and is similar so you can trade with it but you need to watch it
very carefully and there are a lot of desynchronization and after one year of
active trading you can be exhausted because instead of enjoying your life
because you’re AlgoTrader you’re basically every after every session close
and during session close you’re watching if the positions match and and all this
yeah this this was horrible for me I don’t know how other traders what the
experience maybe let’s make some chat some chat and exchange the experience in
in the discord group about this topic but I had horrible experience here with with
the stability and if you trade futures contracts the and the problems with with
not closing the trade desynchronization of the trades is the serious
issue it was for a serious issue for me and also I would like to add that we
also allow to connecting for for TraceStation directly but this is
directly via API and trading stocks so you can use TraceStation broker which is
great broker yeah as a broker I can confirm and you have free stocks like
zero-cost trading but if we have algo cloud you will once a day receive the
report via email and that’s it instead of sitting in front of the platform and
this from my my point of view this is how algo trading should should look like
because you should not be slave of the trading platform and and so thank you
thank you for it I can tell more that TraceStation has amazing the best the
best free intraday data for stocks and and futures and this is great data
source but about the platform okay let’s go let’s move
we have both experience with it and and I’m sure if some TraceStation user will
watch it so yeah you’ll you’ll know what we are talking about and so yeah we are
slowly moving moving forward and we started with the strategies let’s say
development kind of strategies Michael like to use and we went through the
portfolio composition also we also talked about the inspiration and I think
we like covered covered covered the topic like from the Michael perspective
but obviously there could be a lot of to talk about more and I hope that we
can connect with Michael also in the future and discuss more more topics or
certain topics but before we end I would like to ask you for some
recommendations some recommendations Michael what what to do if you are a
good trader because there’s unlimited number of the of the traders of let’s
say some YouTube videos which you can study on it’s been unlimited number of
pages there’s a lot of platforms and there is a lot of teachers and basically
everyone offers something everything looks great when you look at it so what
is your suppose the trader want to start with algo cloud who’s watching
this watching this video what is your recommendation how to start with this
platform and obviously let’s cover it from the way when when you just want to
use the platform but also you can add more description about the algo hub
where it’s also source of knowledge and source let’s say more advanced trading
robots so what would you recommend I can repeat give your time give yourself the
time to discover because it is trading is not it’s not easy this is everybody
is thinking that it is easy it is not easy but it is easier than never never
before in my opinion if you are curious person if you like to discover if you
like to ask your question why is it working or is it not working
this is the the right approach in my opinion to to move forward and algo cloud
is in my my experience is cutting this way many times because you don’t have
for now until now you should be advanced programmer to program not only
strategies but but many tools to to trade algorithmic such kind of with
such kind of approach and algo cloud is giving us ready to use tool when we can
we can focus only on strategies to and of course portfolio to to recognize
right strategies to to check robustness and so on but to move forward our our
algo trading business and I can I can recommend to focus on strategies to
understand strategy because in my experience it is it is the best way to
find the strategies that you can understand for example you are teaching
now generating strategies and this is okay the the the generating from template
as I see the videos it’s a good good idea because you have some template for
for type some kind of type strategies let’s say reversal breakout and you are
moving on the depart but I think that everybody needs to know what is
robustness what how how many traps are for us waiting for us in in the in this
space of overfitting then learning what is overfitting how to manage the
overfitting how to find stable areas using different different parameters of
the strategies this is some lessons we need to know before we we are going to
the real money trading but this is simple like never before I can highly
recommend a few Ali Casey videos about this this topic is the amazing educator
about strategic one also there are few more people I hope we will find them
soon in in algo cloud community very experienced traders that maybe they will
share their knowledge with us and ask read books if you like to to create your
portfolio and check some ready-to-use strategies to develop your your start
you can check out our website I’ll go hub.com double B and and check we have
some ready-to-use strategies for you but of course the best strategies are the
other strategies created by you but you can take some ready-to-use and proven
concept and it’s your own your own ingredients to it understand and this
is it’s great to be inspired and I’m sure this is the great when you can
check this I’ll go up and also but at the end of the day is your account your
responsibility your money nobody is giving you advices and are your
decisions so you always have to know what you are trading and you should
build up your intern internal confidence into what are you trading otherwise you
will stop start your trading when first the first row down occurs so yeah that’s
so that’s why it was my problem my first portfolio of strategies that’s
what it was the strategy portfolio where I didn’t understand the logic inside and
it was a problem because every strategy will have a drawdown then even if you
generate a strategy give your time to study the strategy in details to
understand what is this what is this what is this component what is this
indicator for example what is the logic behind visualize how it looks in the
chart where it is opening position when it’s closing position why it is doing
check different settings to be sure that you understand because this is your
worker every strategy is your is your worker and you need to know your workers
if you are a business manager yeah this is important and if you avoid this
lesson you have to repeat it later when when simply strategy start to trade and
some of them of course because this confidence is confidence is your
confidence to your strategies is really important yeah so thank you for those
recommendations and insights I I’m sure we are not seeing each other in this
format of the interview last time so I’m sure the community will appreciate it
and maybe next time we can discuss some other topics so thank you again my
wish you successful trading during even right now during this turbulent time
and and yeah this is I can say only that bear market because we can go into the
bear markets I don’t know nobody knows but yeah let’s say we are we are in
downtrend now in stock market and this is excellent time it is the best time
for starting algorithmic adventure let’s say so with stocks because after
such events there is the best time for stock stock trading the momentum
strategies are skyrocketing then prepare yourself take your time I’m hope that
market will dive deeper because after such event we will get amazing returns
in stocks and you will be prepared yeah that’s great to hear there is such an
opportunity comparing to buy and hold where you should just wait there there
you have you have more options even it’s simply different approach so yeah we can
use it for the for the video or the video like outline that it’s markets are
falling but it’s the best time to start yeah I started my my journey with stocks
in 2018 first first trade wars let’s say so but now the trade wars are bigger than
I assume that that market can go deeper also yeah so yeah so thank you and see
you next time see you