Great question and one that is going to have to be addressed at some point for the
Informed System Project as well.
For me personally, this is a question that I could answer yes to, I could answer no to, and I could give differing strengths of yes and no's depending on the exact specifics of the situation.
To formulate an answer I think the first thing that I would want to know is how systematic or discretionary the strategy is. Without knowing anything else, I would say that the more systematic a strategy is, the stronger the argument is for keeping the strategy a secret, as pretty much anyone can take the parameters of a completely systematic strategy and generate the same results as the developer does.
On the other side of this, the more discretionary a system is the less important it is to keep the strategy a secret. My reasoning here is that the more discretion involved, the more the individual who is pulling the trigger on the trades is going to affect the results, so the likely hood of someone being able to copy, or trade against the strategy, decreases as the discretion of the strategy increases.
The second thing I would want to look at here is how much money is being traded behind the strategy. In general I think that small traders pay way too much attention to things such as this, as most people do not have the trading capital to place large enough trades to where they are going to show up on anyone's radar anyhow.
The larger a trader becomes however, the more likely they are going to start showing up on people's radar's, and the more likely that things are going to happen which would negatively influence the results of the strategy, if people were to find them out. This is why from my experience, many large traders and institutions use specialized execution methods to hide their order flow, so the market does not take notice.
The third thing that I would want to know is the liquidity of the market they are trading. This feeds back into number 2 as the less liquid the market the less size that a trader is going to be able to do, before he or she enters the market and people start to take notice.
Fourthly, I would want to know the broad category of strategy that we are talking about. As an example here, one can trade much less size in a short term strategy than they can a long term strategy, without popping up on the radar. The same goes with a reversal strategy vs. a strategy which builds into trends.
So these are some of the things that I would think about when deciding how much or how little of a strategy I would consider divulging to the public.
As to the specific answers listed below on apple and publishing companies I can argue the side you have argued below that it would not be wise for these companies to give away their trade secrets. I can also however make the argument that there are ways for them to profit, potentially even profit a lot more, by giving away all their innovations. A great example of this would be IBM who is one of the leaders in open source development, and has given away hundreds of its patents to its open source community. By doing this they increase the number of people working on their projects many times over, which fosters much greater innovation and significantly lowers costs at the same time.
I think this "power of open source" is what Houssam was trying to leverage when he started the
Informed System Project, basically hoping here that by leveraging the collective power of the InformedTrades community, we can build a better strategy than any one person could build by themselves.
Sorry for the long response this is a great question and one that I would love to hear more from you and others in the community on.
Best Regards,
Dave