Brian Bell is a trader, technical analyst, and software developer living in Littleton, Colorado. He is the owner and President of Custom Trading Solutions, a consulting firm that supplies technical analysis and expert software solutions to the trading industry.
Brian started Custom Trading Solutions after spending over a decade with CQG as one of the chief architects and designers of the CQG for Windows™ product. He is an accomplished software engineer, having designed and implemented many of the features of CQG for Windows. Many of the features in this state-of-the-art product are a direct result of his research and use of the system in his own trading.
Brian’s relationship with Joe DiNapoli goes back nearly 15 years, when he and Joe collaborated on a hardware controller box that Joe’s clients used with the CQG TQ 20/20 product. The box improved the reliability of the TQ 20/20 product, and made life much easier for Joe and his clients.
Brian was the driving force behind putting the DiNapoli Studies into CQG for Windows. This implementation is widely accepted as the best in the industry. It includes all of the techniques described in Joe’s book, including DiNapoli retracement levels that update in real time as new highs or lows are made, and the DiNapoli Oscillator Predictor.
Brian has actively used Joe’s techniques in his own trading for many years. Although he still develops and uses his own indicators, it is nearly always in conjunction with the principles and tools laid out by Joe in his book.
Brian is no stranger to neural networks and pattern recognition approaches. He has developed and tested literally thousands of indicators and signals, and hundreds of mechanical trading systems.
As with many other traders and analysts, Brian’s first career was in engineering. He was one of the first object-oriented programmers, performing object-oriented analysis, design, and implementations as early as 1988. He has been programming in C++ for more than a decade, and is known among his colleagues as an expert in the use of this language.
Brian has lived in the Denver area most of his life. In 1982 he graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder with a B.S. in Engineering Physics. He was awarded a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University in 1987.