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Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#22
post #17

I wonder whether the premise of your question is faulty. If you ask enough people: "In your last 100 flips of a coin, did you get more than 60 heads?" some will truthfully say "Yes." Unfortunately, that does not mean there's anything special about their coin-flipping strategy, or that you will be able to generate a successful coin-flipping strategy. My guess is what you really want to know is "What is my expected gai…

Mostly I believe this too, but I am familiar with some people who can consistently make money year after year. From talking to them it becomes clear that they understand things very, very deeply.

See /u/Fletch71011 on reddit-- he's always happy to discuss things. He's made millions trading options, mostly algorithmically as I've understood it. The methods he uses are sufficiently complex that you need to be very well acquainted with the intricacies of derivatives to follow along, but basically he trades volatility instead of price movement. Regardless of whether the price of the asset goes up or down, he makes money. In his opinion, it's foolish to try to trade price direction, and you're basically flipping coins and likely to lose money.

I tried understanding what he was doing and abandoned the attempt. I had to conclude I was not quite so clever as he.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#23
I know cases of algo traders coming from capital markets that have been so successful that they were banned in some crypto exchanges for using highly efficient strategies. One of the guys (he works in a top market maker during the day) told me he was making around 100btc/month back in Q1-Q2'17.

Edit: Not saying it's easy to reach that level of profits, just that it's possible for professional/sophisticated traders.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#24
I built my own intelligent algo trading platform for node.js. It uses market data from Binance and Bitfinex. My best strategy uses unusual volume amounts on Bitfinex to trade on Binance (mostly BTCUSDT and other USDT pairs), an advanced dynamic arbitrage. It can make up to 500-1000 usd per day but not really much more. I started testing a LSTM neural network to optimize the gains and reduce the risks, still early but seems very promising.

I wrote this repo a few months ago for people to get started with cryptocurrency algo trading: https://github.com/jsappme/node-binance-trader

Feel free to contact me at herve76@gmail.com if you need me to write your own custom trading algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#25

You probably can't do HFT trading because you need to have capital to reduce latency. Maybe you can rent servers very close to the trading centers, but this still will cost money. You can use http://www.quantopian.com to try out different algorithms. It will tell you how well your strategy works.

You can also plug Quantopian into RobinHood for $0 trades.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#26
post #15

I lost about $100k doing algorithmic trading. I spent the better part of 2 years after work immersing myself in algorithmic trading, understanding the architecture of the stock market, and getting very very deep into the topic. I found an algorithm that was wildly positive, and traded it on 3 separate markets every night. I learned a lot and I love everything I learned, but it was a very expensive lesson. The #1 thin…

if you've lost 100k, you had 100k to spare. agree it was an expensive lesson.

Yes, it sucked losing that much money but I'm lucky and grateful that it didn't alter anything about my life.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#27
I've made roughly 100% yoy returns for the past 5 years. It utilizes a method I developed now partially implenebted on:

https://projectpiglet.com/

Basically, it tracks experts and makes decisions on investments given what the experts say. Think about how many times you've seen someone say: "I work at Google, our cloud is doing X" or something like that.

The fact insiders talk, let me track them and make money.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean I'll make money tomorrow. The market is always correcting.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#28
post #17

I wonder whether the premise of your question is faulty. If you ask enough people: "In your last 100 flips of a coin, did you get more than 60 heads?" some will truthfully say "Yes." Unfortunately, that does not mean there's anything special about their coin-flipping strategy, or that you will be able to generate a successful coin-flipping strategy. My guess is what you really want to know is "What is my expected gai…

Mostly I believe this too, but I am familiar with some people who can consistently make money year after year. From talking to them it becomes clear that they understand things very, very deeply. See /u/Fletch71011 on reddit-- he's always happy to discuss things. He's made millions trading options, mostly algorithmically as I've understood it. The methods he uses are sufficiently complex that you need to be very well…

I am not sure I understand this.

It takes just as much skill to guess if volatility will go up or go down as it does to guess if prices will.

The best models we know of (say GARCH) will still pace the information in the option prices.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#29

Yes. I've developed a simple strategy that algorithmically trades cryptocurrencies (mainly ETH and BTC because volume, but it would apply successfully to any of the others as well). The strategies are simple, they are based on simple technical indicators, and result in about 2 trades executed per day. The strategy can be applied to "normal" equities as well but it performs particularly well on cryptocurrencies due to…

I have a strategy I wanted to try. Look at historical percentage difference between currencies. See if there is any patterns like, every time BTC drop 10%, LTC drop 20%, or something like that...

Find those patterns and trade on them.

Do you know if people are doing this?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?

#30
post #16

You probably can't do HFT trading because you need to have capital to reduce latency. Maybe you can rent servers very close to the trading centers, but this still will cost money. You can use http://www.quantopian.com to try out different algorithms. It will tell you how well your strategy works.

Concur. You won't be able to beat players whose HFT systems are colocated in the same datacenters as the exchange. And you will not be able to beat those systems built using lower level languages like C++ or, worse yet, dedicated hardware. Source: 5+ years in HFT development

I’d be interested in picking up what you are putting down. Do you have a blog or other content channel?
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