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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?

#141
post #99

I made some good money (millions) in 2017 by algo trading crypto. Now in 2018, the bear market is on, but my pnl is still decent. I collected data, trained models, wrote execution strategies, automated everything. I was successful because I was moving fast, trying things, breaking things, etc. While crypto was and still is my turf, I think I could also do well in the stock market. The problem is that the entry barrie…

Give me your secrets

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

#142
I have been writing my own trading bots for about three years or so, maybe a little less, all told. But exclusively on crypto exchanges. I think most people familiar with crypto could see the latest bubble for what it was, but I did manage to get out before it popped and I've been giving it some cooldown time since. I typically do trade off the volatility. I've put many hours in front of the exchanges (and put a ton of quarters in the machine, so to speak), just watching it like television, and this is the way I learned my strategies (incidentally this is the same exact way I taught myself about networking, by watching tcpdump and ethereal/wireshark). I can do pretty well if the volatility is fairly even. I do end up losing a big chunk of gains when there's too much fluctuation. I've got failsafes in the form of floor/ceiling prices at which my bots pull the cord, but this ends up being pretty expensive and is one of the main ways I end up losing steady gains. I absolutely never trade on margin. I see it as a puzzle, as a kind of game, and the challenge is a substantial part of the reward for me. I will also warn you that pretty much all the rules change once you start trading enough to make the price move locally. It's almost a whole different ballgame. And at least with crypto, it's fairly obvious that most of the trades on the exchanges are people doing the same thing you're doing. You get to know "people" by their patterns of trade.

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

#143

Short answer is - yes. I have a few buddies using a bot from Crypto Profit Bot ( https://cryptoprofitbot.com ) and they definitely make profits. Sorta varies though depending on the strategies used. I played around with this late last year and was able to tune my bot to anywhere from 4% on up. Some trades were ridiculous with 20% or 30% when the bot caught the pumps. Of course, 4% means I was not scalping (a lot of p…

$100k gains, on how much capital invested is that? $20k? $50k? $100k?

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

#144
post #99

I made some good money (millions) in 2017 by algo trading crypto. Now in 2018, the bear market is on, but my pnl is still decent. I collected data, trained models, wrote execution strategies, automated everything. I was successful because I was moving fast, trying things, breaking things, etc. While crypto was and still is my turf, I think I could also do well in the stock market. The problem is that the entry barrie…

Give me your secrets

HODL during a 10x year?

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

#145

I hacked together my own scripted system that would arbitrage cryptocurrency across exchanges. It worked (for the most part), but it's been abandoned now. The best way I can think of to describe why is to say that while the low hanging fruit exists, there's far too little juice in it for it to be worth the squeeze. Others have explained that the problem they've encountered is counter-party risk in that some exchanges…

I spent the last few months trying to build an arbitrage bot and ran into exactly the same issues. If there's a big price differences there's always a reason, either deposits or withdrawals are temporarily offline, or the fee for transferring or depositing is too high, or for some very small coins it can takes ages to transfer (one transfer took 6 hours, another took a whole week!). Otherwise the volume is so low that you basically lose any edge crossing the spread and trying to find enough volume to close out the transaction. I had a small number of trades that made a few pennies, but also a lot more that just sat there and didn't execute at the expected price (based on the bid and ask when my bot found the trade) forcing me to sell for a less optimal price and end up with a loss. I am still sure there's money to be made with this but it takes a lot of work and you would have to search across a lot of coins and a lot of exchanges to find a viable option. Most people, including some very smart people I've talked to, just assume it's pretty easy to do this but if it was everyone would be doing it. Maybe it was 3-4 years ago when crypto was much smaller and less well known, but nowadays most opportunities are exploited as soon as they exist, I suspect a lot of time by the exchanges themselves.

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

#146

Short answer is - yes. I have a few buddies using a bot from Crypto Profit Bot ( https://cryptoprofitbot.com ) and they definitely make profits. Sorta varies though depending on the strategies used. I played around with this late last year and was able to tune my bot to anywhere from 4% on up. Some trades were ridiculous with 20% or 30% when the bot caught the pumps. Of course, 4% means I was not scalping (a lot of p…

$100k gains, on how much capital invested is that? $20k? $50k? $100k?

I don't know that, but my guess is probably anywhere between $20k - $50k. I just hear mostly stuff like "I got over 100% returns on these accounts".

For what I put in, I started with 2btc and when I stopped I had about 4. I was taking profits along the way of a few thousand every two weeks.

Of course, if you look at the crypto market last year, that's easy to see.

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

#147
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a great post on HN fairly recently written by someone who used to work in HFT. He talked about how they tapped the incoming network cable to read the incoming prices on an FPGA faster than they could make it through the OS's network stack. I think they were sending out trades in response to the new prices before they would have even made it to userspace on an OS.

https://meanderful.blogspot.com Worth a read.

Yep, that's the blog. Specifically this post https://meanderful.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-accidental-hft-f...

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

#148
It's not hard to build a machine learning model that can predict the price direction with slightly more than 50% accuracy. However, once you factor in the trading fees, slippage and the spread, you will almost always lose money. I built a number systems that looked like easy money making schemes that would make small amounts on most trades, but once you factor in trading costs (which most people forget about initially) you will lose money most of the time. That applies to the stock market and also crypto currencies if you are trying to predict the price direction. I have heard also that predicting volatility in the equities market is easier and the better strategy. To make money off that you would need to use derivatives. It's less clear how to do this in crypto unless you are trading futures, and I think making money off the price volatility there requires a different strategy, making heavy use of limit orders and stop losses.

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

#149
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with volatility. I don't know what he's trading on exactly. But a big part of volatility trading is selling insurance, i.e. selling insurance against the direction of S&P. You can make a lot of money collecting insurance premium, but on the event of a payout, like a sudden big drop in S&P, the loss can be very substantial. See XIV and SVXY in February of this year.

Trading volatility might imply that he's buying options in both directions. Big moves either up or down would be profitable. The only unprofitable move here would be no substantial moves in either direction. (In which case you lose your entire bet, but no more.)

Could you expand on how that would work? If X is priced at 10 units of currency, and I promise to buy 1 X for 11, and to sell 1 X for 9. And X stays available for 10, I end up paying 11, receiving 9 - netting a loss of 2. If I manage to promise a sell/buy at 10, I even out. What do I lose with low volatility? And how do I make money "both ways"?

Clearly I lack a basic understanding of the concepts involved.

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

#150
post #99

I made some good money (millions) in 2017 by algo trading crypto. Now in 2018, the bear market is on, but my pnl is still decent. I collected data, trained models, wrote execution strategies, automated everything. I was successful because I was moving fast, trying things, breaking things, etc. While crypto was and still is my turf, I think I could also do well in the stock market. The problem is that the entry barrie…

Give me your secrets

I suspect hard work and smarts. I've made money in sports betting and it's mostly grinding through looking opportunities and avoiding bad bets. The smarts part is avoiding bad bets. If you don't know who the sucker is, you're the sucker.
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