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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?

#241

Post by jmhyer123 »

gricardo99 wrote: post #221
jmhyer123 wrote: post #4

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…

>based on simple technical indicators Pure voodoo

Perhaps. But if "voodoo" results in consistent returns then who cares?

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

#242

Post by attilathecoder »

jmhyer123 wrote: post #11
kojeovo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share a bit more on the strategy? I've been looking at exchange APIs and looking up strategies online, but I haven't started implementing anything. Wondering how you approached it once you had the idea to trade algorithmically.

I have two strategies that I use, one for up/bull markets (e.g. April 1st to present was a great example) and one for down/bear markets (e.g. January to April). They evaluate a number of technical indicators (e.g. moving averages, RSI, CCI, etc) to determine when to buy and sell. To get started, I worked backward. The strategy is simple enough that you can execute it manually (e.g. read/interpret the indicators on a…

Any interest in open sourcing the Node.js /Redis component? I was thinking of a similar implementation but using Kafka. Your piece would give me and potentially others a way to get up and running pretty quickly.

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

#243

Post by noobly »

dorgo wrote: post #151
Retric wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 50% chance to lose money per year still allows for very long strings of success. Some strategy's trade ~80% chance of a small win for a ~20% chance of a large loss which means lucky streaks could last for decades.

So, basically you are saying that it's all gambling and nobody has a better strategy / better information than everybody else. Some are just lucky and it is all because of the survival bias. I agree with you in that it is a possible explanation, but I disagree in that it is the only one possible.

I didn’t gather that from what he said at all, personally. I interpreted his comment at face value; it is possible to pull a profit over an arbitrary period of time even with 50/50 odds.

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

#244

Post by sgerrish »

I am 100% convinced that there are people doing this. I know an ex-Google engineer who's doing it for stock options. I think, however, that to be successful, you'd need to have some comparative advantage, e.g. one or more of the following:

1. access to a data source others don't have easy access to;

2. a reasonably deep understanding of statistics and, particularly, a deep skepticism and conservatism about any data you look at; or

3. time to invest in looking for oddities in the market.

(3) is probably the "easiest" for a newbie, although it's not as conducive to algorithmic trading, since it requires manual research (though, if you were clever, you could probably come up with something to make this algorithmic). Here the example that comes to mind is the two guys Ledley and Mai mentioned in this chapter of the Big Short: http://www.bookcaps.com/the-big-short-chapter-summaries---ch...

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

#245

Post by dotBen »

cnd wrote: post #179
dotBen wrote: post #157

I know a few people doing this, one person in particular who has discovered a near-zero-risk quirk that can be exploited with algorithms for fractional %age gain per transaction/cycle/ (kind of being vague here sorry) . He's been able to deploy large $MM amounts of capital to create significant gain nonetheless. However none of them will talk about it, certainly not on HN. I'm mentioning it simply to highlight I thin…

sounds like front-running; illegal and requires expensive infrastructure

nope not front-running

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

#246

Post by spatular »

I was making 25$ per day trading manually during a specific 20-min time slot for about a year. That wasn't simply by chance -- nearly monotonic increase in total earned sum with 2-week averaging during the year. Though I didn't hedge against black swan events, and I'm not sure it would be profitable if I've tried to. That said my understanding was that nobody else cared to take those money. I've eventually lost all intrest too since it was impossible to scale.

That was not algorithmic trading, but maybe-could-be-possible to automate.

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

#247

Post by aflagatopamoon »

anonu wrote: post #239
aflagatopamoon wrote: post #57

Yes, made more money last year trading, than for all my previous jobs combined. Probably got lucky by betting big in an up-trending market, but I'll take it. I use an automated inter-day scalping bot and a collection of scripts to help with manual longer-term technical trading or jumping into a P&D for quick profits. Generating alpha was easier for me than setting everything up. I did not use any complicated model or…

Your answer is confusing... it sounds like you traded actively by "scalping" - but you admit that you got lucky via buy-and-hold ... So you didnt get paid on alpha - but just regular beta. Very few people have alpha....

~0.1% lending bot, ~12% scalping bot, ~7800% algo-assisted technical trading.

The luck was that when you took a BTC profit on alts, BTC would have 5x in the mean time, so you 5x your profits. And even if you made a loss on alts, you'd still break even dollar-wise.

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

#248

Post by casecoded »

I've been using an AWS EC2 instance to run a trading algorithm I put together in Python for the last year or so. You can see the results at http://kandfx.com which I put together as a handy way to track its progress on the go.

I've been trading with Oanda's API for over a year but originally traded using Metatrader 4 and built the algorithm in the native MQL4 language. That ran for around 2 years and the 3 years prior to that was learning and developing my strategy.

Thanks to Docker containers, Python and Amazon EC2 I can finally say I have got the whole pipeline to a stable state which was probably the biggest hurdle after developing the algorithm in the first place.

As for the strategy I have been very reluctant to share it with anyone because on the surface it is very simple. That being said there are some fundamental reasons as to why I believe its been profitable which has more to do with psychology than anything else but it did take learning a lot just to try and distil the behaviour into something that could make money.

I've had some mild success with Crypto but I wouldn't ever try trading it the way I do Forex. The market behaves very differently and not to mention being in the UK any profits from Forex trading are non-taxable as I use a spread-betting account.

Long story short… yes, I do believe you can make money algorithmic trading. Is it easy? No, far from it especially when it comes to having a fault tolerant system.

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

#250

Post by kusmi »

I once hacked together AI to try and predict if cost of Bitcoin will go up or down based only on time and history of price. The program worked, but I remember it didn't predict very well. Maybe tinkering and reworking it would lead to something, but the combining the AI with the exchange APIs is daunting.
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