Is there a catch to Alpaca? How do they make money?
Companies like that usually sell the order flow to market makers.
Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
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Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#12I can't believe I've never heard of alpaca before.
Alapaca's business model [0]:
> Alpaca will start offering Premium Plan subscriptions, where premium users will have access to various perks, such as higher quality live data feed and more computing resources. The pricing and exact features have not yet been determined. Please stay tuned for updates.
[0] https://support.alpaca.markets/hc/en-us/articles/36001104717...
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#13Trading driven from a spreadsheet brings back horrible memories of my earliest days on Wall Street. Excel was usually hacked in the most grotesque ways: tick data coming in, updating cells and signals and driving actual orders out the other end. Add to the fact that you're running on a desktop computer thats already struggling with a dozen other applications consuming market data, CPU cycles and driving 6 monitors...…
And people trusted real money to such a crap solution?
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#14Trading driven from a spreadsheet brings back horrible memories of my earliest days on Wall Street. Excel was usually hacked in the most grotesque ways: tick data coming in, updating cells and signals and driving actual orders out the other end. Add to the fact that you're running on a desktop computer thats already struggling with a dozen other applications consuming market data, CPU cycles and driving 6 monitors...…
And people trusted real money to such a crap solution?
In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
A crappy solution was still the best they had at the time. You're going to hate to read what they say about today's solutions in 2028.
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#15Is there a catch to Alpaca? How do they make money?
Companies like that usually sell the order flow to market makers.
Which is a nice way of saying you're in a pool of bait for high frequency traders.
...but that's really not so bad. Having an algorithm skim 2 cents/share off of you is a lot better than paying $5+ per trade (assuming you're not trading 1000s of shares, and you're not in penny stocks or options where spreads are big).
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#16Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#17Trading driven from a spreadsheet brings back horrible memories of my earliest days on Wall Street. Excel was usually hacked in the most grotesque ways: tick data coming in, updating cells and signals and driving actual orders out the other end. Add to the fact that you're running on a desktop computer thats already struggling with a dozen other applications consuming market data, CPU cycles and driving 6 monitors...…
And people trusted real money to such a crap solution?
In a kind-of defense of such methods: such technologies do seem crappy when you look at them today, but building good products with bad tools is pretty much in the job description for engineers and even more for experimental scientists. Check a good experimental scientist record of 100-300 years ago and you will be amazed what they did with the tools of the time.
This is not an apples to apples comparison to the spider fight world of trading, but there would still be a lot of ingenuity there. And a simple way to limit risk is to ruthlessly review the results, both automatically and manually. Keep going while it works as expected and stop/adjust if there is a major glitch.
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#18I worked for one of the largest financials services companies in the world and they STILL use excel to drive their trading activities. They are so large and so complex that it's impossible to convert them because no one completely understands how it all works. They were developed by traders/market experts with no help from IT, for years IT didn't even knew they existed.
These spreadsheets are truly amazing, I've only seen glimpses of these spreadsheets but they were massive, nothing like needed to have servers in the local network cabinet and running cables for keyboard, video and mouse, because you needed 1/2 a Tb of ram in order to open the spreadsheet.
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#19Is there a catch to Alpaca? How do they make money?
Companies like that usually sell the order flow to market makers.
Good explanation of Robinhood's business model by Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-16/carl-i...
Re: Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet
#20Trading driven from a spreadsheet brings back horrible memories of my earliest days on Wall Street. Excel was usually hacked in the most grotesque ways: tick data coming in, updating cells and signals and driving actual orders out the other end. Add to the fact that you're running on a desktop computer thats already struggling with a dozen other applications consuming market data, CPU cycles and driving 6 monitors...…
And people trusted real money to such a crap solution?
As opposed to another crap solution some small band of programmers could come up with?
If it works...