Launch HN: Mudrex (YC W19) – Automated Trading Without Code

This is great execution and UX. Congrats for launching!

As someone who has done professional algorithmic trading before, I would strongly advise most users to deploy a small amount of capital to these strategies and treat it as a fun game, especially in the beginning. The most important thing in automatic trading strategies is risk management - I am not sure what intelligence does Mudrex provide around that, but even if you're right 70% of the time (very high for automatic trading), the rest of 30% trades gone wrong can sink you quickly if there are no intelligent ways to manage those trades.

The returns and losses also highly depend on volatility of instruments (volatility refers to the average uncertainty in returns as measured by Statistical Standard Deviation). Cryptos are highly volatile. Cryptos are fun to start with, but you must allocate money keeping that into account and you'll be fine. My recommendation is at least 15-20 times less for Bitcoin than what you would allocate to S&P 500, based on their volatility/risk factor alone (15% vs 75% annualized volatility). And even less for other coins (See project below for more guidance)

As an aside, I have been working on my own project for many months to bring trend detection, risk management and intelligent diversification for all DIY Crypto and Stock investors [0][1]. Feel free to check it out if you invest in stocks or crypto at any level. It's in Alpha and will be shared more widely in the coming month or so.

I've thought about bringing automatic trading to my venture, but after a lot of my own time spent creating my own strategies, I can't sincerely recommend it to others without an extremely high level of skill. The hedge fund I worked with had people watching these automatic strategies all the time with lots of alerts, triggers and Plan B management, even if they were "automatic". Who is going to watch the automatic strategies here?

[0]: https://stockquanta.com

[1]: https://coinquanta.com

Are there really people out there who can create profitable automated trading strategies with all that involves, but can’t code?

Presumably they can’t test either and arent too hot on maths?

Who are these people?!

Hi, current macro vol trader & dev here - send me a message here and I'd like to here about your needs and see if my personal setup works for you.

Yes, that's a valid use case for this tool. Exchanges typically don't have this functionality. My opinion based on my personal experience is that it is rather unlikely to build profitable algorithms based purely on "technical analysis patterns": (1) Most of these patterns are pseudoscience, you can google for more info, only a few have even a bit of science behind them (2) There isn't enough data to train a model on minutely or hourly data. The crypto markets change extremely quickly (data distribution shift) so that most of the data you would be using to optimize model parameters is outdated and leads to false conclusions.

To make money off less frequent trades I believe (again, just my opinion) that your decisions must be based on news/insight/insider info, not charting patterns. In other words, more fundamentals. And that's much harder to automate.

Of course, you will find people that tell you the opposite and that they make money. My response to this would be: Of course there are those that make money due to simple laws of probability. With a lot of people trading there will be some winners. But it is mostly due to luck rather than skill. And the fewer trades your make (lower frequency) the harder it is to assign any kind of significance numbers to the results.

Painfully.