Show HN: Quantblocks - Backtest your trading strategies

So judging from the the screenshots... Buy Apple? Yea that would of totally worked. Now for any other stocks, probably not. Also you can see it's less than the simple buy and hold.

Seriously I don't know why people even try trading in their free time.

Now, that being said, I'll take a bet against anyone who thinks they can find a profitable trading strategy using this product :D

Relax. The tool lets you create a strategy and back-test it. It is selling the fact that you can do this without coding, it is not trying to sell you 'Long - AAPL' strategy.

I've had a lot of problems with Yahoo not having complete historical data, especially on thinly traded or OTC stocks. I wouldn't recommend using their data in a production application.

Hey! This is very cool, very fast. One thing I would suggest is the ability to specify a list of securities rather than a single security. In my experience, if you're going to test a general heuristic for trading, you're going to want to test it across as broad of a spectrum as possible to determine if it really has some predictive abilities. Obviously, this requires a lot more computational power if you're applying your rules to everything in the Russell 3000 rather than just a single security. The results would then be the composite of all trades across the securities.

It is really too bad folks keep pushing technical trading platforms to the public. The promise of quick money to be made in a sea of billions of dollars might seem innocuous, but it's (a) bad for the market and (b) bad for society.

It's bad for the market because collectively, the buying and selling of shares based on anything other than company fundamentals (earnings, cash flow, projected growth, etc) distorts the price of the company. Unfortunately, because of our hunger to make money fast, there are too many of us (including large hedge-funds) playing this game, and the effects on price movement are very real. And when prices no longer reflect the company fundamentals, all sorts of bad things happen: Management is pressured to take extraordinary actions just to mitigate the market situation (stock splits/reverse-splits, stock buy-backs, accounting tricks, etc), employees freak out and quit, long-term investors get nervous, potentially fruitful M&As fail to happen, etc.

(The argument that technical/high-frequency trading improves the liquidity of the market is the biggest bullshit, cop-out answer ever: The only people that benefit from this type of instant liquidity are short-term, short-sighted traders ... such as the very people who advocate this type of trading, and not long-term investors!).

As for the societal cost, technical trading educates and perpetuates the myth that the stock market is a big gambling house, and not a means to become an owner of a company. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, every time you think about buying stock you should think of it the same way as if you were buying a mom-and-pop shop, like a pizza place. Is the price you're paying roughly equivalent to - or better than - how much you'd expect to make by pocketing the profits of the shop over the lifetime of the business?

I hate to leave completely negative feedback, so at least I'll give that this tool looks spiffy.

UPDATE: It seems like I'm getting a lot of responses from traders here. Already answered some, can't answer them all. Please sleep over these comments and think about what you could be doing with your time. Life's short.