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How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

jspauld.com

71–80 of 320 posts

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#71
Basically this is a story about a guy who was smart enough to script up his trading tool (he discovered that there is an API and wrote some code to use it).

He trade other people's money, using other people's (probably employer's) account and resources, I suppose.

His employer have paid all the fees, and, took all the risks - if there is profit - it is mine, if there is a lose - it is theirs.)

The essence of trading is about having a special (insider) position of even being a market maker, who just collecting fees from every trade other people do.)

But this is just my guess.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#73

Have you ever thought of making a trading system that would buy tons of stock when a flash crash happens? It is going to happen again. If your system is ready and you buy before they shut the market down or roll back orders you could make a hefty profit.

The difficulty is in identifying what is a 'flash crash' (i.e. a temporary downward blip in prices caused by computer or human error) and what is a genuine downward price movement. If the market dives and you quickly get into a big long position, and then it dives some more - what do you do? You can either close out your losing trade and take the loss, or hope that the market comes back up, all the while holding on t…

> The exchange could nullify all trades in a certain period of time, which would completely wipe out your upside potential.

This is the most important thing: In every single "flash crash", the exchanges have retroactively canceled trades, in a rather arbitrary manner (e.g., "every trade between 16:30 and 16:38 is null and void"). There is some underlying justification, but it is also arbitrary (e.g., "anything below 3% of the price when the flash crash started", with no specific justification for the 3% number, or a well defined methodology for the time of the crash).

That could easily turn a +$100K profit into a -$500K profit, depending on circumstance.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#74
Great work, very interesting to me. Counter to what we're constantly told through the media this stuff can be done. Doing it year after year seems to be the elusive part. Intuitively, once you've proven your technique on 1000+ trades it's not luck.

I developed a fully-automated low-frequency stat arb system that I ran in 2007 based on a perhaps even simpler algorithm. It traded various equities equally to the long and short side regardless of market conditions so widespread rally or collapse was irrelevant. I logged about 20-30 trades/day - much slower.

The results, using no leverage, were +90% in a year with a worst drawdown of 2% and a Sharpe ratio of 2. Total trades were 5000+. Month-to-month the results were very consistent until the uptick rule was nixed in July 2007. August 2007 was a record winner for me, but Sept-Dec 2007 fell flat, not losing, but with greatly diminished profits and the same variation and more frequently getting slammed all-long or all-short instead of a mix that was often near-neutral. Also getting fills better than my orders then completely disappeared, as this was the beginning of the HFT middlemen - including your own brokerage. I shut it down at the start of 2008, keeping the profits intact and moving on to other priorities.

I continued to monitor the theoretical results for a couple of years but the conditions didn't return so I eventually cancelled my data feed.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#75
post #48
post #23

This is just glorified gambling. I am not sure what special insight or advantage he had, other than his own model. Every trader has a model. It could have easily been called "how i lost 500k with machine learning". Like gambling, it's easy to manipulate statistics to show that you did well in some period of time. I worked for a large investment bank about 10 years ago, writing trading programs for quant traders who w…

It is only gambling in the sense that any business is gambling: Your customers might stop coming tomorrow because the fad wore off, or a competitor provides a better/cheaper/hipper alternative. (And indeed, living is gambling. It's all just a matter of the risk/reward portfolie). But jspauld has apparently made $2/trade after fees on 250,000 trading, with a very small standard deviation (I would guess less than $2/tr…

Exactly. I've played millions (!) of real-money online poker hands and won some money in the process (not anywhere near what most people who've played that many hands did).

Most people don't understand that, when you're able to recognize patterns, playing millions of hands while never exposing more than 1% of your bankroll on any deal is not "gambling" but "printing money" (a tiny amount of money in my case compared to consulting but that is not the point).

At the same time the very fact that obviously (seen most of the posts here) most people don't understand basic bankroll management, risk management, standard deviation, expected value, variance, etc. means there are probably quite some opportunities out there to make money for those who do understand that ; )

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#76
post #18

Would you be able to open source any of the code behind your trading system? Maybe not the "secret sauce", but it would be interesting to see how you processed the data feeds, modeled the data, entered orders, etc.

I certainly could open source it. I may just wait a bit on the off chance that somebody wants to purchase it.

Relax, nobody is buying your program.

Other than sheer luck, the most plausible explanation for your diminishing returns is that you found a strategy that worked _at that point in time_, other people copied it (starting with your broking firm), and as that strategy became more common your ability to make money disappeared.

I work in the industry, this happens all the time. Trading strategies have a shorter half life than you may think.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#77
post #34

This article is missing a crucial piece of data: what was the initial investment.. earning 500k with 10k initial investment is genious, with 10M initial investment it's just another year on the stock market.

Especially considering that from it's lowest point in 2009 through the end of 2010, the S&P500 rose by 71%. Need to know what the starting capital was to be able to figure out if his return beat the market.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#78
post #23

This is just glorified gambling. I am not sure what special insight or advantage he had, other than his own model. Every trader has a model. It could have easily been called "how i lost 500k with machine learning". Like gambling, it's easy to manipulate statistics to show that you did well in some period of time. I worked for a large investment bank about 10 years ago, writing trading programs for quant traders who w…

[deleted]

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#79
post #68

I'm sceptical that HFT is good for the public. What did you do to ensure your system wouldn't make a flash crash worse?

Why is it his business to defend other market participants?

I didn't say it was. But everyone should be in the business of not being evil and not exasperating the problems of others. In trading that means not contributing to flash crashes.

I am not saying that this guy's trading did contribute to flash crashes! He may have successfully implemented systems to prevent that. I hope he did, and if so I'm interested to hear how.

Re: How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

#80
post #23

This is just glorified gambling. I am not sure what special insight or advantage he had, other than his own model. Every trader has a model. It could have easily been called "how i lost 500k with machine learning". Like gambling, it's easy to manipulate statistics to show that you did well in some period of time. I worked for a large investment bank about 10 years ago, writing trading programs for quant traders who w…

Uh, if you look at his daily pnl charts, it looks like gambling with some extremely great odds, he rarely looses any money. That pattern is typically associated with HFT, If you can do many small trades and your strategy really has positive expected value you'll get great returns. I don't expect it would work now though, the HFT market is much more competitive these days.
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