Live data from Hacker News

A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

bloomberg.com

41–50 of 85 posts

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#41
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of ROI do they get doing this? Better than 5%?

The article cites American Airlines jumping 11% in the 4 days before it was added to the S&P 500.

The American Airlines example is just one of thousands.

This does not answer the question about ROI.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#42
post #15

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

It's a nice, clear example of the anti-inductivity of the market: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/ The very act of noticing that something is a good strategy, and beginning to trade on it, will over time drain away the utility of the strategy, until it is useless or worse than useless. Tracking indexes is "big", and has some brute simplicity about it, but eventually the market will eliminate that…

"Tracking indexes is 'big', and has some brute simplicity about it, but eventually the market will eliminate that as a viable investment mechanism."

I would like to know how.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#43
post #28

Even in the worst case -- Vanguard doesn't lose anywhere near this premium -- we're talking 20-30 bps, or .25%. It's one of those scenarios where one has to choose what is less bad. Sure, an active manager could play with the index a bit more to help avoid this, but you'd be paying a lot more than .25% for his effort. It might, however, be a good enough reason to side-step this issue and use Total Stock Market (VTSMX…

It's insane to buy one of these old index funds that are now pop curiousities. The only reason DJIA and S&P are interesting is because decades ago we didn't have computers, so we used extremely simplified indicators. Now you can buy into an index fund with 1000s of securities that doesn't have arbitrary constraints determined by the needs of historical contiuity with obsolete newspapers.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#44
post #15

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

It's a nice, clear example of the anti-inductivity of the market: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/ The very act of noticing that something is a good strategy, and beginning to trade on it, will over time drain away the utility of the strategy, until it is useless or worse than useless. Tracking indexes is "big", and has some brute simplicity about it, but eventually the market will eliminate that…

You seem to be misunderstanding the implication of anti-inductivity and/or the point of index funds. Anti-inductivity only holds that strategies that return better than average can't work when applied broadly. There is nothing that implies that a broadly-applied strategy can't give you the market average. Index funds are supposed to give you the average return, that's their objective. There is no reason to believe they won't continue to be successful in doing that (if everybody just invested in index funds, everybody would make the average return...)

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#45

Sure some people get rich, but for buy and hold investors it's mostly a non-issue. The expense ratio of an S&P 500 index is still very small. A total market fund won't have the same front running issues and the expense ratios on those can actually be higher than the S&P 500 index funds. IOW the overhead here is in the noise IMO.

The point of the article is that owning an index fund is NOT buy-and-hold -- the indexs sell to rebalance, and do so in poorly timed ways (that is, in hige fixed batches, contrary to standard advise to "drip"), exposing investors to trading waste that the indexes are designed to avoid -- undermining the purpose of the index fund.

0.2% waste is huge compared to the overhead fee of an index fund. VTSMX fee is 0.17%.

> higher than

You mean "lower than"

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#47
post #15

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

It's a nice, clear example of the anti-inductivity of the market: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/ The very act of noticing that something is a good strategy, and beginning to trade on it, will over time drain away the utility of the strategy, until it is useless or worse than useless. Tracking indexes is "big", and has some brute simplicity about it, but eventually the market will eliminate that…

Show me an actively managed portfolio that consistently beats an index fund and I'll believe it. Until then, you guys can pretend to have all the inside information you want, but numbers don't lie.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#48
Is there a semi-passive fund that just responds to the announcements that something is going into or out of an index?

Presumably they'd leave a little money on the table because they'd have to guess how much to buy in or sell out, but it'd probably mitigate a good chunk of the loss, right?

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#49
post #28

Even in the worst case -- Vanguard doesn't lose anywhere near this premium -- we're talking 20-30 bps, or .25%. It's one of those scenarios where one has to choose what is less bad. Sure, an active manager could play with the index a bit more to help avoid this, but you'd be paying a lot more than .25% for his effort. It might, however, be a good enough reason to side-step this issue and use Total Stock Market (VTSMX…

But don't those Total Stock Market indices have some kind of weighting for each stock? Wouldn't changes in the weightings just leave you with the same problem? Or maybe I'm missing something?

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more interested in a "Index Frontrunning Frontrunning" index, actually.

No no no, you're behind the times. Index triple frontrunning is what's hot.

This is one of those Calc II problems where it turns out the profit limit as the number of frontrunning funds -> ∞ equals something like e/log(2)
Post reply on HN