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If you thought something were profitable in a market, and it was easy enough to implement that any hedge fund could, why would you publish it? They'd just do it too until it was no longer profitable.
If you thought something were profitable in a market, and it was easy enough to implement that any hedge fund could, why would you publish it? They'd just do it too until it was no longer profitable.
Couldn't you make the same argument about opening up your software? The competition would just give it away until it was no longer profitable.
FWIW I think open source software is a great thing but in general a horrible way for any sizable corporation to try to make money.
I'm actually working on a startup in this space. Nice to see some HN people share a similar interest
If you thought something were profitable in a market, and it was easy enough to implement that any hedge fund could, why would you publish it? They'd just do it too until it was no longer profitable.
On the other hand, if you thought something was highly risky and likely to succeed only for a short time before blowing up, why not publish it, then bet against it? :) But seriously -- the author's comments seem to indicate that he is not totally comfortable with the technique and that he is aware it could lose, even though it didn't in this case.
On a similar note, say this guy did lose his $3500. Do you think you'd be reading this post on how to automate day trading? Randomness and the survivorship bias play a huge, huge role here.
As far as the website ideas go, I'm pretty sure that some very smart people have demonstrated that using past performance to estimate future performance simply does not work; no amount of tweaking buy/sell algorithms will help you predict where the market is going tomorrow.
Any books you'd recommend to a programmer with day trading aspirations?
I've been thinking recently about how it would be cool to have a service which allowed you to try different trading algorithms. For instance, it would have a few algorithms built in, you could choose which you want and with what parameters and then it would monitor how it performs. Also available would be the ability to see how this algorithm would have performed in the past (to see how it worked in bad markets, etc)…
Heh, so this has piqued my interest. I have absolutely no experience in online investing/day trading, although I'm pretty sure a lot of you are veterans. Any books you'd recommend to a programmer with day trading aspirations?