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

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

#131
post #16

What contracts did you trade? Looks like you did futures contracts? Did you look into forex at all, or was this strictly equites.

I was trading stock market index futures: Russell 2000, DAX, and a bit of Nasdaq. I experimented with other stuff as well.

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

#132
post #37

The charts show he was trading between Jun 2009 and Oct 2010. How much of his gains could be attributed to the market recovery in general? The Dow went from about 7000 to 11000, the Russell from about 600 to 800.

That's about 50% gain. Unless he put in $1m that doesn't completely explain his ROI.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the article he said tat he did not care about direction, he would simple buy when his expected price was up, and sell when down. However, there could have easily been a bias in his model that "preferred" and performed better during upward movements. If so, he got lucky.

Longs and shorts were 50/50 and my program showed no preference for up or down days. High volatility and high volume was what it liked.

I guess the real question is: what was your alpha in that timeframe?

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

#134
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 could have easily been called "how i lost 500k with machine learning". If you've really worked in that field than it's very surprising you've never heard about what professional poker players call bankroll management (and they "stole" the concept from professional traders). The whole point is that you can --either if you gain an edge or get lucky-- win big. Very big. But you're never exposing a large part of your…

I have some friends that have made a lot of money playing poker. The analogy is very good. But, in poker you have to be willing to deal with much bigger ups and downs than what I had to deal with. You can hit a bad streak and it can hurt - even if you are in fact a really skilled player and do in fact have an edge.

With my program I didn't really have bad streaks because my P&L was averaged out over thousands of trades per day.

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

#135

I've been considering trying HFT myself for a while. I'm competent with Machine Learning and am a Software Developer by day, so I can program and can sysadmin well enough to get something up and running without any trouble at all. But, every time I've tried to actually get started, I've always found the amount of research required before being able to begin is just staggering. It seems like the logical course of sing…

Find sample data: https://quantquote.com/ API (Colo): http://www.lightspeedinstitutional.com/automated-trading/

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

#136
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…

No. This is not. Not ONE gambling. It is thousands of thousands of gamblings with a consistent winning ratio. cannot be oversimplified to a symmetric chance of win or lose.

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

#137
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…

I tried to address this concern at the start of my post. If you have some idea of how I manipulated the statistics I'd be happy to respond. Having said that I can agree that my case is pretty unusual and that everyone should beware of attempting to do something like this. Even for myself I couldn't do it now. (There is a reason I turned my program off.)

Ie., if you made 500k in one period, but then lost 50k a year for the next 10 years, you've made a net profit of 0. All I know is that you had one good run, similar to how some mutual funds have a good run for a while.

How much did you spend before you "tuned" it? How much did you spend afterwards? What were the tax consequences of your trades? Did you make exactly 500k? Have you traded at all since then?

You mentioned that you occasionally "sat in" and took some large losing positions. Were these on purpose? Bugs? Was your exposure actually much higher than you thought? Was limiting contract size enough risk management?

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

#139
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get that. It would be true if he just made a few trades, but the author claimed to be making 2000 trades a day. Over a period of months winning that wouldn't qualify as blind luck.

>Over a period of months winning that wouldn't qualify as blind luck. Why not?

By that definition you could start claiming everything as blind luck. Why bother doing anything at all, let luck do the work.
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