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Becoming financially independent as solo quant

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Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#21
This is something that I'm passionate about. I'm about to launch https://feetr.io with the goal of trying to help people become financially independent through investing.

We measure momentum and use that to identify stocks with a good chance of massive price movement. It's currently free over at Twitter but will cost $8.99 per month.

Currently targeting people who know how to invest but long term goals are, of course, giving alerts to buying/selling opportunities and eventually investing on peoples behalf.

Historically the average stock has increased by 7.64% per day but given improvements to the algorithm we've managed 18.88% per stock this month. Though that does drop to 12.2% if you remove the 519% that COSM achieved.

All historical stocks are shown on homepage, with leaderboard at https://feetr.io/leaderboard (cuts the noise and gets to the exciting stocks)

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#22

I was able to do it consistently for over 3 years. I had a pretty successful strategy and could execute on that strategy using consumer grade trading APIs from Interactive Brokers. I had even extricated luck from most of the equation: ~9:1 profit/loss. It was an arbitrage strategy, so the luck variable became how often I had opportunities arise. I quit not because I couldn't make it work, but because I couldn't handl…

Crypto? I feel like that must not really count.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#24
post #11

This seems similar to Renaissance Technologies, especially regarding the regression part. Funny how so many people are skeptical, as if they they want to be convinced that it's not possible. The fact Renaissance Technologies has been so successful for so long shows it can be done. Easy? no, but possible, yes.

RT is going to be a fantastic case study when their scheme unravels. The likelihood of the outcomes RT has enjoyed occurring without committing some kind of fraud or employing other illegal practices is basically (not exactly) zero. At this point it's more a question of whether their skill in hiding the shenanigans can continue to outpace discovery of them at a level of visibility that forces action by the authoritie…

It has partway, they've paid something like 7 billion in tax penalties for medallion, which wipes out a lot of the gains from the past few years.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#25

I was able to do it consistently for over 3 years. I had a pretty successful strategy and could execute on that strategy using consumer grade trading APIs from Interactive Brokers. I had even extricated luck from most of the equation: ~9:1 profit/loss. It was an arbitrage strategy, so the luck variable became how often I had opportunities arise. I quit not because I couldn't make it work, but because I couldn't handl…

Crypto? I feel like that must not really count.

No, futures.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#26
post #10

This seems similar to Renaissance Technologies, especially regarding the regression part. Funny how so many people are skeptical, as if they they want to be convinced that it's not possible. The fact Renaissance Technologies has been so successful for so long shows it can be done. Easy? no, but possible, yes.

Renaissance is a complete outlier. Most hedge funds - including firms that sell themselves as quants - just lose tons of money. I've been in this industry for a while and folks making high returns solo either: 1) Got lucky for a very short amount of time, then their strategy stopped working. On avg those folks net lose money trying to make "the thing" work again. 2) Were running a super risky levareged strategy and w…

> Most hedge funds...

What about prop funds, which are trading for their own account? Seems like those wouldn’t keep it up very long if they were losing tons of money.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#27

The top comment is spot on: " You have a choice: $103k or your pride. To keep the $103k, you'll have to swallow your pride and admit it was all luck. If you choose your pride, you'll go to $0. The choice is yours. Best "

Why?

Because no one believes a random person can find arbitrage opportunities that hedge funds or high frequency traders are not already exploiting.. In this case I think most people are wrong. I think it is possible to still find arbitrage opportunities in the open market.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because no one believes a random person can find arbitrage opportunities that hedge funds or high frequency traders are not already exploiting.. In this case I think most people are wrong. I think it is possible to still find arbitrage opportunities in the open market.

Oh, you can find opportunities. They just don’t have the RoI and scalability that hedge funds are looking for. Sometimes bigger scraps reach the ocean floor and it’s a big day in bottom feeder’s life to stumble upon one.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#30
post #21

This is something that I'm passionate about. I'm about to launch https://feetr.io with the goal of trying to help people become financially independent through investing. We measure momentum and use that to identify stocks with a good chance of massive price movement. It's currently free over at Twitter but will cost $8.99 per month. Currently targeting people who know how to invest but long term goals are, of course…

Damn, what an incredibly poorly executed plug. Could you at least try to be sly?
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