would love to see Volume on the chart
On there as a toggle off by default, under the chart. You're the second to not notice it so design feedback duly noted
Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#22Technical analysis is astrology for boys.
Thinking there are straightforward, simple algorithmic strategies to beat the market requires one to also believe that the billions of dollars behind large investments for some reason doesn’t care about using these same strategies to make money.
“They have different goals”, I hear. Literally nobody’s investment strategy involves passing up above-average returns for low risk.
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#23This is fascinating. That said, if it's possible to do better than random guessing, then does this reflect the fact that the five charts are presumably hand-selected to be "interesting"? My naive guess, and I'd be very curious to learn if this were wrong, is that something very close to the efficient market hypothesis is true; that, if it were possible to beat the monkeys on randomly chosen stocks on random dates, th…
The interesting answer by the author, will_asouka, has been marked 'dead' for some inscrutable reason.
Thanks for flagging, summary is:
Charts are from a seeded random draw.
And the instinct is pretty spot on players state ~74% average confidence but hit ~54%.
Accuracy is basically flat across confidence brackets.
Up only strategy quietly beats the coin flipping monkeys (stocks generally go up and to the right) but players call down 43% of the time.
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#24you should probably rename it since reading the tape is the opposite of charts :p
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#25> Read the Tape gives players the same 5 S&P500 stock charts per day to predict. You select low, medium or high confidence and then call the chart UP or DOWN. It's a 1d chart which then resolves over 5 days. Alpha is scored against the Monkey Index, a basket of 11 random coin flips at low confidence which provides a tangible win/lose condition. Your description here and on the website is not clear to me about what I…
Yes I think you're right, it's unclear. I'm hopeful the first reveal explains the dynamic as the player goes. Maybe something like- each chart shows 60 daily candles of a real S&P 500 stock, a past window with the ticker and dates hidden, you call if the stock closes higher or lower 5 days later?
It would find it clearer if:
- “up” and “down” was explained. If I bet “down” I’m betting my stock will underperform the monkey index? And if I am correct, I will make money (short the asset) or simply loose less than if I’d invested in monkey?
- loosing less money was green (win) when monkey is down even more.
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#26you should include volume
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I think you're right, it's unclear. I'm hopeful the first reveal explains the dynamic as the player goes. Maybe something like- each chart shows 60 daily candles of a real S&P 500 stock, a past window with the ticker and dates hidden, you call if the stock closes higher or lower 5 days later?
It would find it clearer if: - “up” and “down” was explained. If I bet “down” I’m betting my stock will underperform the monkey index? And if I am correct, I will make money (short the asset) or simply loose less than if I’d invested in monkey? - loosing less money was green (win) when monkey is down even more.
Thanks for surfacing. Up or down is a call on the stock price alone, nothing to do with the monkeys. Down means you think its close is lower in 5 days. The monkeys make a call up or down on the stock price too, and then their pnl is subtracted from yours.
So you can lose money on the trade and still go green because the monkeys lost more, or make money and go red because a monkey made more. The idea is it's your edge over random. Hope that makes sense and thanks for raising, will strive to make it clearer in-game.
Edit- to clarify Up/Down are a plain long or short, no options and no leverage. Low, medium and high are position sizing.
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#28you should include volume
It's under the chart, toggled off by default. 3rd comment so very obviously needs to be made more prominent, on it.
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#29I ended up generating alpha so this is clearly a great game and I'm a genius investor (compared to random monkeys). When I lose it all tomorrow, my opinion may of course change.
Seriously though, this is a clever idea and I'm interested to see if I can consistently beat the monkeys. Time will tell! Thank you for sharing!
Re: Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
#30Technical analysis is astrology for boys.
Thinking there are straightforward, simple algorithmic strategies to beat the market requires one to also believe that the billions of dollars behind large investments for some reason doesn’t care about using these same strategies to make money. “They have different goals”, I hear. Literally nobody’s investment strategy involves passing up above-average returns for low risk.
There are plenty of known effects that are relatively simple to automate
Holding overnight risk yields superior risk-adjusted returns. Buying end of month and dumping few days into new month. There are dozens of such effects
These have mechanical reasons for their outperformance - overnight risk has to do with how borrow interest rates for equity markets are calculated and firms unwilling to hold unhedged exposure overnight. Longing EOM has to do with people getting their paycheck EOM and auto buying index funds, and so on and so forth.
Systematic trading isn't magical, it's identifying these kinds of (often simple) effects and building a portfolio of them.
As an individual investor you actually have a huge advantage over large institutions in that your portfolio is nimble and easy to get out of.
As a relatively simple exercise - consider a hypothetical portfolio that's simply long SPY for the year. Could you identify _one_ day in which you'd rather be flat? The answer is probably yes, and the reason you can do this (and not a billion $ AUM fund) is that rotating in and out of positions is cheap for you.
When news about Iran hits the tape, who do you think can exit their positions faster? Joe Schmoe with $30k in his brokerage account, or Citadel with a $100bn position?