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Becoming financially independent as solo quant

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Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#31

Post by smcn »

thw09j9m wrote: post #30
smcn wrote: 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?

I don't think sly would be required truthfully. The post is about becoming financially independent as a solo quant, I'm offering something similar. Currently for free. I'd like to offer the service to as many people as possible while it is currently free.

I know it's advertising and just about everyone reading the post should see it as such. That's not uncommon here.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#33

Post by MikeDelta »

antonvs wrote: post #26
pid-1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We often forget that there are quite a few prop shops out there with just a few people, making a living for many years.

Not sure where to find a link to the statistics, but you hear it when talking to the community.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#34

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

darksaints wrote: post #15

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…

I've often wondered about this.

It seems to me one of the bigger risk factors is attempting to maximize profit. If you're ok not trying to maximize profit it seems to me that you can mitigate quite a bit of risk in the short term trading.

Re: Becoming financially independent as solo quant

#35

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

nootropicat wrote: post #16
acapybara wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much about family size as it is burn rate. Check out something like FIRE calc: https://firecalc.com/ What you need to do is figure out the burn rate to sustain your family, figure out your safe withdrawal rate (e.g. 3.5%), then you can easily get amount of capital required. A Mormon friend of mine, with 5 kids, spends less on food for his family than we do (family of 4) --he/his wife are just much better…

Those historical returns are ridiculously optimistic. In fact stocks aren't great once you look globally. Imagine investing starting from 1900 Germany or Russia. In both cases you would be zeroed out. It's a form of survivorship bias to look at American stock markets only. I think a 0% after-inflation return for a normal investor (ie. no specialized domain knowledge, no insider info) over the next several decades is…

no one who was investing in 1900 is alive today, your point doesn't matter.
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