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Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

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Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#91

Post by svantana »

sebyddd wrote: post #74
svantana wrote: post #59

I may be way to cynical for my own good, but there's no proof that this is actually real, right? Besides a couple of pretty bizarre screenshots [1]. I'm skeptical because a) these types of gains in public markets are pretty much unheard of, and b) faking a story like this would be a fairly easy way of getting lots of attention for your freelancer business (which this guy advertises right at the top of the article). […

Appreciate your point of view. First of all, there seems to be a lot of skepticism around this project and I found that surprising. You're saying that if you would get incredible returns from trading you would keep quiet. And therefore you are contradicting yourself by accusing my lack of transparency. As I was invited to share my story on Indie Hackers, my goal was to provide as much insights into the project, witho…

From the article: >> Got a cool project? I am currently available for freelance work.

Whether you are lying or not does not really matter, after all you're just a regular guy trying to get ahead like the rest of us. And the startup royalty keeps telling us to bend the rules. What I'm criticising is IndieHacker's lack of due diligence to screen for charlatans. I'm assuming you didn't show them any further proof than what's in the article?

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#92

Post by morgante »

zump wrote: post #86
morgante wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest red flag is that this guy is supposedly still freelancing. If he had a strategy this good, he would've quit freelancing and be a multimillionaire by now. The only reason I'm not 100% convinced this is fraud is that it's on the Indian market. I don't know the level of sophistication there, so it might still be possible for an independent trader to exploit winning strategies.

As if GS and JPMorgan don't have huge Indian operations with IIT grads.

Yea, I'm sure they do. It's just that I don't know anything about the Indian market, which makes it slightly harder to dismiss completely out of hand.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#93

Post by dangerboysteve »

svantana wrote: post #59

I may be way to cynical for my own good, but there's no proof that this is actually real, right? Besides a couple of pretty bizarre screenshots [1]. I'm skeptical because a) these types of gains in public markets are pretty much unheard of, and b) faking a story like this would be a fairly easy way of getting lots of attention for your freelancer business (which this guy advertises right at the top of the article). […

I call BS myself. He's from Romania, maybe living in New York or San Fran whatever profile you read and he's using Indian based trading API's linked to an Indian brokerage.

I also think most of the stories on indie hacker are bull and it's just people growth hacking or something to get free publicity.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#94

Post by zump »

svantana wrote: post #70
joemi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not arguing at all about being skeptical, but regarding 'cat' it's entirely possible they just had the wrong file extension on that ascii art chart. I've definitely given some plaintext files incorrect extensions if I knew I'd be wanting to open them (or quicklook them) in some program that usually ignores the correct extension. The general vagueness of the post is a much much much stronger reason to be skeptical, im…

Yes that's entirely possible, but my main point was that the chart looks really hand-made (by someone who doesn't really know what they're doing). I don't really see how an ascii data visualization tool would spit out such an abomination...

Exactly. Show me the command line to get that graph.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#95

Post by csallen »

morgante wrote: post #90

Can I do an Indie Hackers interview about how I went to Vegas a few times and made $10k? I even have some Python scripts modeling my "strategies!" This is almost certainly a fluke, if it's true at all. There aren't any valuable lessons here and such a story merits a high degree of skepticism. Algorithms which can successfully return 95% profits consistently are not wasted on freelance developers. I usually love Indie…

I find these criticisms quite unfair, especially given that he admits in the article that (a) he is new to trading, (b) his results cover a short period of time in a bull market and could easily be 100% luck at this point, and (c) he's had to manually step in to avoid ruin. You're excoriating Sebastian for not hedging claims that he has repeatedly hedged.

I also disagree that there aren't any valuable or inspiring lessons for indie hackers here. In fact, I enumerated some of them as asides in the interview itself, none of which would apply to your hypothetical trip to Vegas.

You and others are hyper-focused on the irrelevant question of whether or not Sebastian's attempt to build an unparalleled money-making machine has succeeded (answer: obviously not), and ignoring the actual point of the interview. It's the equivalent of the guy who read the SubmitHub interview a few months back, ignored all the lessons within, and instead attempted to create an exact clone of the SubmitHub product.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#96

Post by brilliantcode »

Let me tell you about the time I caught the "finance bug" after watching Wall Street film in 2007.

I had a near 99% accurate scalping system. I could not believe it. Every trade I was making was profitable. How could this be?

The system worked without a stop loss. Meaning 1% of the time the prices turned, it wiped out all the profits (limited reward) accumulated.

I published all of these details on my university homepage which has since been deleted as they won't let alumni's keep one. But I was very careful that while 99% system accuracy is achievable, it's the downside risk that makes the system pretty fucking useless.

Of course you can put a stop loss but the system ran on "limited rewards unlimited risk". There's just no holy grail out there. Even if you read Hull's options book, no matter how complex your option strategy gets, you always have to be right at the end of the day. It's pure speculation and we all know how casino's work.

So knowing this, if it sounds too good to be true, there's a very strong reason for it. Retail trading is a zero sum game. Even more suspicious when the downsides are conveniently left to "if I gave it away system won't work". I was fully transparent about the downsides when I published my trading system.

The last thing I wanted was to people without the financial literacy to naively believe that a holy grail trading system existed. They don't exist. History is filled with funds that blew up because they believed alpha generation would be a constant thing.

Even quant trades I question their success. In the long run, all trades are speculative and carry risks (except arbitrages which are automated to oblivion). No matter how sophisticated you get the risks are always unknown.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#97

Post by alva »

csallen wrote: post #95
morgante wrote: post #90

Can I do an Indie Hackers interview about how I went to Vegas a few times and made $10k? I even have some Python scripts modeling my "strategies!" This is almost certainly a fluke, if it's true at all. There aren't any valuable lessons here and such a story merits a high degree of skepticism. Algorithms which can successfully return 95% profits consistently are not wasted on freelance developers. I usually love Indie…

I find these criticisms quite unfair, especially given that he admits in the article that (a) he is new to trading, (b) his results cover a short period of time in a bull market and could easily be 100% luck at this point, and (c) he's had to manually step in to avoid ruin. You're excoriating Sebastian for not hedging claims that he has repeatedly hedged. I also disagree that there aren't any valuable or inspiring le…

You are strongly defending him.

What proof do you have of his claims?

If this turns out to be a dodgy submission for self promotion it is mildly embarrassing for IndieHackers if they admit error in this instance.

If it turns out you have seen no solid proof for these claims and amidst the heavy skepticism express by multiple people in this thread you do not investigate and demand proof, than that calls into question the rest of IndieHackers

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#98

Post by csallen »

dang wrote: post #89
csallen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly fine to link to discussion on HN, but not okay to explicitly ask for upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Why link to /newest rather than the actual discussion?

Because if someone decides to upvote of their own volition then I want it to count, and not be discounted because I linked them to it when they might have found it on their own. If that goes against the spirit of the rules then I can abstain in the future, but at the same time it's a disincentive to ever directly linking a thread.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#99

Post by csallen »

alva wrote: post #97
csallen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find these criticisms quite unfair, especially given that he admits in the article that (a) he is new to trading, (b) his results cover a short period of time in a bull market and could easily be 100% luck at this point, and (c) he's had to manually step in to avoid ruin. You're excoriating Sebastian for not hedging claims that he has repeatedly hedged. I also disagree that there aren't any valuable or inspiring le…

You are strongly defending him. What proof do you have of his claims? If this turns out to be a dodgy submission for self promotion it is mildly embarrassing for IndieHackers if they admit error in this instance. If it turns out you have seen no solid proof for these claims and amidst the heavy skepticism express by multiple people in this thread you do not investigate and demand proof, than that calls into question…

You are consistently ignoring the logic and reasoning I provide in my responses, and I'm not sure why.

Re: Neural Net Side Project Makes $3500/mo Trading Stocks

#100

Post by morgante »

csallen wrote: post #95
morgante wrote: post #90

Can I do an Indie Hackers interview about how I went to Vegas a few times and made $10k? I even have some Python scripts modeling my "strategies!" This is almost certainly a fluke, if it's true at all. There aren't any valuable lessons here and such a story merits a high degree of skepticism. Algorithms which can successfully return 95% profits consistently are not wasted on freelance developers. I usually love Indie…

I find these criticisms quite unfair, especially given that he admits in the article that (a) he is new to trading, (b) his results cover a short period of time in a bull market and could easily be 100% luck at this point, and (c) he's had to manually step in to avoid ruin. You're excoriating Sebastian for not hedging claims that he has repeatedly hedged. I also disagree that there aren't any valuable or inspiring le…

What are your standards for including interviews on Indie Hackers though? Honestly, my criticisms are less of Sebastian than of you. He admits that his strategy is unlikely to be profitable in the long run, but what exactly is the merit of including stories about an amateur trader on a site about technical side projects?

I, and likely many others in this thread, have tried our hand at trading. I've had months where I generated amazing profits. I have "algorithms." Yet I definitely don't pretend any of this stuff is special or noteworthy—why would Sebastian's be?

A huge part of what's cool about Indie Hackers is that people are generally transparent and you can see their approach to roughly similar problems. There are plenty of sites (hundreds of them) where you can find people bragging about their trading strategies and bots. Why does Indie Hackers have to expand into them?

This is nothing like the SubmitHub interview. That had lots of great lessons in customer development, building a brand over the years, etc. Realistically the only lesson from this story is "get lucky."

> In fact, I enumerated some of them as asides in the interview itself, none of which would apply to your hypothetical trip to Vegas.

Why not? I'm sure I could come up with some trite lessons about how poker playing is applicable to business and startups. Heck, there's a whole cottage industry in doing so.

That doesn't mean I think a story about my poker playing would make a good Indie Hackers interview.

> money-making machine has succeeded (answer: obviously not), and ignoring the actual point of the interview

What, exactly is the point of the interview then? You could just as well cover random sites that have launched with 0 profit or revenue. Heck, if you're in that business, I've got a ton of side projects I'd love to share.

I'm trying not to be too critical here, as I genuinely like Indie Hackers. But you need to have some standards for what gets included. Everyone who manages to make money doing something shouldn't count.

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