If you are a programmer with a good understanding of statistics, you can get access to legal data not reflected in market prices and profit on smaller capacitie

If you are a programmer with a good understanding of statistics, you can get access to legal data not reflected in market prices and profit on smaller capacities than hedge funds. In fact, you can achieve a Sharpe ratio comparable with the best modern trading strategies (albeit without specialized knowledge, infrastructure and a full team you won’t be doing it on billions in AUM). I gave a basic guide for doing this with equity prices just yesterday in a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349011 The short version is that you need to find actionable data that reliably maps to the revenue of companies without many revenue streams, collect the data (basic programming skills), build a timeseries and forecasting model from that data (statistics and basic financial knowledge), then take a contrarian position when expected earnings are very far off from what your data predicts. This outline is structurally similar for non-equity securities. Obvious caveat: I still basically recommend people invest in diversified index funds. But speaking as someone who has done what I just outlined, I see no reason not to give a clear-eyed explanation if you’re already set on active trading.