4 ms·

I've built a few algo trading bots. There are a lot of challenging problems and it's very rewarding, just no direct financial reward. I was focusing on pure te

I've built a few algo trading bots. There are a lot of challenging problems and it's very rewarding, just no direct financial reward. I was focusing on pure technical analysis, so maybe I was doing something wrong, but there weren't any strategies that I saw would work. No statistical analysis that I could do of the data could give me any insight. Testing out theories did not work, either! I didn't use ML or anything, research I did there didn't seem like it made sense to look into.

SirLJ 9y ago
Welcome to my world :-) I was like you and took me few years to realize the technical analysis and candle shticks simply do not work... All those books, online trading courses and coaches are simply charlatans making money from teaching and not from trading... Maybe it did work in ancient Japan, but today even if you find someone crazy enough to sell you a working trading strategy, it will be quickly arbitraged by all the people using it... One advice: first focus on risk management; even with marginal trading strategy, with good risk management, you can still make constantly money in the stock market...
- justaguyhere 9y ago
  Here is my problem with these so called courses - if someone has figured out to time the market, why would they sell it for $47 (or whatever the amount)? It doesn't make any sense, unless that person is a college kid with no money of his own to invest (in which case, he wouldn't have the know how or be in a position to teach). Do you do day trading?
  - SirLJ 9y ago
    No, I do not believe in day trading, I don't think I can compete with my few VPS servers against millions of dollars of HFT infrastructure, co-located servers in the exchange data centers, etc... The problem with all educators/gurus/coaches is not much the fact that you'll lose few thousand dollars to useless training, but when you start real trading you'll end up losing much more hard earned money using their strategies... Not to mention some of them will front run their students, buying low float and often penny stocks and alerting to the followers and selling into the spike and then will use the winnings as advertisement to lure the next batch of sheep to fleece... Don't forget: "There's a sucker born every minute" as my high school friend P.T. Barnum used to say ;-)
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  Risk management barely answers the question. I can sell when I go below a threshold, but how do I buy back in?
  - SirLJ 9y ago
    Obviously you need a strategy, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless...
    - odonnellryan 9y ago
      Well, yes. But then that brings us back to the question, how to determine a strategy?
      - SirLJ 9y ago
        OK, this is how I did it: I went and back tested any trading strategy I could find, of course they all failed, but it gave me the feel for the market and I started having my own ideas and this is basically how I found my edge... Always remember what my good friend from high school Mark Twain once said: "The harder I work, the luckier I get." ;-)
        odonnellryan 9y ago
        People also just get flat lucky, all the time!

SirLJ 9y ago

Welcome to my world :-) I was like you and took me few years to realize the technical analysis and candle shticks simply do not work... All those books, online trading courses and coaches are simply charlatans making money from teaching and not from trading... Maybe it did work in ancient Japan, but today even if you find someone crazy enough to sell you a working trading strategy, it will be quickly arbitraged by all the people using it... One advice: first focus on risk management; even with marginal trading strategy, with good risk management, you can still make constantly money in the stock market...

justaguyhere 9y ago
Here is my problem with these so called courses - if someone has figured out to time the market, why would they sell it for $47 (or whatever the amount)? It doesn't make any sense, unless that person is a college kid with no money of his own to invest (in which case, he wouldn't have the know how or be in a position to teach). Do you do day trading?
- SirLJ 9y ago
  No, I do not believe in day trading, I don't think I can compete with my few VPS servers against millions of dollars of HFT infrastructure, co-located servers in the exchange data centers, etc... The problem with all educators/gurus/coaches is not much the fact that you'll lose few thousand dollars to useless training, but when you start real trading you'll end up losing much more hard earned money using their strategies... Not to mention some of them will front run their students, buying low float and often penny stocks and alerting to the followers and selling into the spike and then will use the winnings as advertisement to lure the next batch of sheep to fleece... Don't forget: "There's a sucker born every minute" as my high school friend P.T. Barnum used to say ;-)
odonnellryan 9y ago
Risk management barely answers the question. I can sell when I go below a threshold, but how do I buy back in?
- SirLJ 9y ago
  Obviously you need a strategy, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless...
  - odonnellryan 9y ago
    Well, yes. But then that brings us back to the question, how to determine a strategy?
    - SirLJ 9y ago
      OK, this is how I did it: I went and back tested any trading strategy I could find, of course they all failed, but it gave me the feel for the market and I started having my own ideas and this is basically how I found my edge... Always remember what my good friend from high school Mark Twain once said: "The harder I work, the luckier I get." ;-)
      - odonnellryan 9y ago
        People also just get flat lucky, all the time!