9 ms·

I Created a Trading Simulator

37 points by deandree 6y ago

apetresc 6y ago
What sort of skill are you supposed to be training when you don't even know the time period or security you're trading? Just by staring at the brownian motion really hard?
- jshawl 6y ago
  Risk tolerance?
- bsamuels 6y ago
  People who trade on technical indicators like the author have to consider the market to not be accurately represented by brownian motion. For technical analysis to be anything other than an abstract form of gambling, the efficient market hypothesis has to be flat out false. Representing the market using brownian motion only applies in cases where the market is under the weak or strong forms of EMH.
  - apetresc 6y ago
    Surely even the most ardent EMH opponent would at least agree that information is relevant, even if it hasn't been fully absorbed by the market yet, right? I've never met any proponent of technical analysis who maintains that they can divine patterns purely from the shape of the candles, without knowing what they're trading or what day it is? That flies right past EMH and into the realm of pure numerology.
    - bsamuels 6y ago
      Honestly, I have no idea. I don't know any proprietary traders who use candlesticks/TA. The one or two people I know who use TA are hobbyists who watched some videos on youtube. I might be in the wrong here, but all my experience points at TA being something that's used to sell online courses/generate advertising revenue rather than being a legitimate way to trade.
    - saltyfamiliar 6y ago
      > I've never met any proponent of technical analysis who maintains that they can divine patterns purely from the shape of the candles, without knowing what they're trading or what day it is? I have. The theory is that the fundamentals of the security are reflected in it's price movements, so reading its price action is roughly analogous to reading news relevant to the instrument. Also it's not really about looking at the "shapes of candles." That's a frankly primitive approach to technical analysis, and one of the biggest reasons that people keep drawing comparisons to astrology, numerology, divination, etc..
  - na85 6y ago
    >For technical analysis to be anything other than an abstract form of gambling, the efficient market hypothesis has to be flat out false. Technical analysis is predicated upon the assumption that the efficient market hypothesis is true, and that all investor sentiment and other relevant information is all already priced in. Whether TA is actually valid or if it's just drawing random foofy lines on a chart remains up for debate.
    - bsamuels 6y ago
      No, for technical analysis to work, EMH needs to be false. If EMH is strongly true, then the price of a security will always be priced to the intrinsic value of the underlying. For TA to work, the price needs to be divorced from the intrinsic value because the change in intrinsic value of an asset doesn't follow any pattern. If EMH is strongly true, even fundamental analysis should yield no alpha since all public information would be integrated into the price. That's why there's a distinction between strong and weak EMH. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032615/what-are-differences-between-weak-strong-and-semistrong-versions-efficient-market-hypothesis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032615/what-are-dif...
      - na85 6y ago
        >No, for technical analysis to work, EMH needs to be false. The way it was explained to me is that if the EMH is true, then looking at fundamentals is pointless because all the fundamentals are already priced-in, which leaves nothing but price and volume data left to analyze. How could EMH be anything other than true in that case? I'll note that investopedia is often not a good source. Here's an investopedia article that explicitly supports my position, for example: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/technicalanalysis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/technicalanalysis.asp
        bsamuels 6y ago
        The same claims about TA/EMH are made as part of the CFA study materials that are made in the investopedia I linked. I'm afraid I don't know what else to tell you, there's no public links to CFA Institute study materials and they're a pretty definitive certification authority in finance.
  - smabie 6y ago
    It's well known that returns are both not normally distributed (obviously) and not even log-normally distributed (slightly less obvious, but still readily apparent). Moreover, it's pretty obvious that while markets don't conform to any form of EMH, they often trend towards efficiency over time. This is easy to see in the massive consolidation in the market making space in traditional finance over the last decade and also you can watch it in real-time right now in the crypto space. Even two years ago, it was pretty trivial to be successful as a market maker using quite naive models and a system glued together in Python in a couple days. Today, things have gotten significantly more competitive: many single man operations have become uncompetitive and even larger (3-10 man) and more sophisticated firms are feeling the heat from behemoths like Susquehanna, Jane St, and Jump Trading. It's amazing how you can feel the crypto market getting more efficient in front or your eyes. It's like running on a treadmill, and you're always terrified it will start going faster than you and your team can run.
  - deandree 6y ago
    People who strongly believe in EMH are usually theorists. There are way too many people who's practical track record is way too good to be attributed to chance. I believe markets are random most of the time, but there are moments when they are not. That's where the best traders place their bets. Also, here's my favorite counter argument to EMH - https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-wrong-zoom/ https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-w...
  - ezekiel68 6y ago
    Contrary to popular belief, many growth stocks begin their periods of greatest growth at a time when they have reached an all-time high . This was true of TSLA in April, 2013 and NVDA in April, 2016 (No claim on the significance of April is implied) This observation, along with other technical AND fundamental screening techniques may at least be used to generate a short-list of candidated securities deemed more likely to succeed as investments than others. Yet, none of this negates the responsibility to follow sound portfolio management practices. (Inventing involves significant risks. You could lose all of your capital. Nothing I've writtend should be construed as investment advice)
- SamBam 6y ago
  The idea is that stock graphs show patterns. That when it's rising you can stare at the shape of it and intuit whether it is going to rise or fall within the next short period of time. People get very into specific patterns, and books are written about these patterns. To a certain extent, if a lot of people are doing this this can turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, because lots of people are looking at the same charts and saying "it's bound to fall now" and so sell their assets. The problem is, this only makes any kind of sense with assets that have very little "real world value" grounded in reality. Why does the price of BitCoin going up? Because people expect it to go up. So they buy it. So it goes up.
  - deandree 6y ago
    Patterns are an oldschool Technical Analysis fallacy that blindly believes that X means up and Y down. More practical and successful approaches (Price Action) focus on statistical significance and recognizing market context and supply/demand imbalances. Self-fulfilling prophecy is not a real thing - take any chart and you can find 10 patterns that say up and 10 that say down. Big players move the markets and they don't use retail trader Technical Analysis patterns.
- deandree 6y ago
  It's all about price and price action. A lot of trading styles don't require much history and don't care about the news - it's all calculated in before you know. A lot of traders believe price reflects all you need to know - everything else is just noise.
simpleoxygen 6y ago
I’ve seen this posted multiple times over reddit and something is making me think you are paying for these upvotes as now it’s shot up on hacker news.
- deandree 6y ago
  I've been doing a fair bit of promotion and marketing, because "you build it and they will come" rarely works, even if your stuff is good. But I'm sure any dev who has launched anything already knows that. I posted this here with close to 0 expectations, because my posts in HN usually don't get much attention. If you've seen this on Reddit, you should know it was very well received in multiple subs, so getting a bit more than 20 upvotes here wouldn't be something out of the ordinary.
  - simpleoxygen 6y ago
    Yeah nice try but HN detected the voting abnormality and removed your post.
    - deandree 6y ago
      It's not removed. Sorry to disappoint your conspiracy theory.
      - simpleoxygen 6y ago
        Try checking HN front page on a different IP and account ;-)
        deandree 6y ago
        Try checking like page number 5/6. This post has 30 upvotes, not 300. I must know you from somewhere. A random stranger wouldn't spend so much time obsessing and being jealous over my medicore success post. Based on your green nickname, you probably even registered just to come comment on my post. I advice you to stop wasting time on such activities.
carabiner 6y ago
My brother was a daytrader in the late 90s on Wall Street at a small firm. He said they didn't hire him for his degree (elite university) but for his ability to play a music instrument at a high level. They looked for people with a strong ability in a specific, nontrivial "skill." There were a lot of athletes, it didn't have to be analytical or related to trading. He didn't do well there and left after a short while, but this trading simulator makes me think of zeroing on just that narrow ability to stare at the charts and suss out patterns from the noise.
- DenverCode 6y ago
  I had a couple of interviews at trading firms and the largest ones required skill tests such as clicking buttons within a specific time period, riddles, etc.
  - elevenoh 6y ago
    How are these firms doing today?
    - DenverCode 6y ago
      One is akuna capital the other is jp Morgan.
  - deandree 6y ago
    From what I know, there is basically only one thing they care about. Proven track record of making money and beating the market. Nothing else really counts. Except for young graduate quants - you need a degree from top tier school.
- deandree 6y ago
  Successful traders come from very different backgrounds and use very different methods. There are a million ways to make money in this, but they all are very hard to find. Most of successful traders have very unique skillset. This is a performance sport. Lot's or similarities with pro athletes.
justinsaccount 6y ago
Not much of a trading simulator if it does not allow you to control size
- deandree 6y ago
  Does it really impact your practicing experience that significantly? This is an abstraction over market, it also doesn't have slippage and hundred other things. Anyway, size is on the feature list, will be added in following weeks.
  - justinsaccount 6y ago
    yes. If you are long something you can't buy more on a dip or sell half on a rally.
    - deandree 6y ago
      If averaging down is the key to your daytrading strategy, I suggest you rethink your strategy. There is a good saying - "never add to a losing position".
      - justinsaccount 6y ago
        "or sell half on a rally"
artemonster 6y ago
How does "go short" works? I understand "go long" is when you buy low and sell high. What is the opposite?
- amerkhalid 6y ago
  "Go short" means you sell first, then buy it back later. If you think AAPL is going lower, you can borrow shares from your broker and sell those. And when it goes down, you buy back shares at lower price and return them to broker with interest.
  - artemonster 6y ago
    thanks!
- currymj 6y ago
  you borrow a share of stock from someone (like literally they loan it to you), then go sell it and keep the money. eventually, you go to the market, buy another share of stock, and give it back. if you sold high and bought low, you make money.
- deandree 6y ago
  To simplify - when you long, you bet on price going up. When you short, you bet on price going down. If you went short and price dropped 5%, your profit is 5% (minus commission, slippage, and some other stuff).
zexodus 6y ago
Hello deandree, Almost a year ago I've had pretty much an identical idea. Ultimately I got discouraged by the thought that historical data does not correlate with actual stock performance. Nonetheless, I'm very proud of you for managing to release this product, regardless of the critique you get in this thread. Best of luck in the future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deandree 6y ago
  Thanks! I've now had 20+ people tell me they had this idea or even started it, or even launched it and got no traction. I needed this for myself, so was going to build this anyway. If this helps anyone else (already has, we have solid stable user base), even better for me. We have quite active Discord and tons of ideas what to build next.
SamBam 6y ago
On my first try I got a return of 34% over a month of trading, while the Buy & Hold got 5%. But I'm not going to quit my day job. It's quite easy to keep afloat if you're trading on something like BitCoin that mostly just goes up and up, with the occasional downward blip. But since you don't know when it all might come crashing down, you may as well be doubling your bet every time you lose at roulette -- that also feels like you keep winning, until you don't. One thing that would probably be good is to have people create accounts, and ensure all their sessions are logged. That will make it so that people can't just forget their losses and pretend to themselves that they usually win.
- adflux 6y ago
  Its very easy to make money if the market is only going up. Are you beating the market?
  - deandree 6y ago
    Exactly, you should always be competing with the market. If you can't beat it, why even trade - just invest and spend time elsewhere.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      > while the Buy & Hold got 5%. Yes, I got 6x returns compared with the market.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dpflan 6y ago
  "...But since you don't know when it all might come crashing down..." - Shouldn't stop orders help with this?
  - tines 6y ago
    I believe that stop orders are not effective during the after-hours period. This might be because they require a market-maker to actuate, but I'm not sure.
KaseKun 6y ago
This is excellent! Could you add the ability to "pyramid"? That is, add a second or nth long position.
- deandree 6y ago
  Thanks! That feature is on the todo list, might be added in following weeks.
ldayley 6y ago
I miss Quantopian.com for messing with algorimic trading (most especially for the decades of tick-level data, the community, and back-testing!!). It was sold to Robinhood last month. John Fawcett is an interesting guy & he probably still lurks HN (Hi!).
- fawce 6y ago
  still here :)
np- 6y ago
This is pretty cool, and seems like it would be fun to mess around with. I loathe to be overly negative since I realize I'm probably not the smartest person in the room so I might have overlooked something, but... 1) My findings are that you can't ever predict future stock performance based on historical data, no matter how many tests/trials/algorithms you run. The reason for this is because we, as mere mortal humans, just simply can't predict the future -- no matter how much we try to obfuscate this fact with math and data science, unless you're modeling every single thing that's happening on the planet at the same time and have created a singularity or something, you just can't. This means there is always something potentially lurking around the corner that can absolutely destroy your returns. Now, can you have success in the short/medium term? Maybe. You have a chance to come out a winner in Vegas too. 2) The difference between simulated trades and real trades is actually quite significant. Every real trade you make on the market, no matter how small and/or insignificant you think it is, actually does have a real impact on the market. This is where I find it typically goes sideways when people come up with algorithms based on historical data. An analogy for this is voting -- you might feel that your one single vote doesn't matter, but the fact that everyone voted is everything. You can't easily simulate this as far as I can think of.
- ezekiel68 6y ago
  I'm not sure it is required that we become able to predict the future perfectly. Some technical patterns for some asset classes in some situations (such as belonging to a strong industry group) do, in fact, give an advantage. Here's an example: If a securities chart has been trending downward and the price is below its 50-period moving average (50PMA), the price action cannot change to a rapid and significant upturn without crossing above the 50PMA . Although this does not mean that all crosses above the 50PMA will result in rapid and significant gains, a system such as this could be used to test whether such a strategy provides enough of an advantage over time. It can also be used to test one's reflexes to make the trade at the proper time. AND also used to test one's reflexes to get out of the trade if it does not continue moving in the anticipated direction.
- deandree 6y ago
  Thank you very much! I don't see the feedback as negative, as what I've seen so far has been 95% overwhelmingly positive. My thesis has proven true - this tool is helping people. While HN might not be the most appropriate audience, I'm still grateful for the comments made here. Always good to see things from different perspective. As for your points: 1) Trading is a game of probabilities and risk management. None of the best traders I know are trying to predict anything. They are merely reacting to situations where they have calculated advantage. They know their edge, they know their odds, and they are placing their bets when it's skewed in their favor. 2) For most retail trading styles and portfolio sizes, real trades will have an impact, but not significant enough for it to worry about too much. Unless asset your're trading is really illiquid.
narrationbox 6y ago
This looks great! Congrats on launching. We used to be in this space too. The most tricky part is performance, especially if you are backtesting against an algorithm instead of manual trading. Having to wait for the results on 30 years of trading data can get rather annoying at times. If you do implement support for algorithmic trading, it might be helpful to rewrite the core in WebAssembly.
- deandree 6y ago
  Thanks! This tool focuses specifically on Price Action style daytrading. For algotrading there are many other tools that are way better suited for this task.

37 points by deandree 6y ago

What sort of skill are you supposed to be training when you don't even know the time period or security you're trading? Just by staring at the brownian motion really hard?

jshawl 6y ago
Risk tolerance?
bsamuels 6y ago
People who trade on technical indicators like the author have to consider the market to not be accurately represented by brownian motion. For technical analysis to be anything other than an abstract form of gambling, the efficient market hypothesis has to be flat out false. Representing the market using brownian motion only applies in cases where the market is under the weak or strong forms of EMH.
- apetresc 6y ago
  Surely even the most ardent EMH opponent would at least agree that information is relevant, even if it hasn't been fully absorbed by the market yet, right? I've never met any proponent of technical analysis who maintains that they can divine patterns purely from the shape of the candles, without knowing what they're trading or what day it is? That flies right past EMH and into the realm of pure numerology.
  - bsamuels 6y ago
    Honestly, I have no idea. I don't know any proprietary traders who use candlesticks/TA. The one or two people I know who use TA are hobbyists who watched some videos on youtube. I might be in the wrong here, but all my experience points at TA being something that's used to sell online courses/generate advertising revenue rather than being a legitimate way to trade.
  - saltyfamiliar 6y ago
    > I've never met any proponent of technical analysis who maintains that they can divine patterns purely from the shape of the candles, without knowing what they're trading or what day it is? I have. The theory is that the fundamentals of the security are reflected in it's price movements, so reading its price action is roughly analogous to reading news relevant to the instrument. Also it's not really about looking at the "shapes of candles." That's a frankly primitive approach to technical analysis, and one of the biggest reasons that people keep drawing comparisons to astrology, numerology, divination, etc..
- na85 6y ago
  >For technical analysis to be anything other than an abstract form of gambling, the efficient market hypothesis has to be flat out false. Technical analysis is predicated upon the assumption that the efficient market hypothesis is true, and that all investor sentiment and other relevant information is all already priced in. Whether TA is actually valid or if it's just drawing random foofy lines on a chart remains up for debate.
  - bsamuels 6y ago
    No, for technical analysis to work, EMH needs to be false. If EMH is strongly true, then the price of a security will always be priced to the intrinsic value of the underlying. For TA to work, the price needs to be divorced from the intrinsic value because the change in intrinsic value of an asset doesn't follow any pattern. If EMH is strongly true, even fundamental analysis should yield no alpha since all public information would be integrated into the price. That's why there's a distinction between strong and weak EMH. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032615/what-are-differences-between-weak-strong-and-semistrong-versions-efficient-market-hypothesis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032615/what-are-dif...
    - na85 6y ago
      >No, for technical analysis to work, EMH needs to be false. The way it was explained to me is that if the EMH is true, then looking at fundamentals is pointless because all the fundamentals are already priced-in, which leaves nothing but price and volume data left to analyze. How could EMH be anything other than true in that case? I'll note that investopedia is often not a good source. Here's an investopedia article that explicitly supports my position, for example: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/technicalanalysis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/technicalanalysis.asp
      - bsamuels 6y ago
        The same claims about TA/EMH are made as part of the CFA study materials that are made in the investopedia I linked. I'm afraid I don't know what else to tell you, there's no public links to CFA Institute study materials and they're a pretty definitive certification authority in finance.
- smabie 6y ago
  It's well known that returns are both not normally distributed (obviously) and not even log-normally distributed (slightly less obvious, but still readily apparent). Moreover, it's pretty obvious that while markets don't conform to any form of EMH, they often trend towards efficiency over time. This is easy to see in the massive consolidation in the market making space in traditional finance over the last decade and also you can watch it in real-time right now in the crypto space. Even two years ago, it was pretty trivial to be successful as a market maker using quite naive models and a system glued together in Python in a couple days. Today, things have gotten significantly more competitive: many single man operations have become uncompetitive and even larger (3-10 man) and more sophisticated firms are feeling the heat from behemoths like Susquehanna, Jane St, and Jump Trading. It's amazing how you can feel the crypto market getting more efficient in front or your eyes. It's like running on a treadmill, and you're always terrified it will start going faster than you and your team can run.
- deandree 6y ago
  People who strongly believe in EMH are usually theorists. There are way too many people who's practical track record is way too good to be attributed to chance. I believe markets are random most of the time, but there are moments when they are not. That's where the best traders place their bets. Also, here's my favorite counter argument to EMH - https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-wrong-zoom/ https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-w...
- ezekiel68 6y ago
  Contrary to popular belief, many growth stocks begin their periods of greatest growth at a time when they have reached an all-time high . This was true of TSLA in April, 2013 and NVDA in April, 2016 (No claim on the significance of April is implied) This observation, along with other technical AND fundamental screening techniques may at least be used to generate a short-list of candidated securities deemed more likely to succeed as investments than others. Yet, none of this negates the responsibility to follow sound portfolio management practices. (Inventing involves significant risks. You could lose all of your capital. Nothing I've writtend should be construed as investment advice)
SamBam 6y ago
The idea is that stock graphs show patterns. That when it's rising you can stare at the shape of it and intuit whether it is going to rise or fall within the next short period of time. People get very into specific patterns, and books are written about these patterns. To a certain extent, if a lot of people are doing this this can turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, because lots of people are looking at the same charts and saying "it's bound to fall now" and so sell their assets. The problem is, this only makes any kind of sense with assets that have very little "real world value" grounded in reality. Why does the price of BitCoin going up? Because people expect it to go up. So they buy it. So it goes up.
- deandree 6y ago
  Patterns are an oldschool Technical Analysis fallacy that blindly believes that X means up and Y down. More practical and successful approaches (Price Action) focus on statistical significance and recognizing market context and supply/demand imbalances. Self-fulfilling prophecy is not a real thing - take any chart and you can find 10 patterns that say up and 10 that say down. Big players move the markets and they don't use retail trader Technical Analysis patterns.
deandree 6y ago
It's all about price and price action. A lot of trading styles don't require much history and don't care about the news - it's all calculated in before you know. A lot of traders believe price reflects all you need to know - everything else is just noise.

simpleoxygen 6y ago

I’ve seen this posted multiple times over reddit and something is making me think you are paying for these upvotes as now it’s shot up on hacker news.

deandree 6y ago
I've been doing a fair bit of promotion and marketing, because "you build it and they will come" rarely works, even if your stuff is good. But I'm sure any dev who has launched anything already knows that. I posted this here with close to 0 expectations, because my posts in HN usually don't get much attention. If you've seen this on Reddit, you should know it was very well received in multiple subs, so getting a bit more than 20 upvotes here wouldn't be something out of the ordinary.
- simpleoxygen 6y ago
  Yeah nice try but HN detected the voting abnormality and removed your post.
  - deandree 6y ago
    It's not removed. Sorry to disappoint your conspiracy theory.
    - simpleoxygen 6y ago
      Try checking HN front page on a different IP and account ;-)
      - deandree 6y ago
        Try checking like page number 5/6. This post has 30 upvotes, not 300. I must know you from somewhere. A random stranger wouldn't spend so much time obsessing and being jealous over my medicore success post. Based on your green nickname, you probably even registered just to come comment on my post. I advice you to stop wasting time on such activities.

carabiner 6y ago

My brother was a daytrader in the late 90s on Wall Street at a small firm. He said they didn't hire him for his degree (elite university) but for his ability to play a music instrument at a high level. They looked for people with a strong ability in a specific, nontrivial "skill." There were a lot of athletes, it didn't have to be analytical or related to trading. He didn't do well there and left after a short while, but this trading simulator makes me think of zeroing on just that narrow ability to stare at the charts and suss out patterns from the noise.

DenverCode 6y ago
I had a couple of interviews at trading firms and the largest ones required skill tests such as clicking buttons within a specific time period, riddles, etc.
- elevenoh 6y ago
  How are these firms doing today?
  - DenverCode 6y ago
    One is akuna capital the other is jp Morgan.
- deandree 6y ago
  From what I know, there is basically only one thing they care about. Proven track record of making money and beating the market. Nothing else really counts. Except for young graduate quants - you need a degree from top tier school.
deandree 6y ago
Successful traders come from very different backgrounds and use very different methods. There are a million ways to make money in this, but they all are very hard to find. Most of successful traders have very unique skillset. This is a performance sport. Lot's or similarities with pro athletes.

justinsaccount 6y ago

Not much of a trading simulator if it does not allow you to control size

deandree 6y ago
Does it really impact your practicing experience that significantly? This is an abstraction over market, it also doesn't have slippage and hundred other things. Anyway, size is on the feature list, will be added in following weeks.
- justinsaccount 6y ago
  yes. If you are long something you can't buy more on a dip or sell half on a rally.
  - deandree 6y ago
    If averaging down is the key to your daytrading strategy, I suggest you rethink your strategy. There is a good saying - "never add to a losing position".
    - justinsaccount 6y ago
      "or sell half on a rally"

artemonster 6y ago

How does "go short" works? I understand "go long" is when you buy low and sell high. What is the opposite?

amerkhalid 6y ago
"Go short" means you sell first, then buy it back later. If you think AAPL is going lower, you can borrow shares from your broker and sell those. And when it goes down, you buy back shares at lower price and return them to broker with interest.
- artemonster 6y ago
  thanks!
currymj 6y ago
you borrow a share of stock from someone (like literally they loan it to you), then go sell it and keep the money. eventually, you go to the market, buy another share of stock, and give it back. if you sold high and bought low, you make money.
deandree 6y ago
To simplify - when you long, you bet on price going up. When you short, you bet on price going down. If you went short and price dropped 5%, your profit is 5% (minus commission, slippage, and some other stuff).

zexodus 6y ago

Hello deandree, Almost a year ago I've had pretty much an identical idea. Ultimately I got discouraged by the thought that historical data does not correlate with actual stock performance. Nonetheless, I'm very proud of you for managing to release this product, regardless of the critique you get in this thread. Best of luck in the future.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deandree 6y ago
Thanks! I've now had 20+ people tell me they had this idea or even started it, or even launched it and got no traction. I needed this for myself, so was going to build this anyway. If this helps anyone else (already has, we have solid stable user base), even better for me. We have quite active Discord and tons of ideas what to build next.

SamBam 6y ago

On my first try I got a return of 34% over a month of trading, while the Buy & Hold got 5%. But I'm not going to quit my day job. It's quite easy to keep afloat if you're trading on something like BitCoin that mostly just goes up and up, with the occasional downward blip. But since you don't know when it all might come crashing down, you may as well be doubling your bet every time you lose at roulette -- that also feels like you keep winning, until you don't. One thing that would probably be good is to have people create accounts, and ensure all their sessions are logged. That will make it so that people can't just forget their losses and pretend to themselves that they usually win.

adflux 6y ago
Its very easy to make money if the market is only going up. Are you beating the market?
- deandree 6y ago
  Exactly, you should always be competing with the market. If you can't beat it, why even trade - just invest and spend time elsewhere.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    > while the Buy & Hold got 5%. Yes, I got 6x returns compared with the market.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dpflan 6y ago
"...But since you don't know when it all might come crashing down..." - Shouldn't stop orders help with this?
- tines 6y ago
  I believe that stop orders are not effective during the after-hours period. This might be because they require a market-maker to actuate, but I'm not sure.

KaseKun 6y ago

This is excellent! Could you add the ability to "pyramid"? That is, add a second or nth long position.

deandree 6y ago
Thanks! That feature is on the todo list, might be added in following weeks.

ldayley 6y ago

I miss Quantopian.com for messing with algorimic trading (most especially for the decades of tick-level data, the community, and back-testing!!). It was sold to Robinhood last month. John Fawcett is an interesting guy & he probably still lurks HN (Hi!).

fawce 6y ago
still here :)

np- 6y ago

This is pretty cool, and seems like it would be fun to mess around with. I loathe to be overly negative since I realize I'm probably not the smartest person in the room so I might have overlooked something, but... 1) My findings are that you can't ever predict future stock performance based on historical data, no matter how many tests/trials/algorithms you run. The reason for this is because we, as mere mortal humans, just simply can't predict the future -- no matter how much we try to obfuscate this fact with math and data science, unless you're modeling every single thing that's happening on the planet at the same time and have created a singularity or something, you just can't. This means there is always something potentially lurking around the corner that can absolutely destroy your returns. Now, can you have success in the short/medium term? Maybe. You have a chance to come out a winner in Vegas too. 2) The difference between simulated trades and real trades is actually quite significant. Every real trade you make on the market, no matter how small and/or insignificant you think it is, actually does have a real impact on the market. This is where I find it typically goes sideways when people come up with algorithms based on historical data. An analogy for this is voting -- you might feel that your one single vote doesn't matter, but the fact that everyone voted is everything. You can't easily simulate this as far as I can think of.

ezekiel68 6y ago
I'm not sure it is required that we become able to predict the future perfectly. Some technical patterns for some asset classes in some situations (such as belonging to a strong industry group) do, in fact, give an advantage. Here's an example: If a securities chart has been trending downward and the price is below its 50-period moving average (50PMA), the price action cannot change to a rapid and significant upturn without crossing above the 50PMA . Although this does not mean that all crosses above the 50PMA will result in rapid and significant gains, a system such as this could be used to test whether such a strategy provides enough of an advantage over time. It can also be used to test one's reflexes to make the trade at the proper time. AND also used to test one's reflexes to get out of the trade if it does not continue moving in the anticipated direction.
deandree 6y ago
Thank you very much! I don't see the feedback as negative, as what I've seen so far has been 95% overwhelmingly positive. My thesis has proven true - this tool is helping people. While HN might not be the most appropriate audience, I'm still grateful for the comments made here. Always good to see things from different perspective. As for your points: 1) Trading is a game of probabilities and risk management. None of the best traders I know are trying to predict anything. They are merely reacting to situations where they have calculated advantage. They know their edge, they know their odds, and they are placing their bets when it's skewed in their favor. 2) For most retail trading styles and portfolio sizes, real trades will have an impact, but not significant enough for it to worry about too much. Unless asset your're trading is really illiquid.

narrationbox 6y ago

This looks great! Congrats on launching. We used to be in this space too. The most tricky part is performance, especially if you are backtesting against an algorithm instead of manual trading. Having to wait for the results on 30 years of trading data can get rather annoying at times. If you do implement support for algorithmic trading, it might be helpful to rewrite the core in WebAssembly.

deandree 6y ago
Thanks! This tool focuses specifically on Price Action style daytrading. For algotrading there are many other tools that are way better suited for this task.