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Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years: https://grizzlybulls.com https://grizzlybulls.com I've traded them with my own capital suc

Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years: https://grizzlybulls.com https://grizzlybulls.com I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual returns with much lower volatility than the overall market. My starting capital was small (500k) so in addition to growing with my own capital, I'm now providing the signals (3 free, 4 premium). 105 total members, MRR is currently $1397/month, just launched exactly 1 month ago today. Still in the google sandbox so I'm not seeing much organic traffic. We have a small community on reddit, rest of users from social media, Seeking Alpha and Stock Twits.

RyanShook 5y ago
Just curious, why sell your model if it's working so well for you?
- pyrrhotech 5y ago
  I've thought about this a lot, and to answer 100% honestly, I'm not sure I always will, but for now: 1. These are not HFT models. They trade once every 2-4 weeks on average. They scale to billions in capital, so selling them does not inhibit my own returns. 2. There's a lot of demand. Part of the reason I decided to launch is I had some friends IRL begging me to let them use my models as well. Seeking Alpha has over 15M MAU and hundreds of thousands of premium subscribers, and in my opinion this service provides more direct value and wastes less of your time with noise. 3. All the money I make from this goes back into my own bot and compounds. Sure the $1400/month doesn't add up to much right now, but 1000+ premium subscribers one day would make a huge difference to me financially. 4. I believe we are at a precipice with passive investing, and the next bear market which could be right around the corner will dishearten a lot of folks. The more money investing smartly in the market at a reasonable fee makes the markets and overall economy less fragile. More automated smart investing saves society the drag of lots of suits on wall street mostly playing a big marketing game without producing much alpha or liquidity or any other measurable benefit in contrast. Also, on a lighter note, running a business is just a lot of fun. I love seeing people use my product and get value from it.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Who would you describe as your target audience? For example, would someone with some software and mathematics skills but limited financial knowledge (but growing interest) be able to turn the signals into a trading system?
    - pyrrhotech 5y ago
      Definitely, that's why I have API access to signals as part of the Gold Plan. I think there are several ideal users: 1. Active investors who like to pick individual stocks and want to know when is a good time to hedge for beta for macro downturns. 2. Other algotraders who want to either set up their own fully automated system using my models (either in full or as part of the input to their own proprietary model). 3. Average folks who are mostly passive investors but want to be just active enough to avoid the biggest downturns that can take years or decades to recover from. They don't want their retirement savings to potentially stagnate for 13+ years like March 2000 to March 2013. Our models have low signal frequency compared to most competitor systems which make them easy to execute on almost passively by following our email notifications. 4. People who already have 6 figure+ investment accounts and want to grow it more aggressively than SPY or VTI, but don't want to 1. spend the time and energy managing their portfolio themselves and/or 2. pay very high hedge fund / PE / VC fund fees for dubious benefit
      - bmitc 5y ago
        Thanks for the information. I’m going to check it out. This is a unique thing I haven’t seen before. On another but related note, are you familiar with Robert Carver’s books? If so, any thoughts? I’ve been going through his Leveraged Trading book.
        pyrrhotech 5y ago
        Thanks for checking it out :) I've heard good things about Carver's work but I haven't read them myself. However, I got started reading similar books by Ernest Chan
mockingbirdy 5y ago
The performances of the models are almost unbelievable. I only saw something similar with alphahub.us in the past (but higher max. drawdowns) - what do you think of them? I'm interested in running the Gold Plan, are there any resources on how to set up a fully automatic trading system with it? I'd love to connect.
- pyrrhotech 5y ago
  Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day. By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour. Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :) One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems. I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.
  - mockingbirdy 5y ago
    You talk in plural form, but I can only find information about you on the page. With this kind of alpha, I'd expect a team of quant traders and physicists working on it (I actually talked with the creator of alphahub.us, he's a physicist). Are you intending to work full-time on it and what are the other plans (I saw you started a job at a new company)? Not trying to be skeptical, but this could be something life-changing if it works - already pretty hyped tbh. The alphahub.us strategy has execution problems because some of the smaller companies in the NASDAQ have low trading volume, so it doesn't scale as easily as a macro strat. I've talked with people who run it and it runs into scalability issues even with limited amounts of capital. Still trying to find the catch with your offer because it looks amazing.
kolbe 5y ago
So, let's assume you started on April 1st with $500k. That was 1.8045 years ago. At a compounded 75% returns, you now have $1,936,655 and you expect to make $124,904 this month alone on invested capital. And yet you bother to broadcast your secrets and (waste your time by selling subscriptions for $1397/month. If you did this for 5 years, you'd have $82mm, and you want to risk getting that edge traded away for $1397 a month. Huh. Smells fishy.
- pyrrhotech 5y ago
  Healthy skepticism is warranted and welcome of course! My account is currently at 1.4M. Taxes and living costs are taken out regularly. I'm not giving anyone access to the source of the models, only the output signals and trade history. I do give brief descriptions of some of the indicators that each take into account, but none of the details of how the complex system works which is the tricky part. You can find huge list of potential indicators for algotrading for free lots of places online. Lastly, the 75% is a bit of an anomaly. As you can see, the top model is only expected to return about 60% pre-tax. It's unusual that in live trading we have exceded the back test--2020 was a bizarre year and we also started after a big bear market so we benefited for a huge bull that year + nailed the June and September crashes (check the trade history). 2021 was a below average year by contrast, and over the long term, any algotrader should expect the live results to be a bit under the backtest as despite our best efforts (and I consider my anti-overfitting engine to be the biggest accomplishment here), all systems are to some degree overfit to past data. Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, I make no guarantees of always publishing this site and signals. If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering. However, obtaining 1% of Seeking Alpha's userbase would be 5M+ per year in revenue from the site which is a few multiples of my current net worth. Even with a hypothetical 50M net worth 10 years from now from 40% post-tax, post-living expense returns, 5M is still meaningful. If we fail to gain that much traction, or the bot does so well that I hit that kind of figure much earlier than expected, I may halt the publishing. As of now, and for the forseeable future, the site makes financial sense to me, and it's been a lot of fun, so it also makes pleasure sense for me. Life is about more than money of course.
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jussi666 5y ago
"Over the last few years we have built and refined seven algorithmic trading models. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual return. Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years." Lot's of conflicts there. You need to polish up your story. Nobody, NOBODY is going to put 500k on a bot which is still in development. Also how come you had exactly 500k? Not 497K or 502K for example? I've been developing cryptocurrency bots since 2013 and I don't see any reason to sell the signals to anyone ever if they turn out to be profitable. Last year, It seems, I finally made a few profitable bots but let's see how it goes. If they all turn out to be bad, I'm not going to start selling them like everyone else. I'm going to try again. Beating the SPX500 on bull runs is easy. Just buy the index future with higher than 1x leverage. It will work until we get another market crash. Have you backtested your bots during 2000-2006? How does the P&L curve look? Sorry, but I get pissed off at people who sell bots to people who doesn't understand how hard it actually is to make them profitable. Yeah, they may be your customers for a few months but then they are going to try another bot hoping it would be better.
- pyrrhotech 5y ago
  My bot was in full time development for more than 3 months before I started trading live with it, I had traded manually previously for 15+ years, and I was highly confident the bot was better than me. Why not put money into it? The execution framework is extremely stable. My models do not use any leverage, and they perform better in volatile markets than stable ones. In fact, the only way they can gain alpha is from avoiding drawdowns because during long signals they get exactly the same returns as SPX. And yes, you are right, it is incredibly difficult to make a profitable bot. 2020 isn't the full story, that's when I decided to give it my full time effort of 80+ hour weeks. As long as the bots continue to perform near the backtest, yes eventually I would become wealthy with them without other monetization, and as mentioned in other posts, a net worth in the high 8 figures, probably dwarfs what I can make with this website and service so I make no guarantees that it will always be around. That said, I'm enjoying running it and having real people use my product, and it does not hinder my own returns, at least not at our current scale. Side note: FWIW I think it's probably harder to make a successful crypto bot than equity bot because crypto is far more speculative and doesn't have as much fundamental and macro backing it up--would have to be mostly TA, sentiment and there's bound to be more inherent randomness to the movements since it is so new and speculative.

RyanShook 5y ago

Just curious, why sell your model if it's working so well for you?

pyrrhotech 5y ago
I've thought about this a lot, and to answer 100% honestly, I'm not sure I always will, but for now: 1. These are not HFT models. They trade once every 2-4 weeks on average. They scale to billions in capital, so selling them does not inhibit my own returns. 2. There's a lot of demand. Part of the reason I decided to launch is I had some friends IRL begging me to let them use my models as well. Seeking Alpha has over 15M MAU and hundreds of thousands of premium subscribers, and in my opinion this service provides more direct value and wastes less of your time with noise. 3. All the money I make from this goes back into my own bot and compounds. Sure the $1400/month doesn't add up to much right now, but 1000+ premium subscribers one day would make a huge difference to me financially. 4. I believe we are at a precipice with passive investing, and the next bear market which could be right around the corner will dishearten a lot of folks. The more money investing smartly in the market at a reasonable fee makes the markets and overall economy less fragile. More automated smart investing saves society the drag of lots of suits on wall street mostly playing a big marketing game without producing much alpha or liquidity or any other measurable benefit in contrast. Also, on a lighter note, running a business is just a lot of fun. I love seeing people use my product and get value from it.
- bmitc 5y ago
  Who would you describe as your target audience? For example, would someone with some software and mathematics skills but limited financial knowledge (but growing interest) be able to turn the signals into a trading system?
  - pyrrhotech 5y ago
    Definitely, that's why I have API access to signals as part of the Gold Plan. I think there are several ideal users: 1. Active investors who like to pick individual stocks and want to know when is a good time to hedge for beta for macro downturns. 2. Other algotraders who want to either set up their own fully automated system using my models (either in full or as part of the input to their own proprietary model). 3. Average folks who are mostly passive investors but want to be just active enough to avoid the biggest downturns that can take years or decades to recover from. They don't want their retirement savings to potentially stagnate for 13+ years like March 2000 to March 2013. Our models have low signal frequency compared to most competitor systems which make them easy to execute on almost passively by following our email notifications. 4. People who already have 6 figure+ investment accounts and want to grow it more aggressively than SPY or VTI, but don't want to 1. spend the time and energy managing their portfolio themselves and/or 2. pay very high hedge fund / PE / VC fund fees for dubious benefit
    - bmitc 5y ago
      Thanks for the information. I’m going to check it out. This is a unique thing I haven’t seen before. On another but related note, are you familiar with Robert Carver’s books? If so, any thoughts? I’ve been going through his Leveraged Trading book.
      - pyrrhotech 5y ago
        Thanks for checking it out :) I've heard good things about Carver's work but I haven't read them myself. However, I got started reading similar books by Ernest Chan

mockingbirdy 5y ago

The performances of the models are almost unbelievable. I only saw something similar with alphahub.us in the past (but higher max. drawdowns) - what do you think of them? I'm interested in running the Gold Plan, are there any resources on how to set up a fully automatic trading system with it? I'd love to connect.

pyrrhotech 5y ago
Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day. By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour. Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :) One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems. I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.
- mockingbirdy 5y ago
  You talk in plural form, but I can only find information about you on the page. With this kind of alpha, I'd expect a team of quant traders and physicists working on it (I actually talked with the creator of alphahub.us, he's a physicist). Are you intending to work full-time on it and what are the other plans (I saw you started a job at a new company)? Not trying to be skeptical, but this could be something life-changing if it works - already pretty hyped tbh. The alphahub.us strategy has execution problems because some of the smaller companies in the NASDAQ have low trading volume, so it doesn't scale as easily as a macro strat. I've talked with people who run it and it runs into scalability issues even with limited amounts of capital. Still trying to find the catch with your offer because it looks amazing.

kolbe 5y ago

So, let's assume you started on April 1st with $500k. That was 1.8045 years ago. At a compounded 75% returns, you now have $1,936,655 and you expect to make $124,904 this month alone on invested capital. And yet you bother to broadcast your secrets and (waste your time by selling subscriptions for $1397/month. If you did this for 5 years, you'd have $82mm, and you want to risk getting that edge traded away for $1397 a month. Huh. Smells fishy.

pyrrhotech 5y ago
Healthy skepticism is warranted and welcome of course! My account is currently at 1.4M. Taxes and living costs are taken out regularly. I'm not giving anyone access to the source of the models, only the output signals and trade history. I do give brief descriptions of some of the indicators that each take into account, but none of the details of how the complex system works which is the tricky part. You can find huge list of potential indicators for algotrading for free lots of places online. Lastly, the 75% is a bit of an anomaly. As you can see, the top model is only expected to return about 60% pre-tax. It's unusual that in live trading we have exceded the back test--2020 was a bizarre year and we also started after a big bear market so we benefited for a huge bull that year + nailed the June and September crashes (check the trade history). 2021 was a below average year by contrast, and over the long term, any algotrader should expect the live results to be a bit under the backtest as despite our best efforts (and I consider my anti-overfitting engine to be the biggest accomplishment here), all systems are to some degree overfit to past data. Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, I make no guarantees of always publishing this site and signals. If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering. However, obtaining 1% of Seeking Alpha's userbase would be 5M+ per year in revenue from the site which is a few multiples of my current net worth. Even with a hypothetical 50M net worth 10 years from now from 40% post-tax, post-living expense returns, 5M is still meaningful. If we fail to gain that much traction, or the bot does so well that I hit that kind of figure much earlier than expected, I may halt the publishing. As of now, and for the forseeable future, the site makes financial sense to me, and it's been a lot of fun, so it also makes pleasure sense for me. Life is about more than money of course.

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jussi666 5y ago

"Over the last few years we have built and refined seven algorithmic trading models. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual return. Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years." Lot's of conflicts there. You need to polish up your story. Nobody, NOBODY is going to put 500k on a bot which is still in development. Also how come you had exactly 500k? Not 497K or 502K for example? I've been developing cryptocurrency bots since 2013 and I don't see any reason to sell the signals to anyone ever if they turn out to be profitable. Last year, It seems, I finally made a few profitable bots but let's see how it goes. If they all turn out to be bad, I'm not going to start selling them like everyone else. I'm going to try again. Beating the SPX500 on bull runs is easy. Just buy the index future with higher than 1x leverage. It will work until we get another market crash. Have you backtested your bots during 2000-2006? How does the P&L curve look? Sorry, but I get pissed off at people who sell bots to people who doesn't understand how hard it actually is to make them profitable. Yeah, they may be your customers for a few months but then they are going to try another bot hoping it would be better.

pyrrhotech 5y ago
My bot was in full time development for more than 3 months before I started trading live with it, I had traded manually previously for 15+ years, and I was highly confident the bot was better than me. Why not put money into it? The execution framework is extremely stable. My models do not use any leverage, and they perform better in volatile markets than stable ones. In fact, the only way they can gain alpha is from avoiding drawdowns because during long signals they get exactly the same returns as SPX. And yes, you are right, it is incredibly difficult to make a profitable bot. 2020 isn't the full story, that's when I decided to give it my full time effort of 80+ hour weeks. As long as the bots continue to perform near the backtest, yes eventually I would become wealthy with them without other monetization, and as mentioned in other posts, a net worth in the high 8 figures, probably dwarfs what I can make with this website and service so I make no guarantees that it will always be around. That said, I'm enjoying running it and having real people use my product, and it does not hinder my own returns, at least not at our current scale. Side note: FWIW I think it's probably harder to make a successful crypto bot than equity bot because crypto is far more speculative and doesn't have as much fundamental and macro backing it up--would have to be mostly TA, sentiment and there's bound to be more inherent randomness to the movements since it is so new and speculative.