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Show HN: Algorithmic trading for everyone

• b20000 4y ago
  so did you get into YC?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Not yet!
• morelandjs 4y ago
  Any time I see ML claims, I want to see rigorous validation. At the end of the day, whether or not your approach works isn’t debatable. It’s measurable. My prior is that everyone is full of shit, because most ML claims are.
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Hi! Just want to say im a passionate inventor and programmer. I just love and have fun learning new technologies and building my dreams with them. I'm no expert on ML but i could tell you that i have a bunch of personal ML projects ranging from Deep-Reinforcement-Q-Learning to NLP and computer vision. I have been programming for aprox 8 years, 5 of those during my engineering and computer science BS studies here in Chile. Check some of my ML projects here!: https://github.com/MatiasMingo/Machine-Learning-Projects https://github.com/MatiasMingo/Machine-Learning-Projects Cheers!
• pjc50 4y ago
  Nice font! > Currently facing a big KYC compliance wall (code and protocols) .. but yes, you're going to learn a _lot_ about the difficulties of legitimately marketing to retail investors.
• manx 4y ago
  You definitely have a good domain. Best of luck!
• 1in1010 4y ago
  Page does not load "Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail "
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Trying to fix it. Getting too many requests :)
    • senectus1 4y ago
      HN Hugz... :-D
    • bigChris 4y ago
      • fsckboy 4y ago
        > Be careful with Heroku DMCA takedown if you don’t plan on open sourcing the project. G what does this mean, and how would open sourcing help, and what is the G?
        • bigChris 4y ago
        • bigChris 4y ago
      • simlevesque 4y ago
        I don't understand.
      • selcuka 4y ago
        > Some solicited advice I'm pretty sure that's not what "solicited" means.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pwillia7 4y ago
  Site down -- Love the idea and been waiting for something like this. I want a yahoo pipes (if anyone even remembers that) for algo trading. I'll wait and see if that's what this is when your app is up!
  • jasfi 4y ago
    My app does something like that, only for crypto right now (also waiting to see this app too). https://tradecast.one https://tradecast.one
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Thank you! The website is up an running now
  • landa 4y ago
    My company offers exactly this kind of product. We’re currently offering it to institutional investors, but if you’re interested, would love to talk and discuss your use case. My email is my username at alum dot MIT dot edu.
• babyshake 4y ago
  > Currently applying for dev positions on several companies. Is there a way to contact you regarding this - specifically Algo trading software related?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Hi! My email is matias.mingo@gmail.com
• karn09 4y ago
  Since your site is down - and if this is open source, can you share a link to the source code?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Currently not open source. The site is up though! Kindly, Matías
• sillycube 4y ago
  Cannot enter the site. Showing heroku error
• csense 4y ago
  One potential target audience might be employees / executives of publicly traded companies. If Alice owns stock in her employer or her employers' partners / suppliers / clients, she may be very interested in an algorithmic position manager to help her achieve her financial goals (e.g. selling down if the position exceeds a certain percentage of her net worth). The main reason Alice would like this is to create an audit trail that defends her against any hypothetical insider trading accusations. That is, your brokerage will have records that explain not only what trades occurred (as any brokerage will do), but also why those trades occurred (you ran algorithm F on X input and F(X) is what popped out).
  • Swizec 4y ago
    Next step: bespoke algorithms with neural nets trained just so to produce the result you want. “We’re about to close this deal, run the algorithm that decides to buy $vendor stock”
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    This blew my mind. You genius lol. Lets talk. matias.mingo@gmail.com
  • erik_seaberg 4y ago
    This doesn’t work if you have the ability to let good trades proceed but cancel bad trades after having learned nonpublic info. You’d have to commit to a https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp plan during an open trading window, and I don’t know how complex the price/quantity formula is allowed to be.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    That might not be sufficient. First, some publicly traded companies have freezes and employees can only trade in specific windows. The algorithm will need to take this into account. Second, is "an algorithm did so" a legitimate defense ? It will probably depend on the jurisdiction but i can imagine lots of courts dismissing that because regardless of algorithms, it's on the human not to act illegally, and humans have created, tuned and parametered said algo. I don't think laws have been updated for such cases ( like with self-driving cars).
• yoyopa 4y ago
  isn't algorithmic trading essentially about leeching from others. i wouldn't call it investing.
  • benreesman 4y ago
    No, algorithmic trading is not about leeching from anyone in any intrinsic way. Like all trading there are good and bad actors, and bad actors get a lot of press. The two biggest roles that “algorithmic” or “high-frequency” or “electronic” traders play are: - market making: someone has to warehouse a bunch of thing A a and thing B so that buyers or sellers can find a counter party. this used to be an Italian guy from Jersey called a “specialist” and he quoted in eighths so that the minimum he could make per unit was $0.125. he was not giving you a better deal than optiver. - arbitrage: thing X costs a lot in Chicago and is cheap in New York, or vice versa. buy in the cheap place, raising the price, sell in the expensive place, lowering the price. wash/rinse/repeat: shit costs the same in both places now. people have been doing this since before the wheel, on foot.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      How are market makers using algo trading to warehouse a bunch of stock?
      • benreesman 4y ago
        The use of models and algorithms is in an effort to not get caught on the wrong side of a big move, the technical term for this is adverse selection, more colloquially “getting lifted”. If someone is coming through with a massive order and you fail to anticipate this and cancel in time, you’ve effectively subsidized a block trader. Market makers want to participate on both sides picking up a small fee (typically one tick) for providing liquidity in a market that is seeing price action in both directions. They don’t want to get run over by agency execution people trying to lay off 21 billion in Tesla stock. The common misconception is that in order to sell you a share of AAPL, the market maker first buys it cheaper and then sells it to you in some unfair way. There isn’t time for that: they already had inventory.
• Unknomad 4y ago
  Thank you all for your replies! You are awesome and extremely helpful. Site is currently up. Having some unexpected issues with traffic. Sincerely, Matías
• cyral 4y ago
  Just an FYI, there is a company that spent 5+ years building a no-code algo trading platform and it's pretty slick: https://optionalpha.com/ https://optionalpha.com/ Of course, competition is always good for innovation though. It looks like they are integrating with brokers to avoid the KYC issues (however, there is certainly a lot of liability in automatically placing orders though). You will still need to get live market data from somewhere but the compliance for that isn't quite as crazy.
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    That company looks great! Thanks for the info and the advice
• smabie 4y ago
  1. Takes months/years to develop a profitable trading strategy with a team of people. 3.5/mo on multiple algorithms is kinda laughable. 2. The adverse selection here is really really high: if you could generate alpha, you would find some capital from a big multi-manager or allocator (which is incredibly easy to get these days), and just focus on running their money. The fact that you are making a retail focused site instead of raising private capital says a lot. 3. Looking over the trading algorithms, seems pretty clear that you don't have a background at a prop firm or a quant hedge fund? It takes years to learn this stuff, and the only way you can reasonably do it before going out on your own is at an established shop. Sorry to be a little harsh, but something like this is never going to work and no one in their right mind should allow your algorithms to trade for them. Generating alpha is incredibly incredibly hard, and teams of experts often spend years working on it with nothing to show for it.
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Thank you for your feedback. It's a work in progress. Being the only developer, an engineering student and a part-time freelance dev at the same time, it's hard to keep up with the maintenance of the algorithms and keeping the platform working perfectly. 3.5 months was the time i developed full-time. Some of the algorithms have been running since aug 2020
    • Unknomad 4y ago
      Also. I don't think that generating alpha is necessarily the only motivation behind building an investment strategy. There are endless possibilities of financial products that could be built on top of a platform like this. Basically, im looking for help to build the best possible platform.
    • designium 4y ago
      Don't let these people discourage you. You are starting up and by the fact that you already got people's attention in HN, that shows that you are onto something greater. Keep the good work!
      • 4y ago
• ordinaryradical 4y ago
  Unit can cover your compliance and KYC responsibilities. Just learned about them. Will get you there significantly faster and cheaper too.
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Awesome! Thank you
• SniperOwl 4y ago
  Was this app born in Chile?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Yes!!
• b20000 4y ago
  i don’t think you can simply let people invest in strategies you manage. that stuff is highly regulated and i think you will have to become a broker?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Hi! So yeah, i need to register as an RFA to operate legally with stocks. Not crypto though (Depends on the country). Cheers!
• a_c 4y ago
  How would you compare yourself with Quantopian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantopian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantopian
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    I think my business is simpler and more permeable than Quantopian for the regular retail investor. Also, Quantopian let algorithmic trading dev's publish their algo's for a percentage of the income in return. I would love to include such a feature in the near future but for now it's just too risky for me to let anyone publish an algorithm without the correct KYC. Also i think Quantopian's business model, however complex and well thought, was flawed.
• hiyer 4y ago
  Apologies as this is not directly related to the post - what books/other resources would you recommend for someone who wants to get into algorithmic trading?
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    I would recommend creating one from your own intuition. That's an awesome practice i think. You would be amazed on how simple they can be. Also some books i would recommend are: - Hands on Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading, Stefan Jansen, Packt - Python for Finance Cookbook, Eryk Lewinson, Packt Cheers!
  • ge96 4y ago
    Not OP can check out algotrades subreddit perhaps
  • HyprMusic 4y ago
    Ernie Chan's books are a great starting point. If you plan on getting into the ML side of things then Stefan Jansen and Marcos De Prado's books are a must have. Some advice: Read lots of books, stay away from Reddit, be prepared to get lamented by other algo traders, expect every idea you read about to have lost all it's alpha, get ready for several misguided "I've done it, I'm rich" moments, and most of all have fun. It's a long and arduous journey with very little hope, but if you like impossible challenges then there's nothing quite like it.
• donkarma 4y ago
  Website is incredibly laggy
• t_mann 4y ago
  Well, you tried something, next time try to make something that can't lose ordinary people money unexpectedly. A few notes: - The links didn't work in my mobile browser. - What I've seen similar platforms do is let users create strategies and then let other users invest in those, for a share of the profits. - Are you actually accepting investments already?? I hope that's just your family, but you might be in deeper legal trouble than you realize. Take that feature out asap until you talked to a specialized lawyer. - If you get a job offer, I'd take it if I were you. And take down the site, and pay out the investors (in full or above that; I'd cover any losses by the algorithms out of my own pocket).
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Thank you for your feedback! Of course! My main aim is to help people. Always. Currently i'm not accepting deposit's. No chance of taking down the site though :)
• shaolinspirit 4y ago
  Great idea, I wish for you to succeed with that and do not be discouraged by negative comments here. If you love what you do, keep doing it, eventually you will figure out the missing pieces. Take a look if you still didn't at open source trading bots like Gekko. And add a email subscription service, I would love to be notified about news and product updates. Good luck!
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Thank you very much for your feedback!! Really means a whole lot. Kindly, Matías
• hackandtrip 4y ago
  I hope the growing interest (probably driven also from the crazy $$$ that prop shops are paying) in algo-trading will lower the barrier of entry. Another interesting platform which grows on similar concepts is Composer: https://www.composer.trade https://www.composer.trade A big missing piece in OP's project is a backtesting - I think that a very important part of testing your strategy is trying it on real-world data.
• fluxode 4y ago
  Sorry to pile on, but this doesn't look great. Most people with any quantitative finance experience will tell you this is the wrong approach / the wrong application of these types of techniques. ML in trading is primarily used for portfolio optimization and relative value-type analysis. It (and especially Reinforcement Learning) are not useful if you a just trying to build signals to trade with. And Fibonacci Retracements are only kinda useful as a visual tool for assets that are mean-reverting in some capacity (i.e. forex). It is applicable to Crypto to an extent, but the volatility of Crypto nullifies most of the usefulness as this as an actual trading signal. If you really want to pursue this, it would be helpful if you provided a bit of info on how the strategies worked, what type of hedging / risk management is going on, etc. Best of luck
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Hi! the vision is different as the products are shown right now. Because i lack expertise, of course an experienced quant would laugh at my basic algorithms. But i had to start from somewhere. My aim and the features i want to implement now, will mainly come from fast product iteration, making connections with people that do have much more experience than me and quality growth for the algorithms. "Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference" Winston Churchill. Give it some time haha! Cheers
• anamax 4y ago
  Why are you doing KYC? Yes - you're doing KYC because you're holding your customer's money. Don't do that. Instead, figure out a way to provide trading services using your customer's accounts at existing exchanges (or DAOs). Let the exchanges do KYC. In other words, be a tout, not a bookie.
  • Unknomad 4y ago
    Yes! That's a brilliant idea. I'm going to figure it out. Thank you that is very helpful!
    • anamax 4y ago
      Note that you don't need partnerships with exchanges to do this. You just need API documentation. You're just providing software and possibly running (that is, arranging to run said software on some cloud service) software for people. Also, you might want to look at hummingbot.io . One of their models is aggregating market-makers. Exchanges and some coin promoters pay rebates to large market-makers. If you use hummingbot to do market-making, they'll include you in their pool (which consists of lots of small market-makers that the exchanges and promoters won't deal with individually) and give you a proportional share of the rebates that the pool earns. Yes, that aggregation does involve dealing with exchanges, but maybe you can come up with an angle that doesn't. Or, maybe that's an easy relationship to arrange. See https://hummingbot.io/en/blog/2022-02-liquidity-mining-march-recap https://hummingbot.io/en/blog/2022-02-liquidity-mining-march... for some recent numbers. (Liquidity mining is what they call being paid to do market-making.)