17 ms·

High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot) I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on

by smcn 4y ago

High level: finding the next big meme stocks (which morphed into finding any stock that could increase a lot) I was pretty late to GME, despite having been on Reddit for a good few years. I started researching what had happened, and where the conversations were taking place just trying to understand where to place myself to be a part of the next one. I ended up checking out the typical r/WallStreeBets and the other big trading subreddits but I always felt that I'd need to devote 100% of my time to Reddit in order to capitalise on any of the information. So I built a scraper to do the heavy lifting for me. That worked well. Then I started trying to find ways to identify the good stocks from the bad. That worked even better. So I turned it loose onto many different social media platforms where people discuss trading. It worked well enough that I ended up quitting my job to develop it and trade full time. There are still improvements that I'm working on but I think that'll always be the case. A great proof of concept of this is BBBY last month. Out of nowhere it went from ~$5 to $30. There was no real business reason for this, just rumour and speculation. It won't be the last. I don't know if links are allowed but if you want to follow along, it's https://feetr.io https://feetr.io (unfortunately not accepting any more beta users currently, but all data is posted to Twitter until we launch). There's also a leaderboard at https://feetr.io/leaderboard https://feetr.io/leaderboard if you're only interested in the big numbers. The tech stack is 100% lisp. I use CCL locally, SBCL on AWS. Also, hunchentoot will power the backend when it launches. I mention that because a lot of people have this fear that hunchentoot is slow or something but in my case it's pretty rapid. Of course, make sure you're writing fast code, but it's not the bottleneck that I think people think it is.

aklemm 4y ago
Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.
- smcn 4y ago
  It was earning me a lot more money than a salaried position.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- amusedcyclist 4y ago
  - smcn 4y ago
    I can understand the criticism that it's not adding value to the world. However, the same could be said of the stock market in general. If they shut that down, I'll happily close Feetr. In the meantime, someone will be making money from the stock market. Why shouldn't it be you? Or me? Or anyone reading this?
    - uoaei 4y ago
      The exact same thing could be said by the people running toxic mining operations with clearly safer alternatives, monopolistic healthcare firms who regularly deny basic access, lobbying operations to eliminate laws that keep kids from getting addicted to nicotine, and plenty else. These are all things your investments are surely contributing to. Ethics is hard because there's no enforcement like there is in the legal system. You have to think through the consequences of your actions yourself to understand the harms you engender throughout the system you inhabit, and then choose for yourself what level of harm you feel is acceptable to bring onto others for your own benefit.
      - smcn 4y ago
        Sure, I guess. However, the market will not die due to my lack of participation. It would be amazing if we lived in a world where morality would win out but we don't. My concern is "how do I help the most amount of people?", and that's why Feetr is public and cheap. You can live the life that makes you happiest but how are you helping people deal with the current economic downturn? There's a food bank near me and the line is much longer than I'd care to describe. It's not even cold yet. And it's going to get much worse. You can either pretend to help by avoiding the big bad, or you can work within the current framework to try to do as much good as you can.
        uoaei 4y ago
doix 4y ago
How are you finding communities to track? Are you crawling and flowing links to shitty subteddits? Creating honeypot accounts to try and get spammed invites to telegram/discord groups? Are you following the different *Chan's? IRC? I had a friend that did something for crypto. He would try to map pump and dump efforts to crypto projects. Gave them codenames and followed which ones had the most successful pump and dumps and then get in on them and sell early. It was a lot of work getting the spam early and being involved in all the places. I don't think he ever managed to fully automate it.
- smcn 4y ago
  Good question! It's a manual process of discovery. As in, I actually go out and hunt down groups talking about stocks and if it looks interesting, I'll add it into the algorithm. I'll then analyse the data over a period of a week or two and determine whether it's worth continuing. If it is, I move it to production and it'll perform as the rest do. If a community is not publicly visible (discord, telegram, etc) I'll ask an admin if they're okay with what I'm trying to do. If it's a no, it's a no. There are those groups that do try and force a pump and dump but I'm against using them. That's ultimately not what I'm after as I prefer organic conversation with genuine reasons to buy. Maybe the reason doesn't turn out to be true (BBBY) but that's the case with a lot of stock analysis anyway. Sometimes the reason a stock makes it to me is due to a pump and dump but there are measures taken to make sure that we're not acting on artificial metrics. There is also a period of premarket validation which tries to measure the stocks that are deemed interesting each day, so people are (hopefully) not getting sent duds. It can happen, yesterday ADTX only managed 0.58% but moments like that help us fine tune the algo and those happen fewer and fewer.
  - doix 4y ago
    Wait, I thought the whole point was to find pump and dumps early. I'm not sure what you're trying to do now. The most interesting (for me anyway) would be to figure out what is going to be on Reddit before it appears by analyzing spam/pump and dump groups etc. If you're analyzing Reddit after the fact, isn't that kinda late?

by smcn 4y ago

aklemm 4y ago

Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.

smcn 4y ago
It was earning me a lot more money than a salaried position.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
amusedcyclist 4y ago
- smcn 4y ago
  I can understand the criticism that it's not adding value to the world. However, the same could be said of the stock market in general. If they shut that down, I'll happily close Feetr. In the meantime, someone will be making money from the stock market. Why shouldn't it be you? Or me? Or anyone reading this?
  - uoaei 4y ago
    The exact same thing could be said by the people running toxic mining operations with clearly safer alternatives, monopolistic healthcare firms who regularly deny basic access, lobbying operations to eliminate laws that keep kids from getting addicted to nicotine, and plenty else. These are all things your investments are surely contributing to. Ethics is hard because there's no enforcement like there is in the legal system. You have to think through the consequences of your actions yourself to understand the harms you engender throughout the system you inhabit, and then choose for yourself what level of harm you feel is acceptable to bring onto others for your own benefit.
    - smcn 4y ago
      Sure, I guess. However, the market will not die due to my lack of participation. It would be amazing if we lived in a world where morality would win out but we don't. My concern is "how do I help the most amount of people?", and that's why Feetr is public and cheap. You can live the life that makes you happiest but how are you helping people deal with the current economic downturn? There's a food bank near me and the line is much longer than I'd care to describe. It's not even cold yet. And it's going to get much worse. You can either pretend to help by avoiding the big bad, or you can work within the current framework to try to do as much good as you can.
      - uoaei 4y ago

doix 4y ago

How are you finding communities to track? Are you crawling and flowing links to shitty subteddits? Creating honeypot accounts to try and get spammed invites to telegram/discord groups? Are you following the different *Chan's? IRC? I had a friend that did something for crypto. He would try to map pump and dump efforts to crypto projects. Gave them codenames and followed which ones had the most successful pump and dumps and then get in on them and sell early. It was a lot of work getting the spam early and being involved in all the places. I don't think he ever managed to fully automate it.

smcn 4y ago
Good question! It's a manual process of discovery. As in, I actually go out and hunt down groups talking about stocks and if it looks interesting, I'll add it into the algorithm. I'll then analyse the data over a period of a week or two and determine whether it's worth continuing. If it is, I move it to production and it'll perform as the rest do. If a community is not publicly visible (discord, telegram, etc) I'll ask an admin if they're okay with what I'm trying to do. If it's a no, it's a no. There are those groups that do try and force a pump and dump but I'm against using them. That's ultimately not what I'm after as I prefer organic conversation with genuine reasons to buy. Maybe the reason doesn't turn out to be true (BBBY) but that's the case with a lot of stock analysis anyway. Sometimes the reason a stock makes it to me is due to a pump and dump but there are measures taken to make sure that we're not acting on artificial metrics. There is also a period of premarket validation which tries to measure the stocks that are deemed interesting each day, so people are (hopefully) not getting sent duds. It can happen, yesterday ADTX only managed 0.58% but moments like that help us fine tune the algo and those happen fewer and fewer.
- doix 4y ago
  Wait, I thought the whole point was to find pump and dumps early. I'm not sure what you're trying to do now. The most interesting (for me anyway) would be to figure out what is going to be on Reddit before it appears by analyzing spam/pump and dump groups etc. If you're analyzing Reddit after the fact, isn't that kinda late?