Show HN: Trigger – IFTTT for the stock market
triggerfinance.com
triggerfinance.com
I feel very confident in saying that for 99.9% of people, using this service will be a terrible, terrible idea that will only cost them money in the long run.
If you want to get into the stock market, buy a low-cost index fund and hold it for the next twenty years. That's the best advice I can give you.
I have criticised this idea elsewhere in the thread so this will be my last post on it. I hope all HN folk reading this thread will look into it and discover how parasitical this sort of venture is.
they just need to be aware that retail traders are not going to get the same kind of competitive advantages that the big boys like Citadel or GETCO have.
it's not a "rigged" game in the same way Walmart being able to buy wholesale apples cheap and flip it to us richer is not a "rigged" game.
This service is the equivalent of putting an amateur chess player in front of Kasparov and suggesting they bet real money on winning because you taught them a basic opening move.
everyone in this thread here seems to have the common sense to say "don't try to compete in the same strategies as the HFT specialists". that's absolutely true.
but then this idea that financial markets cannot be anything else other than a HFT's playground doesn't seem to go away, even in this thread. that's not a fair assessment.
if you are a retail investor, if you pick a portfolio allocation appropriate to your risk appetite, if you pick a reallocation and reinvestment policy that you can get a good handle on, and you stick to it without fail, then you are half of the way to what pensions/insurances/savings plans implement for you, except now you don't pay fees, and you don't have to wait 20 years for the investment to "mature". in fact, because retail fees are so high, retail investors are better off using a minimal rebalancing policy: trading less, tweaking less, getting less fidgety about their trades - and that is a good thing. trading less and getting better returns usually comes together.
if you are happy with more risk, and you take controlled bets with options structures going out several weeks or a few months, you can get away with some good wins and a hopefully fewer losses and may still come out ok even after spreads/fees.
if you try to compete with HFTs on the sub second horizon without any of the equipment/services that the HFTs pay for, then you will lose. don't do that, that space is not for you.
Sort of. Until they trade too much too fast.
Pattern day trader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_day_trader
It would help to further inform people of the advantages you maintain over regular folk.
How many signals do you track?
Are you using neural-nets?
What kind of computing power does your system use?
What's the latency of your connection?
etc..
Can you elaborate?
I am sure the idea is well intentioned but really it is just suckering people out of money in a similar way to forex robots etc.
It's that average people (or anyone) can't time the market etc. so nevermind any advantages a quant firm might have, the rules that average person sets up with their IFTTT will be horrifically unwise.
Trigger is simplifying the world of stock investing by reducing everything to an “IF THIS, THEN THAT” statement, called a ‘trigger’. You can create triggers to track all sorts of things happening in the market -- for example, if a stock drops suddenly, or if Apple announces earnings at a certain level, or if the Fed is raising interest rates. You can use Trigger to be notified (in real-time) when important events affecting your portfolio occur, and in the future, can execute automated trades through our platform.
We currently integrate with 8 different brokerages (including eTrade, Fidelity, and TDAmeritrade) for account read-access. We hope to expand this list in the future (looking at you, Robinhood!).
Our mission is to help the individual investor take a more disciplined, rules-based approach to managing their portfolio. Please help us deliver on that promise by giving us your feedback!
Please let us know if you have any questions - we’re here to answer them, Rachel
Also, side note she uses Robinhood, not sure if there's plans to add that at some point
Re-robinhood, we are in line to get access to their API, and it will be the next broker we chose to integrate with. You can potentially have free algorithmic trading from your phone!
My broker (Fidelity) charges me something like $7/day/stock to keep a stop order open. Presumably I could accomplish the same thing for free with Trigger. Is there some major difference between a "sell if below X" Trigger and a stop order, or is Fidelity just bilking me?
Still, Trigger sounds pretty neat even if you do have a non-crappy broker. As soon as HN picks it apart to make sure there are no obvious pitfalls, I'll definitely take a look.
And if it helps inform your broker research, Robinhood is the exception to the rule when it comes to commission-free trades.
In no instance have I seen a fee for maintaining an open order. If anything they should pay you! You're essentially giving them a free option!
I had built a chrome extension integration for vibration / beeps / zaps at variable stock prices, and it was quite useful for a few traders I knew.
I am really interested in knowing more about your API, do you have any more info? Also, will you be on Android -- and do you need to have the app installed to use your IFTTT channel?
Thanks!
maneesh@pavlok.com http://pavlok.com/ifttt
Is that a nice way of saying that you can program it to zap you?
In the mean time, I'd recommend interested non-iOS users to check out Quantopian [1], which is not nearly as simple and accessible, but gives you the power to do real algorithmic trading.
How do you mitigate the latency between the stock exchanges, and the user's location + latency introduce via mobile devices?
Thanks!
Bummer that you're noticing bugs though. If you feel up to it, we'd love to hear what they are - you can email support@triggerfinance.com or live-chat with us through the app (press the logo on your icon).
We'd love to integrate Robinhood in the future but have nothing that we can announce right now, unfortunately. Sent at 5:23 PM on Thursday Adrian: Hello! Co-founder here.
We currently access a Nasdaq last sale feed through a distributor (Xignite) for our real-time feed. We make no guarantees around latency per se, though in reality it ends up being on the order of < 1 minute (at worst) from exchange to a trigger being evaluated on our backend, and a bit more than that (highly dependent on many other factors) to being displayed on a user's phone.
Hope that this helps though I realize I wasn't very specific!
It does, thank you.
The idea and execution thereof seems very slick, but I can't help shake how much of a disadvantage regular stock traders are when put up against all the ultra-high speed trading done by algorithms.
Wall-street Rant Aside, from my previous life building an algorithm based hedgefund, one option would be to put your trigger-execution engine as close to the stock-exchanges as possible, to reduce the latency between market events surfaced in your feed & trigger execution. Softreal time actions, such as any User interactions with the mobile app being persisted to backends, could be done at cloud/dc's, then propagated to your backend in NYC. You could provide a simple SLA saying that trigger updates will have 1-minute lag time for effect, but actual Event->Trigger->Execution would be completely based on the time to evaluate the trigger.
a) Is the REAL real-time, or is it delayed? (If not delayed, who's allowing you to share real-time data for free?)
b) Can I administer 100% of my configuration on the web and then just use my phone to monitor it?
How are you planning to handle the user data though (who set what trigger when, etc.?) -- will you be selling it (even if anonymized) to third parties?
On the other hand, I am sure you are well aware of just how many amateurs lose money because they think they can actively manage and "play the stock market". My fear is that letting people make extremely, and these are extremely simple rules will make them feel even more in control and "smart" about their investments decisions.
Every rule examples presented are horrific simplifications that are somewhat intuitive (the dangerous kind!), giving confidence to the user, but would never pass for a sensible trading strategy. I think you are misleading users into thinking they are much more in control than they actually are.
From CEO in this comment thread
>"Trigger is trying to take the emotion out of investing, as the pros do."
>"As a former trader..."
As a former trader you must understand how complex trading and analysis is.
Saying that, "Buy Low, Sell High" isn't a bad strategy ;)
Am I correct that assuming in the long run, the only difference between going long stocks/ETFs through this app vs just buy+holding an index fund would be:
-Cash sitting around not in an investment
-$7 commission on each order
If you are not buying and selling the same assets at the same weightings as an index fund, then it is different from that index fund.
>Cash sitting around not in an investment
How is this a difference between investing one way and investing another way?
These triggers could be considered a proxy for fear ("IF JPM dividend decreases THEN SELL JPM") and greed ("IF Fed raises interest rates THEN BUY VXX"). These codify and act on what a user expects their emotions to be.
That's quite a claim, where's the evidence to back it? There are funds[1] that have consistently beat the market every year for decades, their very existence disproves the gambling hypothesis.
> What do you know that the pros do not?
You're not playing the same game as the pro's so it doesn't really matter. Hedge fund/mutual fund managers are playing with millions/billions of dollars which requires massive liquidity and carefully planned entries and exits over a period of time in order to not move the price too much; that's a completely different game than what a retail investor plays and that means retail investors can chase profits in areas too small for the big guys to play in.
In other words, you don't have to beat the big guys, you're not fishing in the same pond nor playing the same game. Retail investors can enter and exit trades instantly without having to worry about liquidity or slippage, two concerns that dominate the big guys strategies. When you're small, you're nimble in a way the big guys can't be.
As for it not being gambling - there's nothing stopping you beating bookmakers. It's doable, but you need to spend an awful lot of time researching sports (or whatever). It's the same with stocks - the vast majority of people are essentially just taking the spread and making expected losses on every trade, which the bookies (market makers in stock terms) soak up. A few people can spot outliers and take only those bets and make money long term.
I stand by my claim. If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
How is that gambling?
By choosing proper low-fee funds you can minimize the brokerage fees (and you can buy securities at net asset value) so that half of your critique of long-term profitability is untrue.
Sure, and I agree on that point.
> If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
No one said it was easy. Merely that it's not gambling; gambling implies that's it's random and you can't find any edge, but people clearly do find edges and make money consistently so it's not gambling, it's just damn hard. However, it's a fallacy to conclude that you have to be better than the pros to make money for exactly the reason I specified, the pros are playing a harder game because the more money you have, the harder it is to find alpha.
It's vastly easier to get a 10% return on a few tens of thousands that it is on millions or billions because of liquidity and slippage. You can't exit a losing position in the billions instantly like you can when you have a few thousand, or enter quickly, it's an entirely different game.
No it doesn't. I was a professional poker player, and professionals have existed for decades. Their existence doesn't mean there's no gambling in poker.
If you're taking offense to the wording of "just gambling," sure, I can see that. Like poker, it's gambling with an element of skill. Or perhaps more aptly put, it's a skill game with a gambling element.
What makes it gambling is that you have no influence over part of the process. You can control your decisions (bet/fold/buy/sell), but the rest (company performance, turn/river cards) is out of your hands.
So yes, of course this is gambling.
What made these academics think they could beat the pros?
I'd give the same answer for someone who wanted to write crypto, and I'd expect much of HN to do the same. We absolutely need more people writing crypto, including crypto for fun. And the existing crypto written by "experts" is often ridiculously insecure. Please, do spend a weekend reading some book and putting together some crypto code to learn how things work. But do not proceed to encrypt your bank account credentials with them and stick the encrypted file on the public internet.
start the video at 8m38s and listen to Simmons explain that he had no idea wat he was doing when he started.
A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_simons_a_rare_interview_with_t...
JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models -- just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on.
That's basically what I said. I didn't claim that he had a brilliant and correct answer before he started. (Nor am I claiming that you need to have a brilliant and correct plan for a cryptosystem before you start.) I'm claiming that he had the resources to make experimentation not ruinous (the first part of that story is how he acquired those resources, namely, "pure luck" which "certainly wasn't mathematical modeling"), and he engaged in that experimentation and took the scientific method seriously (the second part of that story).
Not to mention the fact that there is a huge number of professionals in this space who can only afford to do what they do because it's their losing their customers money and not their own.
My response was to demonstrate that someone was making up his answer. Now you're digressing into the "well, most people fail" argument.
If you dig into the answer in the link you provided, Simons says gained his initial funding (as well as his data) by what we could accurately call gambling. He had no strategy, no reason to believe he was successful, and no expectation of being successful. He was - through luck - successful. With that success, and having gained money he could then afford to lose, he noticed some structure in the data, and hired some mathematicians to evaluate his hypotheses. It was in fact more likely that he would have lost all his gambled money before even thinking about approaching the problem technically.
He was lucky, in the most straightforward sense. Anyone else, too, could be lucky. But the nature of probability is that the common case is not the lucky case. That's not a digression, that's the exact discussion at hand. If you want to insist that occasionally people are lucky -- sure, and occasionally a newcomer will invent a secure block cipher.
If you have enough money to test hypotheses, and you're okay with losing that money if your hypotheses are wrong, fantastic, go test them. That's exactly what Simons did. If you want to get rich by investing in the stock market without a strategy and hoping to get lucky, well, yes, some people get lucky. Simons happened to be one of them. But that's hardly evidence you should emulate that part of his behavior.
Also, no one said the goal here wanted to get rich. Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting. Please don't tell us what's in the video again.
That's not what I claimed. I claimed there were two steps. Step 1 is to acquire enough capital that you're okay losing it. Step 2 is to use that capital. Step 1 is what I claimed he was lucky. Step 2 is the one that lasted 20 years. Without step 1 (and there are many ways to do step 1 that don't involve luck, as well as many ways that don't involve investing), you can't proceed to step 2.
> Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting.
That is definitely interesting, and I agreed with that point upthread. You don't have to use actual money to learn about the math, though. If you want to learn stuff on simulations, everything I've been saying about capital you can afford to lose doesn't matter. However, the one and only thing simulations can't do is get you rich.
Besides everyone's always recommending low-cost index funds, the ones that would have given one a 31 basis point return over last year tracking the S&P500? With the gain in wealth over the last year for a 100k investment, one could almost buy a Nexus 6P on sale. Brilliant.
There exist a million reasons you do not want not-quite-stop-limit orders on SPY or GOOG in your personal account, you are up against trade execution systems that smoke your retail broker not to mention this outfit (who you now put between you & your broker).
Please do not bring a butter knife to a gun fight and lose your shirt.
Create trigger, see what the average is, place corresponding order outside of trigger so as not to give the game away, profit.
if 50000 identical triggers fire at the same time trying to buy the same stock with market orders they're going to get a bad deal, and people selling are going to clean up
It's certainly not illegal for me to do it, if you happen to tell me your stop loss orders over beers, or if I predict people's stop loss orders using public information and/or a sophisticated model.
So which side of the line is Trigger on? They don't seem to be a broker, exchange, or fiduciary, and they wouldn't be getting the relevant information from those sources.
"The User acknowledges and agrees that upon posting or transmitting information [...] on the APP, the User assigns to the Company [...] all rights, interest and title in and to such information"
If you want to manage your money through a tech startup, I suggest choosing one that is a broker and/or has a fiduciary responsibility to you!
Is this a screen scraping integration where the provider stores my username / password and provides you with a token?
Or is this directly integrated with the brokerages?
Are you all planning on integrating Robinhood as a broker?
Best of luck in launch.