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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

I may be way to cynical for my own good, but there's no proof that this is actually real, right? Besides a couple of pretty bizarre screenshots [1]. I'm skeptical because a) these types of gains in public markets are pretty much unheard of, and b) faking a story like this would be a fairly easy way of getting lots of attention for your freelancer business (which this guy advertises right at the top of the article).

[1] Running cat on a csv file would usually just print a list of numbers, yes? Instead he gets ascii art with months on the vertical axis, making it seem like time going back and forth, and some random commentary in the right margin. I dunno but something about it screams "mockup". As does the minimalist, ultra-stylish AWS window.

Edit: also, if it were me who got incredible returns from trading at high speed on indian markets using only machine learning on historical data, I would definitely keep quiet about it. Just sayin'...

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I call BS myself. He's from Romania, maybe living in New York or San Fran whatever profile you read and he's using Indian based trading API's linked to an Indian brokerage.

I also think most of the stories on indie hacker are bull and it's just people growth hacking or something to get free publicity.

Appreciate your point of view. First of all, there seems to be a lot of skepticism around this project and I found that surprising. You're saying that if you would get incredible returns from trading you would keep quiet. And therefore you are contradicting yourself by accusing my lack of transparency.

As I was invited to share my story on Indie Hackers, my goal was to provide as much insights into the project, without blowing up the advantage it gives me over a very niche market (NSE). I have absolutely no intention to 'advertise my freelancer business' or 'sell my tech', as someone mentioned. My goal was strictly to send an encouragement message to people thinking of/building something similar, by sharing as much as I can of my project. Faking stories online would be the last thing on my agenda and I find it somehow amusing that some people believe that.

PS: Having to cat a lot of text + csv files while developing this, it was much easier to alias my cat function to use csvtool on csv files and it's regular implementation on other files

PS2: The 'minimalist, ultra-stylish AWS window' is a quick app I cranked in a few hours to see the status of my instances. Not sure what's suspicious here. The window or the the fact that it's stylish?

Post your current and historic positions, opened and closed and people might believe you. Currently you have offered absolutely no proof of your claims and the interview suggests you are extremely naive of trading.

> Appreciate your point of view. First of all, there seems to be a lot of skepticism around this project and I found that surprising. You're saying that if you would get incredible returns from trading you would keep quiet. And therefore you are contradicting yourself by accusing my lack of transparency.

https://www.quantopian.com/open

Easy $5k if it does what you claim and would settle the dispute. You can just feed them trades w/o revealing the actual algo.

>Appreciate your point of view. First of all, there seems to be a lot of skepticism around this project and I found that surprising.

Really? You made a crazy claim with no details at all.

Here's my assumptions on this thing:

1. Your algorithmic strategy is only performed on a small selection of stocks, that you have semi-randomly picked, aka not a part of your system.

2. These stocks have had a crazy run.

3. When the NSE had troubles in Nov. and Dec. your conservative stop losses triggered and you stayed out of the market.

4. Your decision on when to re-enter the market was a personal decision, not a part of your system.

5. You have given this thing more money to invest with than we are being led to believe.

Which ones did I miss on?

I gotta be honest, it really does seem like a nice little way to plug you business but I don't believe you're lying. I think you're overstating its performance by leaving out details and were lucky to get that performance in the first place.

From the article: >> Got a cool project? I am currently available for freelance work.

Whether you are lying or not does not really matter, after all you're just a regular guy trying to get ahead like the rest of us. And the startup royalty keeps telling us to bend the rules. What I'm criticising is IndieHacker's lack of due diligence to screen for charlatans. I'm assuming you didn't show them any further proof than what's in the article?

Not arguing at all about being skeptical, but regarding 'cat' it's entirely possible they just had the wrong file extension on that ascii art chart. I've definitely given some plaintext files incorrect extensions if I knew I'd be wanting to open them (or quicklook them) in some program that usually ignores the correct extension.

The general vagueness of the post is a much much much stronger reason to be skeptical, imo.

Yes that's entirely possible, but my main point was that the chart looks really hand-made (by someone who doesn't really know what they're doing). I don't really see how an ascii data visualization tool would spit out such an abomination...

Exactly. Show me the command line to get that graph.

The author of the blogpost in another comment around here said he aliased csvtool to cat, hence cat'ing a csv. That said, unless there's another CLI csvtool program, the one I've read about can't plot. But there are CLI plotters out there.

Anyway, like I said, I'm not trying to say the post is factual. Just trying to point out that the fact that he cat'ed a CSV and got a plot isn't that big a deal (and shouldn't really be an indication of fraud), in a world where so many of us customize our working environments.

I also felt like this article was very strange, almost too good to be true, not really discussing downside risks associated with each position.

It's possible to generate a highly profitable and successful trading system but it's the expected probability factoring in the worst case downside scenarios that really matters.

After all, you could win 9 out of 10 times but that 1 time is where you blow up.

Right now, I'm putting my wall street hat on and calling this bullshit. A naive software developer will not be able to see the potential pitfall of holy grail systems-they do not exist.

I also question if it's really HFT, the bar is really high to get low latency connection but he's only making 3.5k/month...it just doesn't make sense.

And why would you publish your system and say oops I can't tell you anything about it?

> After all, you could win 9 out of 10 times but that 1 time is where you blow up.

In the article he discussed exactly this happening.

> I also question if it's really HFT, the bar is really high to get low latency connection but he's only making 3.5k/month...it just doesn't make sense.

Again, in the article he states that he abandoned his HFT approach.

Most of these negative comments seem to come from people involved in trading who didn't read the full article but are extrapolating based on their knowledge of finance.

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