Comment by sexy_year | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sexy_year | Hacker News Reader

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If you like stocks and are careful with the way you spend your money, you know how much time goes into buying shares of a stock. It’s tedious and I don’t have 24k for a Bloomberg terminal. Which led me to the idea during xmas break to spend the time creating my own terminal. I introduce you to “Gamestonk Terminal” (probably should’ve sent 1 tweet everyday to Elon Musk for copyrights permission eheh).

In summary, the Terminal (https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal) has 7 distinct menus: - Discover Stocks Top gainers; Sectors performance; upcoming earnings releases; top high shorted interest stocks; top stocks with low float; top orders on fidelity; and some SPAC websites with news/calendars.

- Market Sentiment Scrolling through Reddit main posts, and most tickers mentions; Extracting stocktwit sentiment based on bull/bear flags; Twitter in-depth sentiment prediction using AI; Google mentions over time.

- Research Web pages List of good pages to do research on a stock, e.g. macroaxis, zacks, macrotrends, ..

- Fundamental Analysis Read financials from a company from Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, Alpha Vantage, and Financial Modeling Prep API.

- Technical Analysis The usual technical indicators: sma, rsi, macd, adx, bbands, and more.

- Due Diligence Some features are: Latest news of the company; Analyst prices and ratings; Price target from several analysts plot over time vs stock price; Insider activity, and these timestamps marked on the stock price historical data; Latest SEC fillings; Short interest over time; A check for financial warnings based on Sean Seah book.

- Prediction Techniques The one I had more fun with. It tries to predict the stock price, from simple models like sma and arima to complex neural network models, like LSTM. The additional capability here is that all of these are easy to configure. Either through command line arguments, or even in form of a configuration file to define your NN.

if it doesn't come with an ISDA, I'm not interested.

"JP Morgan Employee : But, uh... you guys are under the capital requirements for an ISDA.

Charlie Geller : By how much?

JP Morgan Employee : [thinking] Uh... how much? One billion, four hundred seventy million. So... a lot.

Charlie Geller : This makes us look bad, doesn't it? That we didn't know what the capital requirements were?

JP Morgan Employee : Uh... it's not great. But keep up those returns and give us a call way down the line, you know. Okay?"

Can you provide some more context on this?

Watch the movie "the big short". It's really good. This is from one of the scenes where too guys try to get a license. Although the manage a few million dollars, in order to get the license they should have even more. Or as it turns out the right connections.

the book is even better.

Both are good. The flick is quite faithful to the book, especially in tone.

Michael Lewis, author of the Big Short, also wrote Liar's Poker about his experience at Solomon Brothers in the mid-eighties where things like mortgage backed securities were invented. It's captivating.

Yep, plus that. Although I had to buy the Dutch (My native language) version too (first bought the English version). The subjects are pretty difficult so reading about them in my native language worked better for me.

It's the best scene in the movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo1OSqBQYmk

Reading the comments, I'm struck by how I read this scene totally differently to most of them. I see an overworked, annoyed young analyst sent to deal with two rich kids (starting a hedge fund with money they made 'taking boats down the river', then skipping the ISDA requirements by calling their neighbour) who are wasting everyone's time by not even doing the absolute minimum research -- it was 2006, just Google ISDA and you find out the requirements.

Also a security guard kicking out two men in suits from a lobby is just weirdly unrealistic.

To test this out, I googled ISDA capital requirements and sure enough it doesn't mention the capital requirements in any of the links I found (ymmv).

I think the issue is that they're bespoke transactions so the credit support required may change depending on the context.

Its a great scene, but this one takes the cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE

"That's a nice shirt, do they make it for men?"

"Somehow you're like Dora the Explorer and you're the first person who has found this thing..."

It's a great scene, but this one takes the cake: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ5VfKSYvSk

"There’s some shady stuff going down. God, this is intimate. I feel like I’m financially inside of you or something."

"I'm jacked. Jacked to tits!"

Literally laughed out loud, thanks for the smile on a tough afternoon.

It's a quote from "The Big Short".

I could watch The Big Short and Moneyball all day every day.

I swear we must be the same person!

Don't forget the best line in the movie, usable anytime there is a bit of malfeasance afoot:

"Holy shit, that’s just fucking crazy. That’s fraud!"

I find myself quoting this a hell of a lot in the last few years.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/

Quote from the movie Margin Call.

Also a good movie, but wrong. The Big Short is correct.

You're thinking of: "Please, speak as you might to a young child or a Golden Retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you that."

Jeremy Irons is a god in Margin Call, such a good performance.

Ah the wily Brownhole fund from the 2008 collapse

Wrap it in a SaaS and dummies like me will buy it! Make a mill!

He should accept GME stock as payment medium. 10 stocks per year

I'll give you my GME when you pry it from my dead, cold hands.

This right here except a mil is an understatement

Make a trill!

Looks awesome. I’d love to see some screen shots as I’m not that literate on the jargon

You are a blessing. I thank you to the moon and back. Will definitely check this out and definitely supporting you for your incredible work.

Did you use floating point or fixed point numbers?

Great question, I remember inheriting some code that mixed the two and led to some “interesting” results.

I can't see any reason to use fixed point numbers here, seems like floating point would be perfectly sufficient.

Floating point numbers are inadequate to manipulate accounts representing currency, and for finance at a large.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-doub...

You're cargo culting. Floating point numbers are perfectly fine for financial modeling and forecasting. If your goal is to figure out what stocks to buy/sell, it doesn't matter if your software calculates the P/E ratio as 19.232738273816 but the actual value is 19.232738273817. It doesn't even matter if you calculate it as 19.23 but the actual value is 19.22.

When you're storing balances or transacting payments between institutions, you need to emulate a specific set of operations, part of which includes using fixed point numbers. It is not sufficient to just use fixed point, you also need the correct number of digits (AFAIK it's 4 digits with US currency) you need the correct rounding mode, etc.

Every few years someone comes along with a big new idea to rewrite the aging dinosaur COBOL code that runs the financial world in something modern. It never works. Nobody wants to go through the old COBOL code to figure out exactly what the code does, they take a greenfield approach with a description of what the UI is and an incomplete spec of the operations that need to happen. And then when it comes time to test the system, they get balances and numbers that are wrong. Because the only thing they know is "we need to use fixed point" but never bother to understand the actual full scope of how basic financial arithmetic is unique, and different from "normal" arithmetic.

The problem gets compounded as you chain more operations together. Financial calculations often involve long sequences of operations and that is where you can see the true effect of what I am mentioning.

With numbers that are large enough, a 1% or 0.1% difference means a lot of money. And if you have an automated system making decisions based on those numbers that can translate into financial ruin, legal problems, etc.

Leave the ad hominem aside, btw, noone wants to hear about it.

Fixed point numbers have finite precision. As soon as you multiply two fixed point numbers you risk losing precision unless you use more space for your result. You can’t fix your “long chain of calculation” by making it fixed point as you’ll still be rounding things (unless it happens that all your numbers need 54-63 bits of precision and you were wasting bits on the exponent)

Apart from in accounting, the two problems with floats are nonassociativity and speed, neither of which are particularly relevant here.

The risk of losing money does not look like subtle floating point rounding errors. It looks like someone fucking up a formula in excel or the model being wrong or the model being right but risk not being hedged.plenty of people in finance will add percentages as x + y instead of doing (1-(1+x)*(1+y)) because it’s simpler (this works fine because log(1+x) is approximately x when it’s small, and it can obviously be made better by taking the log earlier but plenty of percentage inputs to a model may be rough guesses anyway (who cares if you write 5% or log(5%)))

> Nobody wants to go through the old COBOL code to figure out exactly what the code does, they take a greenfield approach with a description of what the UI is and an incomplete spec of the operations that need to happen.

The only way to improve on this description would be to note that the contract rate for each of the persons involved in this endeavor would be in the $485/hour range (of which, the labor provider might get $50). And then to note the 12 layers of management sign-off/approval on top of that - billed separately.

No, for finance at large floats are often fine. Plenty of financial calculations cannot be done precisely using fixed point or arbitrary precision numbers either, so there's no point giving up the performance/ease of use that floating point offers. Billions of dollars is transacted based on Excel calculations every day, this whole fixed point for finance thing is a programmer myth.

Of course as you say for accounting you don't want to use floating point, but I can't see anything like that in this application.

Have you considered the problem that any publicly available indicator suffers from the fact that being the first to execute the strategy is the only way to make money? This would imply an entirely algorithmic trading strategy to reduce any potential for delay. That's how we end up with HFT. Maybe not subsecond HFT but <10s HFT.

Does it have the chat feature as well?

Anyway to see the UI for people who don’t know anything about code but looking for a investment alternative

You may want to add a Dockerfile.

Just pushed a really simply start of a Docker PR https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/pull/13. Take a look and contribute.

Nothing stopping you from submitting a PR :)

Impressive work, I didn't know could code!

> probably should’ve sent 1 tweet everyday to Elon Musk for copyrights permission eheh

Why? I assume you're doing this as an advertisment?

I dont have a github account....

But i was working through sigaloid's post here

https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/issues/2

And was still hitting a error on compile

Generally ending with

NFO:pystan:COMPILING THE C++ CODE FOR MODEL anon_model_dfdaf2b8ece8a02eb11f050ec701c0ec NOW. error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1

Ran the following to clear the error

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-dev

Pretty sure libssl-dev and python3-dev were the only ones needed though

Also UserWarning: Using slow pure-python SequenceMatcher. Install python-Levenshtein to remove this warning warnings.warn('Using slow pure-python SequenceMatcher. Install python-Levenshtein to remove this warning')

So the following was needed as sigaloid stated

pip3 install python-Levenshtein

Where is the market data (price, volume, etc) from? All open source projects related to stocks seem to use Yahoo quotes, which is essentially abandoned and not supported at all. No SLA or any indication of long term survival.

I found Alpaca[1] which looks decent in terms of a stock API and their upstream data provider Polygon.io[2] which looks even better but costs $199/mo for essentially per tick market data.

[1] https://alpaca.markets/ [2] https://polygon.io

According to the docs it uses https://www.alphavantage.co/

He just wanted to push his service. HN comment section has been unbearable recently with the substantial increase of people doing this. It has always been present but now it is almost reaching the point of making the comment section worthless.

For real, this has been a big problem for a lot of people. So I built a real time comment pruning algorithm service that lets you browse HN with only quality comments. Subscribe today!

Who just wanted to push this service? OP or sevencolors?

Either way, as a counterweight to all the conspiracy theory nonsense on the web, I have been making an effort to not assume I know people’s hidden intentions. I’d like to invite you to join me in that.

Yeah im just as lost as you. Im not really sure who is pushing what service that is their own... either way, I did find all the links relevant, and worthwhile knowing about..... shrug

Nigerian princes must really love you.

Pushing your own product has been standard and encouraged practice at HN since the beginning. This is an incubator site!

Even if you are posting a fake review as a third person?

There are quite a lot of comments that make it to the top which say, "That's nice, I made this similar thing which is really interesting, here's a <link>." Followed by a big thread about their thing.

I don't mind those comments so much, as they can lead to good stuff, but I do mind them derailing the main thread when they are upvoted. So, I often downvote them in retaliation.

I'm OK with it so long as it's something on GitHub, useful, and you can drop in replace it.

I am OK if it is something directly relevant to the topic and it is presented in a direct manner, but no, 99% of the time it is some disingenuous thing like this: "Hey guys you are talking about nuclear engineering, that made me wonder how fishes in my zone would be affected by a nearby nuclear plant . I use allmyfishes.com which seems to be a great site detailing all the fishes in the US, there is a free tier and good paid plans. _disclaimer_ I founded allmyfishes.com"

I don't think nodesocket is affiliated with the sites he linked, nor I find any links between the two?

And it just happened again, in this same thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260064

I think we need some sort of AI tool to identify these cases. I read a review on findbssales.io which says it could do exactly this, with a good payment model based on API calls.

Disclaimer, I built findbssales.io

findbssales.io is down.

I won’t mention that website, but FYI I built it and I have no idea who posted that comment.

What is this low-quality cynicism? Why do you think that it's his service?

Alpaca is primarily for trading.

They were using Polygon for data, but if I recall correctly, I believe seeing an email or such that they're going to roll out their own data and discontinue the Polygon "bridge".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com