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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

If it's a bubble, it's a pretty lousy one in terms of returns. Some energy stocks were up 100-1000% a week ago due to surging oil prices. And then some SPACs were up 500%. Some guy on reddit's wallstreetbets recently turned $17k into $600k with amazon call options. I never seen anyone make those kind of returns with crypto...just guys with tiny Binance or Coinbase accounts who are happy to make 20% from a $1000 initial investment.

The same coins now like litecoin are unchanged even as far back as 2017. So either it's a weak bubble or a deflated one. Compared to stocks, Crypto is dead..nothing goes up for more than a day..tons of wash trading. tons of scams.

3x tech etfs are way better than bitcoin anyway. I would rather own TECL and TQQQ instead of bitcoin. TECL and TQQQ were up over 100% in 2021 compared to 60% returns for bitcoin.

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The wild fluctuations in price, even if the average stays the same, is what enables returns here, not the rise of value over time. I have a bot that trade on the highs and lows of the day, and it can make an absurd amount of money.

Also, buying very large quantities of fringe alt coins at millionths of a dollar each can pay off if the coin ends up rising in popularity and price. I do a few moon shots each year and cash out in November when crypto rallies. I’ll put $500 in 10 coins and usually one or two of them 100x at some point. I have my notifier send me a text message when it’s time to sell.

Not saying this stuff is useful, because it totally isn’t at this point. Well, except perhaps to make some random people a lot of money from nothing.

Did you code the stuff yourself? How did you start? I am looking forward to writing my own stuff. I found that some exchanges like OKX/OKEX have APIs that allow you to algorithmically trade.

I was using a smaller exchange’s API but now I use alpaca.markets. I wrote the program in Node.js that just runs a callback function every N second interval and decides if it’s a good time to buy, sell, or do nothing.

My best advice to getting started is write your trading algorithm or decision making logic in a parameterized way so you can feed in snapshots of time for back testing. I’m sure there are frameworks out there but I literally wrote this hot garbage in a weekend with not a lot of research. I’ll probably rewrite it someday and optimize it a bit more.

Wow, I just read your comment but even without doing so, this is exactly what I did last weekend! Loaded 4+ years of crypto market data into a database using python+some binance api, so that I can feed the historic data for backtesting/development purposes!

I’ve looked at one or two frameworks (that I cannot even recall now) and they all seemed to over complicates thing. I’m not smart (or educated on the specifics of) enough to invent complicated trading algos, so why not just make it simple, observable, and testable. Great to see you came up with this independently as well, I’m not in finance so its a little validating that I’m not totally crazy!

Same thing for me. Both frameworks I looked (freqtrade and some other with a fancy name) had a insurmountable amount of context needed just to grok the concepts and how to make the complicated machinery go. I would probably spend months just trying to understand it.

It got me so uneasy to the point I just decided to go straight at it. Load the values and hey, let's try some backtesting. Simple stuff. If at the end of the day I end with more money than I began, shit is working. tweak that into oblivion. That's my plan.

So yeah, you also validated me (because I was thinking "this is just going to be stupid stuff. that can't work").

Thank you for existing and lucky me to be able to have this timely exchange in such a noisy communication world heh

A lot of crypto ads play along the lines of ”$100 invested in 2012 would be worth $lots today. Invest now!”

The implied promise is that it’s still the early days, and you too can become a millionaire

I don't understand the logic of claiming that something isn't a bubble because other some other class of assets is even more volatile.

Was the housing bubble a lousy one just because home prices didn't go up 100% per year?

> Some guy on reddit's wallstreetbets recently turned $17k into $600k with amazon call options.

This is just gambling. If you are open to extreme risk, you can make plays like this on anything. It doesn't mean there is or isn't a bubble.

I don’t think you understand what “one guy turning $17k into $600k with Amazon call options” means.

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