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Comment by jwmoz | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why a simple book review has so many upvotes.

A couple years ago I read all I could on this and started systematic trading on crypto. Ended up with the best results on a public platform and ran a small trading operation with a few clients, one a crypto market maker. It's really hard due to all the market unknowns, stress and psychology/emotion. After the FTX debacle I lost ~35% of capital. Currently put it on pause and back software engineering.

Had to rebuild my asset allocation system which was based on FTX api. Improved it to be realtime and using Binance api. There's still the counter party risk-Binance could get busted or USDT fraud.

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It probably has so many upvotes because it's quite a novel topic for HN. You might not appreciate it as much, being in the industry, but algorithmic trading is a field most of us haven't explored. Most of the content on HN is focused on web design to be honest, so things outside of that can get quite a lot of traction.

Ah fair enough. For anyone interested I recommend Trading Systems by Tomasini and Stocks on the move by Clenow.

Do you have some recommendations on good books on trading systems? I work in the energy trading world, and in general the systems there are behind the financial world by ~10 years.

I hope to learn more about this topic!

Try Trading Systems by Tomasini and Stocks on the move by Clenow, Python for finance. For the code side there's not much ultimately you have to build it yourself and learn.

How complicated were your algo trading strategies? And have you thought of translating these to non-crypto?

They were fairly simple, using simple maths or technical indicators, or simple pandas calculations depending on the system. They all generally were based on the momentum behaviour of markets.

The hard part is the backtesting and design of strategies talking into account the science and art of it. And the absolute truth that past performance does not dictate future results.

I haven't tried non-crypto, I think I will just leave that to simple investments in tracker funds or etfs.

Did you measure your returns in USD or ETH/BTC?

I've come across many profitable traders in Crypto who only measure in USD and when you compare their results to just buying and holding ETH/BTC at the start of the cycle they come out behind. Everyone feels like a great trader in a bull market.

Their risk adjusted returns could be a lot better though.

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