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Comment by _zkyx | Hacker News Reader

I have won and lots thousands for sure. Haha. When stocks were on a rip the bot was making lots of money just because everything was going way up. Then, in 2022 when everything went way down, like tons of tech stocks, my bot sucked. So, I really need to add shorting or something. I'm still exploring things on the strategy side.

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Aka, everyone thinks they’re an investing genius when the whole market is going up.

Yes, 100%. Everything looks amazing while the markets are going up. Sometimes, I've just shut the entire thing down when there is Fed news or the markets are taking a dump. That's a legit strategy too. Only run it while the markets are going up.

Isn't the trend detection equally applicable to shorting as well, with swapped signals?

Or do you believe there are more fundamental changes needed so your app can trade in shorting as well?

Yeah, right now I'm only set up to buy stocks. I haven't tried to short anything yet. I want to get to this eventually since it would be nice to make money when the market goes down too.

I'm sure you know this, but for others reading this who are novices at finance / trading, like I am - the gotcha here is that while the strategy may be symmetric, the risk is not - when buying a stock, there is a floor to how much money you can lose (the price you paid for the stock), while with short-selling, there is no such floor, since the price can rise to any amount and increase your losses to infinite. I believe that traders will use hedges to account for this, however, these hedges will eat into your profits if they are not exercised (but may save your bacon if they are!).

Yeah, I haven't explored this yet. The unlimited risk thing bothers me thought. Which probably sounds funny since this whole things is risky as hell. But, I was more looking into options or something to hedge but honestly everything takes so much time to learn about, test, and then do. So, I just wanted to focus on this and then expand.

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