In general, investment discussions on HN are very shallow.
Is there some investing discussion forum on the web with substance?
If you see the most fitness and nutrition advice, and you go through it, most of it sounds like pseudo science that would never work. Yet if you go running in the morning, most parks around your home will have these people who are very fit, eating the right things and doing the right stuff.
Its just doing all of this is hard, painful and demands some serious discipline on the very long run. This process in essence now acts as a filter to 99% people out there. Among the 1% degree of success again varies based on other parameters(timing, luck, overall effort in continuous improvements etc). By the time you arrive at 0.1%, the process basically acts as ruthless filter to eliminate people who just can't measure up.
So many times the what works, can be easily learned and known. Doing it, is just a whole different beast altogether.
(That particular strategy doesn't work anymore)
So, it’s hard to go beyond shallow advice without everyone screaming about the latest bubble.
To do well in quant finance you need the same intuition and talent as a reinforcement/probabilistic learning practitioner — good grasp of statistics and instinct for complex systems with feedback loops like differential equations and dynamics. Market making for example can be formulated as a bellman equation.
> Is there some investing discussion forum on the web with substance?
I've personally searched for something like this quite a bit in the past and I think ultimately it's the wrong question. It seems to me that a forum of people discussing stock market dynamics is always going to be doomed from the start. I think that's because the ideas actually worth discussing are too complex for even people with above average intelligence/capability.
TLDR: In my opinion, there's basically no where on the internet that you will find an "edge". All of the discussion is too shallow.
Assume that there are ultimately just two approaches you can take to financial trading: fundamental analysis & technical analysis.
Fundamental analysis is almost a solved problem. This is why stock picking is so hard and Warren Buffet types are so rare. I think this is because FA is infinitely more understandable than TA. Companies are evaluated based on their balance sheets/cash flows and compared to peers. It's not simple per se, but it's the sort of thing most people can grasp. It's well established that beating an index fund is difficult and that most stock pickers will not beat an index fund. Investing forums are full of people thinking they will be the exception but we know that most of them will underperform the benchmark.
Then there's technical analysis. Technical analysis of any substance requires a very strong mathematical background. The original post only mentions moving averages. That's essentially a pre-school level understanding of TA and I have strong doubts that a moving average strategy has ever been profitable. Basically any strategy that involves buying/selling based on a moving average or one of it's cousins is more shallow than astrology.
A more advanced practitioner of TA might get into pairs trading/statistical arbitrage. In developed markets (stocks/forex), an individual cannot succeed at this even if they understand how it works. It's just too competitive. Just a few years ago you could be profitable doing this in under-developed markets (.e.g crypto) but I'm not confident an individual could compete in crypto markets anymore.
Then there's even more advanced strategies that are employed at places like Renaissance Technologies. The people that work there tend to have advanced degrees in math/physics.