Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

If I could just give you one piece of advice it would be this: don't do this.

A bit longer: You're a pig headed for the slaughterhouse. Please do it 'for play money' only for the first 5 years or so, if your method makes money over that period then set yourself a goal and if you reach it stop.

View on HN

If you could please shed some light as to why you hold that opinion (past experience etc.), it would be of great help!

Beating a stock market index is a zero-sum game, and the large players in this market have hundreds of millions of dollars and huge manpower invested in making money of small players like OP. I suppose it's possible in principle to be smarter than them, but that's the bar.

It's zero-sum over the short term, but not over the long term -- "beating the index" is (kinda sorta) another way of saying "dragging the index towards efficiency." It means investing in stocks that are going to perform, which (kinda sorta) like investing in companies that will be successful, which increases the size of the pie.

Of course, with the amount of money the OP is likely to be investing, it's completely sensible to ignore market impact.

I'd like to caution that judging from the comments I see from you so far in this, it appears that you have not much knowledge in the area. As such, if you're doing this for fun and learning, great. I'm sure you'll learn a lot. But if you're doing this for money, know that you are playing a difficult game against a lot of very good players.

I once attended a predator-prey algorithm seminar on stock trading at the International Conference on Machine Learning. I came away realizing that a ton of people are in this area, and not just the big banks. If you're doing this, go in realizing that you're trying to ride a bike for the first time without training wheels in a race against experienced motorcyclists.

These will be very good for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8994701

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360742

edit: spelling

Reply on news.ycombinator.com