Commenting on this to mark it in my feed for later reference. Well said!
808 karma · joined August 22, 2017
My basic strategy is that the signal/news/data contains no real information beyond whether or not people are buying or selling. When they stop selling I start buying and vice versa. Use your data skills to identify "things that work with regularity" and "things that rarely ever work" while at the same time understanding "literally any strategy works SOMETIMES".
Develop a roughly asymmetric strategy where your average gain is greater than your average loss per trade. The biggest thing you need is to pick some BIG WIN trades and ride them for a large profit. A small percentage of big wins pay for the losers and make the whole thing profitable. Remember that you "Make more money" by trading larger quantities, not by seeking larger moves. You don't "make money" so much as you harvest what the market gives you and if its not giving you close the trade. Your chosen trading system should reflect this.
Size your trades such that if you're betting N shares with $Y dollars now and you take a loss, you're coming back to the table with at least N shares and $Y dollars. Never loose $100 and find yourself in the position of recovering that loss with only $50 to play with. Read about "money management" in gambling for some ideas heres.
Don't be afraid of the short side either as you will make about half your money there. Don't be afraid to bet agains the trend and "call bullshit" on a move - your system should be designed to detect the success rates of these calls and should be looking for those situations.
For me its about using data to make bets where, in the event I win, I win pretty big and in the event I lose, I lose minimally.
USE BRACKET ORDERS FOR ALL POSITIONS OR PERISH. AUTOMATE YOUR STRATEGY OR PERISH. ALWAYS TAKE YOUR TRADES OR PERISH.
Making profitable trades here and there is EASY - keeping the money you made on those is the hard part.
EDIT: If you're concerned about "slippage" you have a bad strategy. If the strategy can be undone by a .75pt slip then you need to consider something else.
EDIT: Don't be seduced by the High Frequency Trading bullshit. You don't have the infrastructure for this and the fastest safest Rust code you can write is still connected to some slow retail trading infra here. Plenty of money to be made in Low Freq mode. 20 trades a month per instrument is a lot of trades a month!
I see this so often, everywhere. The useless people make the most noise, the productive ones are too busy.
Having managed a team of in office devs, I can say that easily 14% or more get barely anything done from the office. Low performers are going to cash paychecks and underwork where ever they are. Bringing low performers back to the office won't help anything.
Astroturfing is the deceptive practice of hiding the sponsors of an orchestrated message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, unsolicited grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial backers.
The first detection of this was in 1996 and in 2024 its now an emergency to start testing for. If this is a real issue, its safe to say the agency has ben derelict for some time in the intervening 28 years. Im not saying its a terrible idea on its face - I am saying the timing for this becoming an issue is suspiciously convenient.
I wrote a small Python program using Pandas and Beautiful Soup to parse the web page and insert all the data into a table. Cron schedules it to run hourly such that you get Cron->wget->Python->database. I considered using this approach on a variety of other things such that instead of browsing the raw data I could use SQL to query a database and detect changes, trends, etc.
Of course this opens the door of easy programatic access to that data. Honestly the need for me was never great enough to go any deeper.
"What exactly will get cut?" - Make you a deal - set a timer and do 10 minutes of research on the subject and come back to report you found NOTHING that could be reasonably and easily cut?
EDIT - so far I haven't heard anyone claim we're going to balance the budget via this mechanism. The goal is to CUT WASTE and IMPROVE EFFICIENCY. I see this as a basis for having a real conversation about taxation personally.
Besides, who was making their decision based on the Washington Post's editorial board endorsement anyhow?
Microsoft is always lurking around ready to push their Azure solution so not like AWS can sit back and rest easy here.
It's funny reading the comments here but has anyone considered that Bezos may in fact support Trump? Bezos is a billionaire and Harris seeks to target them to fix the deficit.
Its just possible Bezos supports Trump and it makes economic sense too, though its terribly unfashionable to come out and say such a thing.
Climate/Energy policy is the electorate, not the government.
You're not protesting The Government here, you're in fact protesting your neighbors who elected the politicians. It seems self evident that any policy being protested is in fact a popular policy and that protestors are the minority attempting to force their will on the majority. By this line of thinking it seems any group protesting anything is missing the point.
Also - who wants more nuclear power? We can go back to living in caves and fighting for scarce resources, expand the nuclear power infrastructure or continue to burn oil and gas. Pick one.
* I'm running a lot of MySQL stuff and such a topic might be of interest to me