_benj

This hits home. I wish there was a way to gauge “retrospect” before actually suffering from it. I’m now usually quite weary of “we’ve had to get yet another loan of 60 mil, after 6 years in business because we don’t know how to make a profitable business” also known as a series C or whatever.

Thanks! I think the limitation is in my knowledge and not in the article or schematics!

I have a rtl-sdr and I’ve played with gnu radio, but the signals that I had to explore were very limited! Apart from few remotes for fans and stuff around the house I only had fm radio and little more.

What I find very interesting from this is the possibility of taking a Si5351A breakout board, configuring it with I2C (I can do that), modulate it with something like audio and a mixer (I can code that… maybe) and plug that directly, likely through and attenuator, to gnu radio!

It would certainly be a lot easier to get a sdr transmitter, but I wasn’t aware of the possibility of modulating a Si5351A with a “simple” signal like 48kHz audio!

I loved the article! Even though I only understood about 1/3 of the technical details, I was honestly quite amazed at how “simple” was producing RF! The guy is using “sound” at 48kHz to produce the signals needed and then a Si5351A (signal generator for up to 200MHz or so controlled via I2C) to produce RF. I’m not sure, or don’t understand yet how the RF is being modulated, but conceptually is understandable! DSP is a field I want to dig deeper into, specifically DSP as it pertains RF.

It tripped me up too initially, but they added a nice workaround to it so one doesn't need to disable the deleting cookies completely.

On the pages where you want to stay logged in like in HN, click the lock icon left of the URL and toggle "LibreWolf: Always store cookies/data for this site" and that's it.

There's certainly something refreshing about knowing exactly for which sites I'm storing cookies (so far kagi, HN, gmail, YT...)

Wow, thanks for sharing this!! I have experience a bit of the same, although I don't have a group of traders making fun of me, the challenge sometimes comes from having to believe in myself, and also from how family sees it, i.e. going from a high salary "secure" tech job to attempting to accomplish something by myself...

I also find curious the human part of wishing to be believed. The numbers in trading are completely ridiculous given that the ceiling is very high for a skilled trader, and thus most people bundle it together with Vegas the hundreds of thousands of dollars in a gambling game or horse race.

I keep forgetting my own complete unbelief until I experienced a trade with triple digit returns... that makes no sense but I did it (the trick is to not return that to the market and to know that those are exceptions and slow and steady wins the race!).

The irony is that many people here in HN (this is y combinator after all) attempting entrepreneurial pursuits with the hope of making a living and a big payout on acquisition and whatnot... in spite of knowing the statistics of how rare it is for that to happen.

At any rate, thanks a ton for sharing that, it is very encouraging! I've seen people do it, that post is one example, and I have the wild believe that I can do it too! I'm expecting nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, but it's worth it for me :-)

Ok

If you have done the work, why not put it live?

I’m probably biased but I prefer futures, even for forex, just because is only one market vs all the extra markets a big spreads in forex, 6E for euro dollar or M6E for even smaller positions/capital/risk.

There also the element that there are a lot of things you don’t learn until you run a system live

I think a way that you can think about it is from a risk perspective. One rule passed down among traders is to not risk more than 2% you account size in any single trade. For a $50k account that would be $1k. Now let’s say that your system gives you 2 times your risk (2R) with a 60% win rate, and let’s say that in average you make 10 trades a month… you can run those numbers and see if they make sense for you.

There’s usually an inverse correlation between win-rate and accuracy. If you increase your risk you can be right more often but your rewards are smaller. Alternatively you can be more “selective” with tighter stops and thus lower risk and is likely that you’ll be wrong more often but that the winner will be bigger…

I believe that you can have the skills to build a system that can detect patterns from historical data, but notice how, for example, from the previous calculations the problem of trading is less of a “technical” problem and more of a market, risk management, money management, statistical kind of problem.

Then there’s the emotional part of, you still have the power to stop your system… if it has had 4 or 6 losses in a row… are you still keeping it up? Loosing is inevitable in trading, but how much loosing can you handle? Have the market conditions changed? How do you measure that?

Good luck!

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions…

I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

Is not dumb, is just way harder than what it seems. Is kind of like, when the price is going “up” it almost never is going up the same way. What happened before? has the market been more volatile? was there a gap in price the night before? how has the week/month been? are there any external factors (upcoming fed announcement, news, tariffs, etc.) is current “going up” a continuation of something? How fast (momentum)? How “hesitant” (volatility vs clearer directional movement)…

When one starts thinking about how to look at all those factors and when one starts thinking about how to measure those factors (what is volatility? What high or low? Compared to what baseline? Does the baseline move?) it becomes clear that the problem is a bit more complicated to measure and implement in code than it is to train oneself and trade discretionary.

With very fast execution (think server collocation on the exchange and direct fiber network access to the exchange server) the possibility of market making opens, I think of the things that Jane Street does, and look how crazy profitable they are. But very few people have access to that.

This seems so much more relevant in light of the recent Firefox new terms and conditions. I think the writing was on the wall but I didn’t wanted to see it.

It might be time to explore librewolf or Vivaldi again

I mean, one wouldn’t attempt something unless one had some measure believe in oneself’s chances. If people attempt stuff they know they will fail… Idk how they do that

I mean you are right… I think somebody said that where you believe you can or you can’t you are right.

This is funny tho

> Game is rigged for big players. You are gambling.

That’s the whole point of the thing, I’m not playing their game! Look at, say, wheat… a report comes out with adjusted supply/demands (USDA releases those), then if players need to buy/sell a few million bushels of wheat… well, you don’t buy/sell a couple million bushels of wheat without paying on slippage…

I’ve made money exactly that way from “big players”. We are not playing the same game at all!

Kinda! Emotions often get in the way tho! If I was able to lose money as dispassionately as I look at a 500 error it would be a lot easier!!

Yes, all of it is solvable. I think my point is that is my impression (at least from the algo trading subreddit) that many approach it as a computer problem, which it is if one is doing what Jane Street is doing and has that kind of execution in the ns scale… but for retail traders I think one needs to learn what trading actually is, what market inefficiencies are there, usual behaviors of markets, money managements, psychology of trading, etc. in order to do algo trading well.

Props to whoever can work that out by themselves.

There’s a guy that supposedly has a couple of live trading bots trading live money on YouTube. I’ve watched his stuff and don’t really have reason to not believe him since I can look at the charts myself and see that they are indeed live. His tutorial of mql5 is also very interesting. Algo bot programming is kind of just event programming. When a bar closes or on a tick… buy? sell? do thing? That’s all it is! The trick is in when to buy/sell/do nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/live/QfDysU5eyM4?si=mvjN8dj6IHMlODR6

Future contracts short term. Future brokers often have good margins of intraday hold. And with micro contracts one does need to take huge risks.

Futures are leveraged tho, so it’s kinda like a table saw, you can be very efficient with it but it can also remove your thumb as efficiently

I mean... algo trading is a huge field. The thing with algo trading is that software people think is as a programming problem. I thought that too... is not at all! I think that one needs to learn to trade in order to then be able to observe the markets with some understanding and then start seeing patterns and behaviors and forming ideas.

I also started with the idea of doing algo trading, my tests results looked amazing! then I learned about slippage, commission, over fitting my stuff to my test data... trading is not a computer problem, is a market problem and once one understands those building an algo makes more sense. I use some tools I coded myself but I still have no idea how to quantify what I see on a chart, why one "signal" I'm fine trading, and another is a no inspite of being the same signal (think stuff like SMA crossing)

Good luck!

I have to confess that I have a platform addiction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But I finally stuck with MotiveWave, so much so that I actually paid for a full license even though there are a bunch of great free platforms. Main thing, works on Linux and macOS, where as many other platforms are exclusive Windows.

Also, the SDK is quite nice too!

As for commodities, I've found some success in agricultural commodities but I also dabble in currencies and indexes. Agricultural though have some interesting characteristics given than they have an actual physical thing behind them as opposed to how stocks move... which varies depending on which side of the bed the CEO of the company woke up!

email on profile ;-)

Well... I trade futures which are open 24/6, but then again, my strategy mostly trades around specific dates when economic reports are released so, when there are no new economics reports I don't have anything to do... but it certainly varies from person to person and from strategy to strategy.

But you are right, trading certainly makes one A LOT more aware of risk/reward just in general life, which can be good or bad. Also, it is very easy to gamble instead of speculate, that is to trade something one "hopes" would work vs. trading something that has a statistical percentage of working, and the difference between the two is purely emotional, because one can convince oneself of quite literally anything! Come with a bullish bias and everything looks bullish... take a step back and reconsider and see how easy is for one to see what one wants to see.

I’m usually hesitant to share but I’ve been doing commodities trading.

There’s a humongous amount of BS out there about trading or day trading but the fact is that people do it and make it, and my best friend being a consistently profitable trader for the last 4 years didn’t help my skeptic case…

At any rate, turns out that the challenge of trading is less of a technical or financial one. Sure, one needs to understand stuff like price action and market structure and such, but the core of the thing is kind of like developing this complete disregard towards money. Making and losing money can’t mean anything or have any emotional impact, one needs to just see numbers, statistics and trust on one’s strategy.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable recommending this to anybody because it requires a weird commitment to failing but still striving and it is hard but not in any way I was familiar with. It’s hard in losing X% of my trading account and waking up next day with a clear head to do the same thing again.

Good to know. Thanks!

Lokimedes, we have complete confidence in you.

> We've quietly been using Julia at our hedge fund…

This! I’ve found a lot of value in Julia for math specially in financial analysis.

Julia’s DataFrame and general development workflow are excellent for research and when it comes to deployment is not too shabby either.

I’m aware of pandas and the rest in Python, but for some reason Julia feels a lot more “ergonomic” for my use case.

I certainly will not

already did like at 2 AM... a friend of mine also tried to do it but it turns out that “Download or transfer over USB” only works if you own a kindle, which he doesn't... so there's that too

I hadn’t really paid attention to DMR because I was so cozy inside the kindle bubble. That notification that Amazon was going to take away the ability to download books was a very strong wake up call…

When ok buys a book for kindle, it seems that one supposedly doesn’t own the book? One “owns” it at the “goodwill” of Amazon?

I put my kindle on eBay today and I think going forward I’ll consider buying physical books and when necessary “finding” the digital versions of it?

Something I found interesting when learning about flash was how it is manufactured and how much reliable single layer cells are (SLC)

There’s certainly a very visible increase in price and decrease in capacity but it’s certainly interesting when you get sd cards with a proper datasheet vs. customer level devices

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory-cards/501?...

I find this funny from people that make their living from $$ from software! Lol

But apart from that Bruno is open source (MIT), you can fork it and have it anyway you want…

The paid option seems just like the traditional open source model of make software free but offer enterprise support. And given that CTOs tent to want to pay for stuff (postman is terrible nowadays but is still picked and paid for) why would Bruno straight up say no to money?