deandree

Wow this is super interesting from psychological perspective.

Try checking like page number 5/6. This post has 30 upvotes, not 300.

I must know you from somewhere. A random stranger wouldn't spend so much time obsessing and being jealous over my medicore success post.

Based on your green nickname, you probably even registered just to come comment on my post. I advice you to stop wasting time on such activities.

Thanks! This tool focuses specifically on Price Action style daytrading. For algotrading there are many other tools that are way better suited for this task.

It's not removed. Sorry to disappoint your conspiracy theory.

If averaging down is the key to your daytrading strategy, I suggest you rethink your strategy. There is a good saying - "never add to a losing position".

Thanks! That feature is on the todo list, might be added in following weeks.

Thank you very much! I don't see the feedback as negative, as what I've seen so far has been 95% overwhelmingly positive. My thesis has proven true - this tool is helping people. While HN might not be the most appropriate audience, I'm still grateful for the comments made here. Always good to see things from different perspective.

As for your points:

1) Trading is a game of probabilities and risk management. None of the best traders I know are trying to predict anything. They are merely reacting to situations where they have calculated advantage. They know their edge, they know their odds, and they are placing their bets when it's skewed in their favor.

2) For most retail trading styles and portfolio sizes, real trades will have an impact, but not significant enough for it to worry about too much. Unless asset your're trading is really illiquid.

People who strongly believe in EMH are usually theorists. There are way too many people who's practical track record is way too good to be attributed to chance. I believe markets are random most of the time, but there are moments when they are not. That's where the best traders place their bets.

Also, here's my favorite counter argument to EMH - https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-w...

Nothing is 100% and/or guaranteed in trading. It's a game of probabilities and risk management

To simplify - when you long, you bet on price going up. When you short, you bet on price going down. If you went short and price dropped 5%, your profit is 5% (minus commission, slippage, and some other stuff).

I've been doing a fair bit of promotion and marketing, because "you build it and they will come" rarely works, even if your stuff is good. But I'm sure any dev who has launched anything already knows that.

I posted this here with close to 0 expectations, because my posts in HN usually don't get much attention. If you've seen this on Reddit, you should know it was very well received in multiple subs, so getting a bit more than 20 upvotes here wouldn't be something out of the ordinary.

Does it really impact your practicing experience that significantly? This is an abstraction over market, it also doesn't have slippage and hundred other things.

Anyway, size is on the feature list, will be added in following weeks.

Patterns are an oldschool Technical Analysis fallacy that blindly believes that X means up and Y down. More practical and successful approaches (Price Action) focus on statistical significance and recognizing market context and supply/demand imbalances.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is not a real thing - take any chart and you can find 10 patterns that say up and 10 that say down. Big players move the markets and they don't use retail trader Technical Analysis patterns.

It's all about price and price action. A lot of trading styles don't require much history and don't care about the news - it's all calculated in before you know. A lot of traders believe price reflects all you need to know - everything else is just noise.

From what I know, there is basically only one thing they care about. Proven track record of making money and beating the market. Nothing else really counts. Except for young graduate quants - you need a degree from top tier school.

Successful traders come from very different backgrounds and use very different methods. There are a million ways to make money in this, but they all are very hard to find. Most of successful traders have very unique skillset. This is a performance sport. Lot's or similarities with pro athletes.

Thanks! I've now had 20+ people tell me they had this idea or even started it, or even launched it and got no traction. I needed this for myself, so was going to build this anyway. If this helps anyone else (already has, we have solid stable user base), even better for me. We have quite active Discord and tons of ideas what to build next.

Exactly, you should always be competing with the market. If you can't beat it, why even trade - just invest and spend time elsewhere.

If you place stop orders at predictable places (most traders do), they can be the sole reason why you lose money. Overall the market is expert in triggering your stoploss. And no, it's not manipulation or exchanges trying to make you broke - beginner stoplosses are usually super obvious and free money lying around.

"you may as well be doubling your bet every time you lose at roulette" - in trading it's called DCA or Dollar Cost Averaging. Works ok/good for very long term investments in stable assets like SP500 Index Funds. But for daytrading the rule of thumb is "don't add to your losers". There's a good reason for that.

I was looking for an app that helps you practice trading, something that would replay historical candles and let me trade on them at a point in time, kind of like a trading simulator.

But I couldn’t find anything that suited my needs.

I asked the trading community for existing solutions, and there were some suggestions:

  *  Most of them were some form of paper-trading, which is not at all what I was looking for, because it has a very slow feedback loop (make a trade, wait for hours/days).
  *  Most notable was TD Ameritrade On-Demand feature, and then some smaller apps, but I wanted something that’s super easy/quick to start with and use.

I wanted something that combines all the things that I’m looking for:

  *  Quick start in seconds — no download, install, registration, etc.
  *  Easy to use UI/UX.
  *  Minimal lookahead bias — accomplished by using random asset/time without knowing which.
  *  Make trades and fast forward time for a super quick feedback/learning loop.

So, I created TradingGYM. It’s an early version, but I wanted to get the MVP out ASAP and see if this is useful to other traders as well.

The app is simple, and you can get started in seconds. Just open the app, and you see a chart with a random asset at a random point in time, and you know neither one of them. You can choose to reveal them in the settings if you want.

The goal is to make a profit (and learn) by making trades and fast-forwarding time to see how it played out, making your feedback/learning loop many times faster. No more waiting hours/days to see how the trade played out.

The mobile version has a minimal UI, so if you are looking for more settings (like candle size), make sure to check out the app on the desktop web.

For now, all the assets included are Crypto, since I already had the data, and that’s the asset class I’m most familiar with.

Some will argue that you only really learn in live trading with real money, where emotions are included etc. And yes, I agree that the psychological factor is a big part of the game. But multiple components contribute to success in trading. While some can only be trained with real stakes (psychology, emotions), some can be practiced quite well in isolation, like pattern recognition. This app focuses on the latter.

Tech stack for the Devs: Node/React (in TypeScript). Postgres DB. Hosted with Vercel (previously Zeit/Now). ECharts for charting.

Super interested to see if this helps anyone improve their performance and skills.

Thanks and good luck with your trading!

I like the idea, especially due to recent Glassdoor misbehavings, but the ultimate question still remains - how can we know we can trust this app? What makes it more trustworthy than Glassdoor?

Part of the charm of this market comes from high volatility - go big or go broke. But yes, agreed, results on more stable asset would be more statistically significant and better representation of what returns could be expected.