pyrrhotech

Managed accounts must first be set up on Interactive Brokers by the client, with a margin account + futures trading permission. Then a second user must be added with Limited Trading Authorization: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trading-authorization.a.... Interactive Brokers has some standard forms to establish the contract. Once all that's set up, I run a parallel instance of my bot with your account in the cloud. Please send me a "Contact Us" or an email if you are interested and want to know more details.

Website is built with NextJs. The models are all built with NodeJs--custom backtester framework, and the execution framework and data fetchers are also in Node and leverage a few open source libraries and currently only works with Interactive Brokers.

We just launched mid December, and currently have 16 paying subscribers and 178 free members. MRR about $2500. The Platinum plan can be either implemented via API, email notifications or a managed account in which case after some legal paperwork, we set up a second user in Interactive brokers with trading authority that executes trades based on the signals (hedging via ES futures).

Interesting, the figure does seem quite low to me. Boglehead passive investing has worked really well for the past dozen years. I expect the next 10-15 to be much more challenging given the extremely high starting valuations and end of the low interest rate and QE tailwind. I've been building algotrading models to help tackle the challenge of when to hedge at https://grizzlybulls.com

My bot was in full time development for more than 3 months before I started trading live with it, I had traded manually previously for 15+ years, and I was highly confident the bot was better than me. Why not put money into it? The execution framework is extremely stable.

My models do not use any leverage, and they perform better in volatile markets than stable ones. In fact, the only way they can gain alpha is from avoiding drawdowns because during long signals they get exactly the same returns as SPX.

And yes, you are right, it is incredibly difficult to make a profitable bot. 2020 isn't the full story, that's when I decided to give it my full time effort of 80+ hour weeks.

As long as the bots continue to perform near the backtest, yes eventually I would become wealthy with them without other monetization, and as mentioned in other posts, a net worth in the high 8 figures, probably dwarfs what I can make with this website and service so I make no guarantees that it will always be around. That said, I'm enjoying running it and having real people use my product, and it does not hinder my own returns, at least not at our current scale.

Side note: FWIW I think it's probably harder to make a successful crypto bot than equity bot because crypto is far more speculative and doesn't have as much fundamental and macro backing it up--would have to be mostly TA, sentiment and there's bound to be more inherent randomness to the movements since it is so new and speculative.

I do have the habit of talking in plural form. The site was built by my wife and I together, but I built 100% of the models myself. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. Now, I've got the models to a place where it becomes very difficult to improve them. I used to be able to make huge progress in a week, now I can spend 100 hours trying different theories and may not end up with any progress. That can be frustrating, so I decided, the models are fantastic right now, the execution framework is very stable, I'm happy with how they are performing, I'm going to let them run.

As mentioned, I'm not rich (1.4M in bot, ~2M total net worth), a SWE job paying 400-600k is quite meaningful to me even with 40-60% returns on my portfolio for the time being, just as potential profits from this website (also perhaps in that range within a year or two?) are also meaningful. If the website fails to generate significant revenue, I may shut it down. Also, I enjoy working on satisfying things, and now that the models are mature and the website is mostly finished except minor details, I'm happy to have a team and a project for now :)

That's also a good call out on the scaling problems--another reason our models trade the SPX futures, literally the most liquid financial instrument in the world. By my slippage calculations, the models don't need significant scaling updates until at least 1B+ is being traded.

Healthy skepticism is warranted and welcome of course! My account is currently at 1.4M. Taxes and living costs are taken out regularly. I'm not giving anyone access to the source of the models, only the output signals and trade history. I do give brief descriptions of some of the indicators that each take into account, but none of the details of how the complex system works which is the tricky part. You can find huge list of potential indicators for algotrading for free lots of places online.

Lastly, the 75% is a bit of an anomaly. As you can see, the top model is only expected to return about 60% pre-tax. It's unusual that in live trading we have exceded the back test--2020 was a bizarre year and we also started after a big bear market so we benefited for a huge bull that year + nailed the June and September crashes (check the trade history). 2021 was a below average year by contrast, and over the long term, any algotrader should expect the live results to be a bit under the backtest as despite our best efforts (and I consider my anti-overfitting engine to be the biggest accomplishment here), all systems are to some degree overfit to past data.

Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, I make no guarantees of always publishing this site and signals. If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering. However, obtaining 1% of Seeking Alpha's userbase would be 5M+ per year in revenue from the site which is a few multiples of my current net worth. Even with a hypothetical 50M net worth 10 years from now from 40% post-tax, post-living expense returns, 5M is still meaningful. If we fail to gain that much traction, or the bot does so well that I hit that kind of figure much earlier than expected, I may halt the publishing.

As of now, and for the forseeable future, the site makes financial sense to me, and it's been a lot of fun, so it also makes pleasure sense for me. Life is about more than money of course.

Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day.

By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour.

Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :)

One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems.

I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.

Thanks for checking it out :)

I've heard good things about Carver's work but I haven't read them myself. However, I got started reading similar books by Ernest Chan

Definitely, that's why I have API access to signals as part of the Gold Plan. I think there are several ideal users:

1. Active investors who like to pick individual stocks and want to know when is a good time to hedge for beta for macro downturns.

2. Other algotraders who want to either set up their own fully automated system using my models (either in full or as part of the input to their own proprietary model).

3. Average folks who are mostly passive investors but want to be just active enough to avoid the biggest downturns that can take years or decades to recover from. They don't want their retirement savings to potentially stagnate for 13+ years like March 2000 to March 2013. Our models have low signal frequency compared to most competitor systems which make them easy to execute on almost passively by following our email notifications.

4. People who already have 6 figure+ investment accounts and want to grow it more aggressively than SPY or VTI, but don't want to 1. spend the time and energy managing their portfolio themselves and/or 2. pay very high hedge fund / PE / VC fund fees for dubious benefit

I've thought about this a lot, and to answer 100% honestly, I'm not sure I always will, but for now:

1. These are not HFT models. They trade once every 2-4 weeks on average. They scale to billions in capital, so selling them does not inhibit my own returns. 2. There's a lot of demand. Part of the reason I decided to launch is I had some friends IRL begging me to let them use my models as well. Seeking Alpha has over 15M MAU and hundreds of thousands of premium subscribers, and in my opinion this service provides more direct value and wastes less of your time with noise. 3. All the money I make from this goes back into my own bot and compounds. Sure the $1400/month doesn't add up to much right now, but 1000+ premium subscribers one day would make a huge difference to me financially. 4. I believe we are at a precipice with passive investing, and the next bear market which could be right around the corner will dishearten a lot of folks. The more money investing smartly in the market at a reasonable fee makes the markets and overall economy less fragile. More automated smart investing saves society the drag of lots of suits on wall street mostly playing a big marketing game without producing much alpha or liquidity or any other measurable benefit in contrast.

Also, on a lighter note, running a business is just a lot of fun. I love seeing people use my product and get value from it.

Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years: https://grizzlybulls.com

I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual returns with much lower volatility than the overall market. My starting capital was small (500k) so in addition to growing with my own capital, I'm now providing the signals (3 free, 4 premium).

105 total members, MRR is currently $1397/month, just launched exactly 1 month ago today. Still in the google sandbox so I'm not seeing much organic traffic. We have a small community on reddit, rest of users from social media, Seeking Alpha and Stock Twits.

One of the worst things I've noticed recently about Google Search is how it is very anti-startup because of the concept of the Google Sandbox, an essentially arbitrary length of time they put a huge negative penalty on your site to try to entice you to buy paid ads instead before your funding runs out waiting for organic traffic.

Perhaps that's my biased opinion on their motivations as I've recently launched https://grizzlybulls.com and yet even though Bing has tiny market share, I'm getting 10x more organic traffic from Bing rather than Google...

This looks cool, I signed up. I may have to employ this in my algotrading pipeline. I've collected historical data from 100s of different indicators and I'm currently using a largely heuristic approach with some light ML on subsets, but so far I haven't had the ML breakthrough I've been looking for, https://grizzlybulls.com/models/vix-ta-macro-advanced

I would file as sole proprietor on schedule C. Write off all expenses, then you'll be taxed on excess profit at your ordinary income rate. Put most of the extra money into ETFs to save for retirement.

It sounds like a lot of money now, and if it never goes away, is completely autonomous someday, or you never want to retire, it is. But if this business were ever to fail or you want to retire it someday (if it requires a lot of active involvement), to replace 170k/year in income, you need a minimum of $5.6M in retirement savings using the 3% rule. That will take quite a long time to save, even with your income.

Not to mention, if you ever have lifestyle inflation and want the whole 45k/month some day without relying on this website, you'll need a whopping $18M which will likely take you most of your adult life to acquire unless you grow the business substantially. Check out /r/fatfire that has a lot of advice and resources for wealthy people. And if you happen to be looking for some alternatives to passive ETF investing, check out my site grizzlybulls.com to learn about algorithmic trading. Congrats on your success!

Hi HN, founder of Grizzly Bulls here. I've been building algorithmic trading models full time for nearly the past 2 years, and I've been working on this site to share them for about a month. I've built 7 actionable models, 2 totally free, 1 requires a free account and 4 premium (to view live signals and full historical trades). Each model has a detail page that shows the historical trades and gives a high level overview of the indicators and parameters used. All models have been running live successfully since April 2020; trades before that are backtest only.

Most people choose to monetize their models by starting a hedge fund. I'm reluctant to go down that path for many reasons, but first and foremost that I believe the best strategies shouldn't be locked away for only the top 1% to utilize. Of course, my capital is also fully invested in my own models, but my capital is relatively small and my slippage analysis suggests these models can scale to billions in capital (they are not HFT, most trade about once per 2 weeks on average).

Please keep in mind that these models are my hard work and IP; I'll have to answer any questions about their internals very vaguely. With that said, I welcome all questions and feedback! Thanks for taking a look.

Hi HN, founder of Grizzly Bulls here. I've been building algorithmic trading models full time for nearly the past 2 years, and I've been working on this site to share them for about a month.

I've built 7 actionable models, 2 totally free, 1 requires a free account and 4 premium (to view live signals and full historical trades). Each model has a detail page that shows the historical trades and gives a high level overview of the indicators and parameters used. All models have been running live successfully since April 2020; trades before that are backtest only.

Most people choose to monetize their models by starting a hedge fund. I'm reluctant to go down that path for many reasons, but first and foremost that I believe the best strategies shouldn't be locked away for only the top 1% to utilize. Of course, my capital is also fully invested in my own models, but my capital is relatively small and my slippage analysis suggests these models can scale to billions in capital (they are not HFT, most trade about once per 2 weeks on average).

Please keep in mind that these models are my hard work and IP; I'll have to answer any questions about their internals very vaguely. With that said, I welcome all questions and feedback! Thanks for taking a look.

> Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes.

I feel like this is more a modern misconception than reality. Play a game of Civilization and you'll start to appreciate just how deep human technology really is. In Roman times, they probably said similar things thinking about how advanced they were compared to the Macedonians a couple hundred years back.

Yea we lost some progress or at least the rate of change greatly slowed from 400 - 1600, but other than that blip I think the progress has actually been fairly linear from 4000 BC to 2021 CE. It just seems like it's not because of the cognitive bias to take for granted all the things that seem so basic compared to computers or nuclear reactors, but in reality, those things actually were very difficult to develop with the knowledge and production techniques available at the time.

Comparing Rails to Express is not apples to apples. You should compare Rails to something like Next.js that has a lot of the magic and plumbing taken care of for you on both the front end and the back end.

I agree that for side projects, underfunded startups and especially for product/business-focused founders, using the quickest magical prototyping framework is definitely the best idea so I agree with the overall sentiment of the post, just not the specific conclusion that Rails is the best way to go in 2021. I still believe strongly that having the same language on the front end and backend is paramount to developer productivity.

The free market is the reason the USA is the richest country in history and has far outpaced the wealth gains of Western Europe who early on was resistant to free markets because of aristocratic feudalism (right wing) and later became resistant to them because of socialist ideas (left wing).

On both sides of history, the USA has so far remained in the center in both eras and that has helped us grow immensely faster than them such that today the USA is wealthier than all of Europe combined despite having half the population and natural resources.

Even Communist china learned the hard way that free markets are the only way to prosperity and after they adopted Deng's free market reforms in the 1970s, they subsequently pulled 700M+ people out of poverty.

Of course we need some regulation to protect the environment. I never said a 100% regulation-free market is what is needed. What we need is to preserve private property, encourage entrepreneurship and innovation and preserve the incentive of hard-work.

I'm not a conservative, I'm a rationalist. I don't make arguments based on "but poor mom and pop lost their jobs!!!". Instead, take a look at the pros and cons at a holistic, societal level and decide what is best quantifiably. Luckily, we don't even really have to do this often, because the free market usually gets it right.

Despite what a naive view of American politics might have you believe, both the far left and the far right want to abolish capitalism and markets in favor of totalitarian beurocratic control, they just have different flavors of how to get to and how to manage that state. There is very little difference in economic and social policy between historical communist and fascist nations. Only rational centrists who fight for liberal democracy and free markets support the best path forward for society.

Also simply because there is no selective pressure for a gene does not mean it does not exist through pure chance.

Well that's a major cherry-pick. How about we use a neutral start point such as TWTR IPO date? Since Nov. 8, 2013, TWTR is up 16.8% and has paid 0 dividends. Meanwhile, SPX is up 162% since then, plus it has paid a dividend of an additional 1.5 - 2.5% per year during that time. And QQQ is up a whopping 381% in that time. Twitter has been one of the worst performers in the Nasdaq 100 over the last 8 years.

I'm thankful we still live in a society with personal and economic liberty. Both those on the far left and the far right are trying to take those from us, and the center is vanishing as America becomes more polarized each cycle. I'm convinced one day in the future, we will no longer have the freedoms we enjoy today, so I live each day to the fullest knowing that nothing good lasts forever.

I felt it had the opposite problem of the Hobbit trilogy. Too much cramped into 2 movies and left out too much context and supporting details that would make the world more interesting and understandable to viewers. I think it would have been better as a 10 episode series or movie trilogy instead of 2 movies.

Software is becoming less and less of a tech industry and more and more commoditized. Very little innovation in the past 5-10 years. Very few successful companies during that time have come about by having incredibly innovative and novel technology - almost all are simply using run of the mill, commoditized technology to solve business problems that they have large domain knowledge of. Given this, it makes total sense that having detailed esoteric technical knowledge is no longer the path to success in 2021, and ultimately, hacker news has always been predominately about one thing - how to get rich. The best methods have simply shifted over the last 15 years from being a tech genius to being technically-proficient domain knowledge expert

I should have said it's a representative aristocracy for the shareholders, as when you do get a vote, your vote is obviously weighted by how many shares you have and not equally. However, whether you have 1 share or 100,000 shares of public company X, your day to day involvement is still essentially equal at 0 unless you are an executive or on the board.

that's quite a stretch. There's a massive difference in an equity investment and a debt investment regardless of giving up voting rights. Let's be real, even voting rights in 99% of SPX companies don't mean anything. It's a representative democracy, shareholders only vote on the very, very biggest decisions in public companies, like "should we accept this merger". In every single SPX company you invest in, you are effectively giving up control of 99% of decisions to the executives and those under them at the company, regardless of whether your shares are class A or C

Also, paying $5B to bail out your CEO and focusing on maximizing long term shareholder returns are far from mutually exclusive. Shareholders should be looking beyond a quarterly earnings report

Um, no, climate change is by far the greatest existential threat to human civilization. Civilization thrived for thousands of years without healthcare of any kind, and although inefficient and too expensive today, healthcare is a near non-issue when compared to the climate crisis. If we do nothing, in a mere couple of centuries Earth will no longer have a breathable atmosphere above 6C warming.

Neither is Facebook or Amazon. In fact, all three have already been moved from tech sector and into communications / consumer discretionary by economists. Google, Microsoft and Apple still qualify as tech for now.