How I Made $15,000 / Day as a Fresh College Grad | Hacker News Reader

How I Made $15,000 / Day as a Fresh College Grad

hackernoon.com

20 pointsleinad52025 comments

Looks like it's missing a lot of the details about the "how".

"This was a more complicated operation with tighter spreads, and required a net long position in crypto"

Based on this, it sounds a lot like gambling, and this experience is survivor bias.

We were actually bullish on crypto (we do fundamental valuation), and with the crypto we were already holding, was able to create more with arbitrage

It's not possible to do fundamental valuation on crypocurrency. You're just fooling yourself. But congratulations on timing the market correctly and identifying an arbitrage opportunity.

Everything can be fundamentally valued, my friend. Even if that valuation means 0.

Why don't you start here, and come back when you know what you're talking about :) https://multicoin.capital/2017/08/24/rep2017/

I understand fundamental valuation just fine. You simply don't know what you're talking about, but thanks for playing.

Care to explain why? / Any experience to suggest you know what you're talking about?

That's cool. What was your fundamental valuation of concurrency? How did you do it? How did you know you were correct?

The link you provided is for a prediction market, and not really useful for fundamental valuation.

The link I provided has a link to a pdf that goes through fundamentally valuing augur, including with a discounted cash flow model.

Finance lesson 101 is that all assets are ultimately valued by its cash flow, or as a store of value. P/E, EV/EBITDA, DCFs, etc. You just try to apply those concepts to crypto, which is what Multicoin does

I mean you can apply astrology to predicting the future but that doesn't make it any more valid than applying those valuation methodologies to cryptocurrencies. Call it "fundamental" if that makes you happy, but the reality is you're effectively just picking numbers out of a hat.

They're frameworks to help you... Don't call it fundamental then. Not about to get in a pointless argument over vernacular

Yes just like basic arithmetic also provides a helpful framework for adding random numbers together.

My thought as well. This wasn’t some awesome arbitrage algo, but rather buy and hold arbitrage that requires the price to go up. Why not just bet it all on black?

As you mentioned everyone knew about the arbitrage opportunities at that time, the problem was getting a Korean bank account if I remember correctly. How did you do that? Did you have connections in Korea? If so, why are you marketing this article as some sort of self-help piece that anybody can follow?

This just seemed to be all over the place, it started out with a very rare opportunity that you capitalized on and then went into leaving the corporate world, starting a startup and blah blah blah but you haven't done anything substantive. You very clearly claim that you don't know how to code well enough to run a startup without foreign help, maybe if you take a job in the industry and get the mentor-ship you clearly need you'd be able to code well enough to be able to run your startup without delays.

This just all seems like half-assed advice from someone who's probably too young to be giving it.

No offense OP

So if everybody knew about it, why didn't they do it? If connections in Korea is all that's needed, I'm sure the opportunity was enticing enough that a foreigner could find that connection.

But appreciate your opinion! You're right, I have yet to prove myself

People did do it. It just wasn’t yet on enough people’s radars.

Yeah exactly, many people did it. And the people with family and friends in Korea could have done it much more easily and closed that window out much sooner than someone in America who didn't speak the language and didn't have the connections.

Oh idk, the whole Korean language that most people speak in that country may have had something to do with it. It's not hard to look at two different exchanges and see a gap, it was hard to create an account on those exchanges and execute on the opportunity because it required an understanding of the language and the laws as well as a physical presence if I remember correctly.

And no you can't just "Find a Connection" lol, you have a lot to learn.

I still don't see how any of those skills translate into a viable business, maybe you could explain that?

The ability to identify opportunities, sell people on working with you, risk manage, and pure grunt work (talking with lawyers, etc.), moving fast, are just a few of the skills required in business that were all applicable here.

Automating trades with python might be more relatable for you. But the point is, it's not just technical skills like that that "translate to a viable business."

Those are fair points but you didn't mention any of that in the article and if you're trying to posit this as a self-help article and not some sort of shameless self-promotion piece then why should I care?

Why wasn't this article more about The ability to identify opportunities, sell people on working with you, risk manage, pure grunt work (talking with lawyers, etc.), and moving fast? I didn't get any of that from the article.

Who said this was a self-help article? The title is what it says. It's an interesting story that people found inspirational / fun to read.

And sure, to use your words, it was self-promotion. But why is that bad?

Regardless of your opinion of them as people, Steve Jobs did "shameless" promotion of iPhones, and Donald Trump did so with his brand. And if people found the information valuable, that's all that matters!

Not sure where your preconception that this must be a self-help article is coming from.

I found this worth reading. It features a number of interesting quotations from famous people I was not aware of. (e.g. "Competition is for losers")

Usually a story with a title like this is bullshit, but this one does detail how they guy actually was raking in a load of cash through online arbitrage. I was surprised.

Thanks man! I appreciate it

You should have known better than to try and impress HN. You could have made $1M/day as an infant and people here will still poo-poo it.

I, for one, enjoyed the article. Wondering if you have any recommendations for discovering opportunities like this in a repeatable/systematic way.

haha, I have learned

I think just having a wide network and staying connected will give you opportunities

As I mentioned in the article, I think being an entrepreneur is a huge arb. That crypto fund alumni msgd me after seeing the article and agreed with that as a big arb

I was expecting mediocrity, but this a good share. Thanks.

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