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Comment by dschiptsov | Hacker News Reader

Basically this is a story about a guy who was smart enough to script up his trading tool (he discovered that there is an API and wrote some code to use it).

He trade other people's money, using other people's (probably employer's) account and resources, I suppose.

His employer have paid all the fees, and, took all the risks - if there is profit - it is mine, if there is a lose - it is theirs.)

The essence of trading is about having a special (insider) position of even being a market maker, who just collecting fees from every trade other people do.)

But this is just my guess.

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This is not even close to an accurate summary. He never stated that he had any employer backing, and he wasn't collecting market making fees. In fact he was paying brokerage fees which is the exact opposite.

He used his own money to test his algos? Come on.

Taking a Machine Learning and Statistics course does not make you a trader. You need something else - access to the system.

This is why my guess is that he was an employee.

An employee of what? He states above that he was paying roughly $200/month for a server and $1800/month for the software/data connections to his broker.

Prior to setting up my automated trading program I’d had 2 years experience as a “manual” day trader. - mom's and pap's 401k?

No, he said he backtested them against data he collected from the feeds. He paid for the feeds just like everyone else does with his own money.

For me it all looks like a bad-written fiction, and the source is just a blog post.

And that's the beauty of it - take it or leave it.

Basically this is a guy who does what many other have done, look no further than elitetrader.com, but smart enough to add "machine learning" to his story headline, which is the hottest buzz term on the street this year, everyone and his mom talks about machine learning last I checked.

So, it is just plain SEO for his startup - a primitive on-line course aggregator.

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