jspaulding

I have some friends that have made a lot of money playing poker. The analogy is very good. But, in poker you have to be willing to deal with much bigger ups and downs than what I had to deal with. You can hit a bad streak and it can hurt - even if you are in fact a really skilled player and do in fact have an edge.

With my program I didn't really have bad streaks because my P&L was averaged out over thousands of trades per day.

I was trading stock market index futures: Russell 2000, DAX, and a bit of Nasdaq. I experimented with other stuff as well.

I didn't lose any sleep but I do indeed hope to contribute more to society with future projects.

$10k loan from dad. Built it up to 30k trading manually before my automated program went live.

It's a great point and seems like a very smart thing to keep in mind. I think in my case, based on the statistics involved, the odds that my success was luck just seems astronomically small. But, guess I'm biased in my own way :)

My fixed costs were $2000/month. I think it was $1800 for TT plus $200 server rent so damn.. I was getting overcharged $800!! oh well :)

I'm pretty sure it was XTAPI. Is that the simpler one? I used the simpler one. Whatever the case.. the code that dealt with the API was trivial compared to the rest of my program. So good work!

Yes i'm pretty sure it wouldn't work today. By buying the code I realistically mean hiring me to work for them based on what I achieved.

thanks quant123 ;)

I don't think anyone was adapting to what I was doing in particular but rather simply adapting to the opportunities in the market.

Hey, I didn't actually intend this to be a course. I do not make any money in the market right now so am certainly not qualified to teach a course on it. And of course, if I was making money in the market I wouldn't have posted this at all. So please everyone remember that. These comments have made me realize it's probably for the best if I do not post the source code. Basically you are competing against armies of PHDs who are buying buildings next to the exchange so they can get their executions slightly faster. It is indeed surprising to me that I was able to make money in the first place. But I do know for a fact that I did make money and I also know that I was not at risk of losing a bunch of money. As mentioned the most I lost in one day was $2000. That's all I was risking.

You are correct. I think I had to have $10-30k in my account. I was extremely low risk so they weren't concerned.

Longs and shorts were 50/50 and my program showed no preference for up or down days. High volatility and high volume was what it liked.

Well I could try. But it's not going to be any easier now than it was in 2010. For four months I tried everything I could think of to keep it profitable but in the end nothing worked so I had to shut it off.

I tried to address this concern at the start of my post. If you have some idea of how I manipulated the statistics I'd be happy to respond.

Having said that I can agree that my case is pretty unusual and that everyone should beware of attempting to do something like this. Even for myself I couldn't do it now. (There is a reason I turned my program off.)

I certainly could open source it. I may just wait a bit on the off chance that somebody wants to purchase it.

Yes, however, I forgot to mention that pretty early on I converted my program to use an API from https://www.tradingtechnologies.com. It's odd, but I can't remember exactly why. I think it was simply because I found a broker who could offer me a lower commission rate and they only supported TT. With regard to posting code yes I may do that. We'll see.

To be honest I don't know exactly what happened. My theory is that over time more and more market participants started integrating the types of analysis I was doing which rendered my program ineffectual. It's a pretty normal pattern that there is some inefficiency in the market and over time it disappears.

It wasn't anything over the internet. I had a server rented at my broker who were situated close to the exchanges in Chicago and had direct lines. For sure I was not the fastest but only behind by a couple milliseconds perhaps.

If anyone has questions for me happy to answer as best I can.

I agree that fake reviews could easily be a nasty issue on Yelp and other sites. In this case I'm not particularly worried about it.. but only time will tell. API access could be good for a variety of reasons though :)

Yes probably

What if I were to just go ahead and list the rating as 4.2 or 4.8 and not show star symbols at all?

You are totally right about the quality of feedback and these all seem like really good suggestions thank you. I don't know what's going on with the Twitter sign-in.. It was working yesterday. bah!

haha.. yes, well LunchTree was a previous project that is not currently active.. I'm not sure why it is forwarding.. I must have done that at some point.

Agreed. Was thinking to take a few features from Amazon :)

That's a great question and the answer is not now. However it seems like there certainly should be. Maybe users could enter a URL for their review as a substitute for the review text. I will follow up with you if/when this is available.

Yeah, I had a tough time making those look pretty. Removed for now.

Please let me know if you have suggestions for the site, thanks.

I would say it would be extremely difficult to start a HFT program nowadays. I actually created a profitable system in 2009.. I ended up making around $500k but by 2010, I was making less and less money each month no matter what I did to try and improve the system. I finally turned it off completely about 3 months ago. I think the problem is there is simply no "dumb" volume in the market and everyone is just competing against other HFT arbitrage programs.