[1] Running cat on a csv file would usually just print a list of numbers, yes? Instead he gets ascii art with months on the vertical axis, making it seem like time going back and forth, and some random commentary in the right margin. I dunno but something about it screams "mockup". As does the minimalist, ultra-stylish AWS window.
Edit: also, if it were me who got incredible returns from trading at high speed on indian markets using only machine learning on historical data, I would definitely keep quiet about it. Just sayin'...
I also think most of the stories on indie hacker are bull and it's just people growth hacking or something to get free publicity.
As I was invited to share my story on Indie Hackers, my goal was to provide as much insights into the project, without blowing up the advantage it gives me over a very niche market (NSE). I have absolutely no intention to 'advertise my freelancer business' or 'sell my tech', as someone mentioned. My goal was strictly to send an encouragement message to people thinking of/building something similar, by sharing as much as I can of my project. Faking stories online would be the last thing on my agenda and I find it somehow amusing that some people believe that.
PS: Having to cat a lot of text + csv files while developing this, it was much easier to alias my cat function to use csvtool on csv files and it's regular implementation on other files
PS2: The 'minimalist, ultra-stylish AWS window' is a quick app I cranked in a few hours to see the status of my instances. Not sure what's suspicious here. The window or the the fact that it's stylish?
Really? You made a crazy claim with no details at all.
Here's my assumptions on this thing:
1. Your algorithmic strategy is only performed on a small selection of stocks, that you have semi-randomly picked, aka not a part of your system.
2. These stocks have had a crazy run.
3. When the NSE had troubles in Nov. and Dec. your conservative stop losses triggered and you stayed out of the market.
4. Your decision on when to re-enter the market was a personal decision, not a part of your system.
5. You have given this thing more money to invest with than we are being led to believe.
Which ones did I miss on?
I gotta be honest, it really does seem like a nice little way to plug you business but I don't believe you're lying. I think you're overstating its performance by leaving out details and were lucky to get that performance in the first place.
Whether you are lying or not does not really matter, after all you're just a regular guy trying to get ahead like the rest of us. And the startup royalty keeps telling us to bend the rules. What I'm criticising is IndieHacker's lack of due diligence to screen for charlatans. I'm assuming you didn't show them any further proof than what's in the article?
https://www.quantopian.com/open
Easy $5k if it does what you claim and would settle the dispute. You can just feed them trades w/o revealing the actual algo.
The general vagueness of the post is a much much much stronger reason to be skeptical, imo.
It's possible to generate a highly profitable and successful trading system but it's the expected probability factoring in the worst case downside scenarios that really matters.
After all, you could win 9 out of 10 times but that 1 time is where you blow up.
Right now, I'm putting my wall street hat on and calling this bullshit. A naive software developer will not be able to see the potential pitfall of holy grail systems-they do not exist.
I also question if it's really HFT, the bar is really high to get low latency connection but he's only making 3.5k/month...it just doesn't make sense.
And why would you publish your system and say oops I can't tell you anything about it?
In the article he discussed exactly this happening.
> I also question if it's really HFT, the bar is really high to get low latency connection but he's only making 3.5k/month...it just doesn't make sense.
Again, in the article he states that he abandoned his HFT approach.
Most of these negative comments seem to come from people involved in trading who didn't read the full article but are extrapolating based on their knowledge of finance.
"The claims made in this interview are extremely suspect, it just not make sense. Absolutely no relevant details are included. The developer claims he was able to built an AI trading strategy that is profitable 95% of the time. No technical details about the strategy or platform for trading is provided. A few trading buzzwords thrown in a few places. The rest of the interview is platitudes and inspirational hacker talk
I think IndieHackers needs to investigate the claims and be provided proof, otherwise this appears to be a fake project for the developer's own publicity. If IndieHackers are fine with that, I will stop visiting as I cannot trust that the content is not just shallow, exaggerated claims to raise peoples profiles."
After expressing my concerns directly to IndieHackers, the interview was changed in multiple places to flesh out a number of the spurious claims which I had criticised.
Without further details or some proof from the developer, this piece stinks. Taking into account the rest of the interview which contains stereotypical inspirational hacker talk, the whole thing feels like a badly done promotional bit for SV style status.
If I am wrong, I will apologise and the developer is going to be a multimillionaire very, very quickly. Until there is more details, I am going to be totally sceptical of IndieHacker interviews going forward. Which is a shame as I think IndieHackers is a great site. How can I trust that the other submissions are not baseless, PR pieces?
If he had a strategy this good, he would've quit freelancing and be a multimillionaire by now.
The only reason I'm not 100% convinced this is fraud is that it's on the Indian market. I don't know the level of sophistication there, so it might still be possible for an independent trader to exploit winning strategies.
Articles like this where proper due diligence verifying the authenticity of the poster isn't in place raises strong questions about how reliable and factual IndieHacker is.
I really feel like they fucked up by posting this article. The other article seemed alright but now I ask the same questions.
It seems like they saw the original trendy tweet where he mentioned it and didn't verify anything.
But hey, maybe this guy really cracked the market, and a Nobel prize and billions of USDs are on the way...
I think you guys are both creating a false dichotomy between "genius who cracked the market" and "liar who is fabricating data", when there is plenty of room in between, e.g. "someone who made a few lucky trades in a bull market over a short period of time," which would describe probably the vast majority of "winners" in the stock market.
It's the equivalent of asserting that everyone who plays a slot machine must break even, when in reality some people win and some people lose.
How many hundreds of engineers tried the same thing and won't get an article on the front page of HN because no one wants to read about mediocre performance? I don't want to sound too skeptical, quantitative HFT is absolutely the future, but if enough people try something that's effectively gambling, some of them are bound to succeed, and those people will get dramatically disproportionate exposure.
EDIT: I do still like this post and the project, the infrastructure is great and it offers insight into something I'm sure many people are curious about.
And you bet your ass if I tried and succeeded I'm not going to come here and brag about it, risking whatever ephemeral edge I had. If I did this, I would do it for dollars, not karma points.
I did not read anything about backtesting. Have you done that? If so, I take it back :)
And another one by Indiehackers founder csallen after it already hit the front page: http://i.imgur.com/rxWtsWJ.jpg
e.g:
Can we tweet a link to our own submission? Can we add a link to the end of a blog post (that we submitted ourselves) with a link to the submission, saying: "Discuss on HackerNews"
Also you ignored the first picture which clearly shows your account.
This is almost certainly a fluke, if it's true at all. There aren't any valuable lessons here and such a story merits a high degree of skepticism. Algorithms which can successfully return 95% profits consistently are not wasted on freelance developers.
I usually love Indie Hackers, but including this story really devalues the brand.
I also disagree that there aren't any valuable or inspiring lessons for indie hackers here. In fact, I enumerated some of them as asides in the interview itself, none of which would apply to your hypothetical trip to Vegas.
You and others are hyper-focused on the irrelevant question of whether or not Sebastian's attempt to build an unparalleled money-making machine has succeeded (answer: obviously not), and ignoring the actual point of the interview. It's the equivalent of the guy who read the SubmitHub interview a few months back, ignored all the lessons within, and instead attempted to create an exact clone of the SubmitHub product.
I, and likely many others in this thread, have tried our hand at trading. I've had months where I generated amazing profits. I have "algorithms." Yet I definitely don't pretend any of this stuff is special or noteworthy—why would Sebastian's be?
A huge part of what's cool about Indie Hackers is that people are generally transparent and you can see their approach to roughly similar problems. There are plenty of sites (hundreds of them) where you can find people bragging about their trading strategies and bots. Why does Indie Hackers have to expand into them?
This is nothing like the SubmitHub interview. That had lots of great lessons in customer development, building a brand over the years, etc. Realistically the only lesson from this story is "get lucky."
> In fact, I enumerated some of them as asides in the interview itself, none of which would apply to your hypothetical trip to Vegas.
Why not? I'm sure I could come up with some trite lessons about how poker playing is applicable to business and startups. Heck, there's a whole cottage industry in doing so.
That doesn't mean I think a story about my poker playing would make a good Indie Hackers interview.
> money-making machine has succeeded (answer: obviously not), and ignoring the actual point of the interview
What, exactly is the point of the interview then? You could just as well cover random sites that have launched with 0 profit or revenue. Heck, if you're in that business, I've got a ton of side projects I'd love to share.
I'm trying not to be too critical here, as I genuinely like Indie Hackers. But you need to have some standards for what gets included. Everyone who manages to make money doing something shouldn't count.
What proof do you have of his claims?
If this turns out to be a dodgy submission for self promotion it is mildly embarrassing for IndieHackers if they admit error in this instance.
If it turns out you have seen no solid proof for these claims and amidst the heavy skepticism express by multiple people in this thread you do not investigate and demand proof, than that calls into question the rest of IndieHackers
How are you determining true alpha? We're in a bull market. Don't mean to sound harsh but this could be blind luck.
And what api can be used for trading?
Are they expensive?
Do you have anything beyond "I'm making $3.5k using methods I won't disclose on an initial investment that I won't disclose"? What's your return on your investment? Sharpe Ratio? If you apply your investment criteria in historical data, do you beat the market?
How different is it from the guy who invested his tuition money on Tesla?
Hedge funds, for example, are largely black boxes, but the publish their returns.
Definitely feeling like this is faux..
Edit: Some pointed it is an Indian Marketplace - but the article mentions that Initrinio provided real-time data but Initrinio only provide IEX (https://intrinio.com/marketplace/data/prices/realtime)
Also you mention you had some concern that some of the stocks may crash. Have you worked in finance in the past to be familiar with the securities offered by the NSE, BSE and MCX?
Have not worked directly in finance, but I always had an interest in it. However I accumulated most of my experience in the past year. My recent concerns concerns were based on previously observed patterns and analytical observation.
I was trading stocks, it's really easy to fake even videos. You don't even need to fake it - just record everything and publish only successful deals.
If this story is true, it should be confirmed. Otherwise, the article can't be considered as serious.
I had a near 99% accurate scalping system. I could not believe it. Every trade I was making was profitable. How could this be?
The system worked without a stop loss. Meaning 1% of the time the prices turned, it wiped out all the profits (limited reward) accumulated.
I published all of these details on my university homepage which has since been deleted as they won't let alumni's keep one. But I was very careful that while 99% system accuracy is achievable, it's the downside risk that makes the system pretty fucking useless.
Of course you can put a stop loss but the system ran on "limited rewards unlimited risk". There's just no holy grail out there. Even if you read Hull's options book, no matter how complex your option strategy gets, you always have to be right at the end of the day. It's pure speculation and we all know how casino's work.
So knowing this, if it sounds too good to be true, there's a very strong reason for it. Retail trading is a zero sum game. Even more suspicious when the downsides are conveniently left to "if I gave it away system won't work". I was fully transparent about the downsides when I published my trading system.
The last thing I wanted was to people without the financial literacy to naively believe that a holy grail trading system existed. They don't exist. History is filled with funds that blew up because they believed alpha generation would be a constant thing.
Even quant trades I question their success. In the long run, all trades are speculative and carry risks (except arbitrages which are automated to oblivion). No matter how sophisticated you get the risks are always unknown.
