Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kyleschiller 3421 days ago
Publication bias is a gigantic problem for amateur FinTech.

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.

3 comments

It's ok Kyle, I'm with ya. I like most indiehackers articles but this one didn't really provide the same level of insight as most. I made over 150% returns on bitcoin in the last 13 months.... and I did nothing.
Thats very different from having 95% success buying and selling. He isn't stating a 95% return, but that the algorithm works 95% of the time. This is unheard of, let alone from someone who started learning finance 5 months ago.
While I do agree with you to some extent, as opposed to gambling, stock market requires technical knowledge. I strongly believe that individual traders stand no chance agains the big players and there may be a combination of luck + favorable stock picks in this case.
> How many hundreds of engineers tried the same thing

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 have a feeling the author is really much more interested in selling his tech than he lets on in the article. I can't imagine any other reason for going after the press.
Really not. If that was my intention, I would went directly to the source. I was invited to share my story with the sole purpose of inspiring others. I have no plans of selling it whatsoever.
Yeah, he references some good resources, but the post doesn't go into any technical detail. I don't think this article hurts him in any meaningful way. It's not like the basic idea of ML for trading is novel.