[alva]

Reposting my comment on the first HN submission of this page

"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?

[morgante]

The biggest red flag is that this guy is supposedly still freelancing.

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.

[zump]

As if GS and JPMorgan don't have huge Indian operations with IIT grads.

[morgante]

Yea, I'm sure they do. It's just that I don't know anything about the Indian market, which makes it slightly harder to dismiss completely out of hand.

[brilliantcode]

You fucking nailed it.

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.

[fictioncircle]

I agree completely unfortunately.

It seems like they saw the original trendy tweet where he mentioned it and didn't verify anything.

https://twitter.com/Sebyddd/status/821005789930389504

[jwmoraes]

I had been asking myself this since I started following IndieHackers a couple of months ago. And now this article has brought up that issue more intensely. Point is, how can we really trust any article from the website if no minimal check is happening on the interviews ?

[csallen]

I recommend treating the interviews like you would treat a tweet or a comment on Hacker News, just more detailed. If you plan on making a critical life decision based on the veracity of a specific claim, do some research first, and perhaps contact the interviewee.

[ucaetano]

Do you have a link to the original version? It looks fake enough as it is, I wonder how much bad it could be.

But hey, maybe this guy really cracked the market, and a Nobel prize and billions of USDs are on the way...

[csallen]

The changes were to add details explaining the 95% "success rate", the sources of data, and the exchange that he was using.

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.

[alva]

Hey. As we spoke about this earlier today, could you please post the original before the edits post our conversation?

edit: I rang the bloody alarm bells about this submission with you. I hope I am wrong, but it looks like you have been had.

[csallen]

Sure, they were additions rather than edits:

Addition #1: "For proprietary reasons I will abstain from publicly discussing a lot of details about the technical implementation. Although I get many requests to open-source the project, I believe that disclosing deep details of the models or prediction approach would hurt the advantages that this solutions has over the other existing bots. However, for anyone willing to learn more about that, I would be more than happy to discuss in private, to some extent."

Addition #2: "...worked around 95% of the time. Now this is not by any means a reliable metric, and there are many factors that affect it. The bot has not been tested enough to guarantee that this isn't just a fluke (it might as well be). Large investment management companies would do anything to achieve those statistics, and I'm sure I won't keep up that amount of success in upcoming trades. The success so far was also greatly impacted by the favorable market conditions, chosen stocks, and the fact that the bot was running intermittently."

Addition #3: "For trading I recommend Kite, mainly for their stable Connect APIs and the low bandwidth. Their limitation is 3 requests per second, and this was more than enough for my new strategy. Getting solid historical financial data isn't cheap, and with so many people hitting the providers to scrape and download data, I don't blame them for limiting the offered information. Intrinio is a good provider for real-time stock quotes at very inexpensive prices. However, getting access to more in-depth data would always yield better results."

[sebyddd]

alva, I found your skepticism very biased. Following your requests, we decided it would help if we address your questions in the interview. Therefore the only edits, where just addition around the 95% claim which seemed to be misunderstood.

Your main claim was that the bot cannot achieve 95% trade success trade constantly, which I undoubtedly agreed to and added more details on this claim.

The edit also provided more details about the platforms that I used along the way, as this detail was overlooked in the initial version of the interview.

I find your claims unfounded and harassing.

[alva]

Post your historic and current positions, opened and closed.

I am not the only one who is extremely sceptical about your claims.

[svantana]

Agree 100% (see my top level comment for more incriminating evidence) and while this is the worst one yet, I feel earlier indiehacker articles have had similar problems -- exaggerating success and achievements for personal gain. If indiehacker wants to save their reputation, they need to editorialize more IMHO.