[csallen]

I find these criticisms quite unfair, especially given that he admits in the article that (a) he is new to trading, (b) his results cover a short period of time in a bull market and could easily be 100% luck at this point, and (c) he's had to manually step in to avoid ruin. You're excoriating Sebastian for not hedging claims that he has repeatedly hedged.

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.

[morgante]

What are your standards for including interviews on Indie Hackers though? Honestly, my criticisms are less of Sebastian than of you. He admits that his strategy is unlikely to be profitable in the long run, but what exactly is the merit of including stories about an amateur trader on a site about technical side projects?

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.

[csallen]

I'm also trying not to be too defensive, but I strongly disagree with your interpretation of this interview. Most of the IH audience will read this, care very little about the "secrets" behind the trading strategy, and instead focus on what you call "trite lessons".

In this particular case, the amount of time and effort an 18 year old put into researching and educating himself about a difficult field is quite inspiring. As is his dedication to doing some non-trivial programming work and actually launching. That might not be inspiring to you or to professional traders on HN, but I can assure you that most IH readers will not care if/when his trading bot ultimately fails.

> 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've featured lots of very small projects. My minimum cutoff nowadays is $100/mo, but in the past I've done interviews where the revenue was $0 or not shared. Although it's fun celebrating big revenue wins, that's not the point of the site. (If you don't believe me, I can point to numerous places where people have actually asked me to feature $0 failure stories on the site.) The point is motivation, inspiration, and education for getting around the most common obstacles that stand in the way of creating an online business.

[morgante]

> Most of the IH audience will read this, care very little about the "secrets" behind the trading strategy, and instead focus on what you call "trite lessons".

I'd like to think I'm part of the core IH audience. I come for interesting stories of people building software from scratch and generating revenue from it.

Someone who got lucky gambling their money for a few months is just not an interesting story. It's way outside the mold of what you usually publish.

> My minimum cutoff nowadays is $100/mo, but in the past I've done interviews where the revenue was $0 or not shared. Although it's fun celebrating big revenue wins, that's not the point of the site.

It's good that you have a cutoff, but I think the issue is that this project doesn't necessarily meet that. With your typical interviews, you know they're making revenue from actual customers and that revenue is a meaningful metric. He happens to have generated profit so far, but I also happen to have generated profit on my gambling trip: it's not a meaningful metric, and in fact, might as well be 0.

He could easily have all his revenue wiped out next month (and, in fact, almost did). I'm really not sure what we have to learn from someone who has successfully gambled for a few months.

[csallen]

Yes, ultimately the stock market is gambling, and thus the durability of his product is quite low, but this is an arbitrary distinction from the rest of the interviews on the site. I could point out unique distinctions for a dozen other interviews on the site, e.g. the popup t-shirt company whose product was temporary, the company making $0, the company doing entirely consulting revenue, the pure hardware company, the paperback book author, etc.

What I keep pointing out are the undeniably valuable lessons that can still be learned from what Sebastian did, as well as why a typical indie hacker might find them inspiring and educational, and why they wouldn't apply to your gambling analogy.

I'm not sure why you're ignoring these parts of my responses. Maybe it's because you've already launched many non-trivial side projects, so you aren't intimidated by that particular hurdle, thus you don't find it inspiring, and as a result you feel compelled to focus entirely on the efficacy of his product. Which is fine! But you are not everyone.

[morgante]

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing what exactly is so inspiring about what Sebastian did, and why it's any different from my gambling "product." He's very far from being the first developer to play stocks. What sets him apart? It's not like he has customers, a marketable product, or anything more than some (unverified) gains.

For my gambling, I too read books. I too wrote scripts and models to assess things. I too have practiced.

At the end of the day, I don't delude myself into thinking those lessons are applicable to my actual business.

[csallen]

Doing research, writing code, testing your product, and ultimately launching it are lessons that are applicable to actual business. Of course, they can be misapplied to what essentially amounts to gambling, but so can any other valuable skill. (e.g. If Sebastian put on his selling hat, started taking on investors, and charging them a fee.)

The fact remains that many people never develop these skills, never get over these hurdles, and oftentimes don't even realize that these hurdles exist. They find it motivational to read about people who did. Especially a teenager like Sebastian.

And ofc you're right: Sebastian is no different than others who came before. But that's never been a criteria for being on Indie Hackers. I find it somewhat telling that the people who are up-in-arms about this interview consist almost exclusively of those working in finance or who've experimented with algorithmic trading.

[alva]

You are strongly defending him.

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

[csallen]

You are consistently ignoring the logic and reasoning I provide in my responses, and I'm not sure why.

[alva]

This is simple.

What proof do you have of his claims?

[csallen]

I sincerely don't understand what you want. You claimed it was impossible for him to find an exchange, and then he revealed his exchange. You claimed it was impossible for him to find data sources, but then he revealed his data sources. You claim that his system can't possibly be as good as it appears, but even Sebastian admits that he had to manually intervene and has also gotten lucky.

What extraordinary claim is being made that requires proof?

[alva]

> You claimed it was impossible for him to find an exchange, and then he revealed his exchange

Wrong.

"1. How did someone outside the financial world get access to an exchange that would allow this" "First bit of proof I think you should get. 1. Agreement with exchange" "1. I was not even referring to "top" exchanges. even just a single exchange. ask him which one he uses"

>You claimed it was impossible for him to find data sources,

Wrong.

"2. He states that he trained the model on financial data. This data is Extremely expensive. If he is using public data like Yahoo Finance, the level of detail that is provided is so low that it is incredibly unlikely any automated strategy could work off it" "[provide] 3. Data sources for AI training" "2. It is very unlikely a succesfull strategy could be based on this [public data]

> What extraordinary claim is being made that requires proof?

The claim that someone with 5 months of financial self learning has created an AI strategy that makes a profit 95% of the time. That is an extraordinary claim.

I have asked him elsewhere in the thread and still have not had a response.

Post historical and current positions, open and closed.

[csallen]

> It is very unlikely a successful strategy could be based on this [public data]... The claim that someone with 5 months of financial self learning has created an AI strategy that makes a profit 95% of the time.

I've responded to this many times now, and you've ignored me, which is why I don't believe you actually want an answer, so this will be the last time I respond:

Sebastian has not claimed that his strategy will work 95% of the time. That would be crazy. He hasn't even claimed that it has worked 95% of the time –- he specifically stated that if he hadn't manually intervened, it would have lost all his money.

He merely reported that over a limited window of time (5 months) with a limited number of trades (non-HFT) in a bull market, 95% of those trades were profitable. If you break down the math correctly (which you did incorrectly in our Twitter convo), winning 19 out of 20 coin tosses = 1 in 52k. That has surely been done many millions of times, assuming hundreds of millions of trades are made daily.

I'm sorry, but the extreme claim that you're looking for proof of was never made. You are battling a strawman.