Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 0xfeba 3266 days ago
You should do a similar experiment with BTC, or BTC+litecoin+eth or something like that. The APIs are already there.
2 comments

That wouldn't work.

The only reason he is getting away with doing this for stocks is that Robin hood doesn't charge any per trade transaction costs.

Day trading cryto would kill him in trading fees.

Trade on a platform with negative maker fees with post only enabled.
he has 50k on the account, he can pay the platform fees. if the returns minus fees are higher than stock returns sans fees, it is game. and right now, it might as well be.
Bitcoin required a couple dollars per transaction, not to long ago.

You are overestimating his risk, right now, for stocks.

The current setup isn't likely to lose him much money. Throwing darts to pick your stocks will cause your stock portfolio to be surprisingly diversified.

Random stock pick is actually a not crazy investment strategy that is likely to get you the same amount of return as putting your money in an index fund.

Transaction fees in cryto, on the other hand, would cause him to lose 10k a month.

Trades on an exchange aren't on-chain, so transaction fees don't apply. The fees are whatever the exchange sets.
And those fees are usually quite high. Like, around 0.2% to 0.5%.

This is actually HIGHER than the on chain transaction costs.

Yeah did some initial research, but didn't find a good platform with an API and no fees.
You can place limit orders with no fee on GDAX/Coinbase, might not be quite what's needed though (I have zero knowledge in the area).

The main downside is that as soon as Bitcoin goes super volatile Coinbase will go down like clockwork.

Bitmex has an excellent API. 0.75% fees but -0.25% if you place limit orders (with post-only on)