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by ryanwaggoner 3102 days ago
Your ideas interest me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Seriously, I’d love more info. It’s become accepted wisdom that trading loses money, 10% returns year after year are unrealistic, experts underperform the market, don’t time the market, etc. It’s such accepted wisdom that I’m skeptical of it. In particular, I wonder whether it actually is realistic for someone who is thoughtful, has a strategy, and has an appropriate risk tolerance to drastically outperform the market at small scale. For example, it seems like with so much index and large fund capital sloshing around and moving the market overall one way or another, it’d be moving a lot of companies with it on a given day / week / month that really shouldn’t be moving. Just an example.

Would love any reputable links, books, etc about this!

3 comments

As Warren Buffett wrote in his 1985 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway: "What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest—whether it be bridge, chess, or stock selection—than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?"
Simplest way is to have information others don't. Much more difficult would be information they have but aren't using correctly.

One example I've heard before is this (maybe garbage...). Publicly traded ecommerce company is going into the peak holiday weeks, and analysts are bullish. You found informational leaks of KPIs by digging through html source code (incrementing order ids, cancellation ids, etc). These KPIs show a downward trend in the final few weeks. You posit these are real, and short the stock since they're likely to miss earnings.

Yes you can drastically outperform the market

Im glad you put your own independent thought into it

Small scale is a much bigger scale than you might think

People have been taught to use asset managers and accept their underperformance.