[ajeet_dhaliwal]

Do you write software? I don't get trading and I want to. I get programming. If you understand both that's great. I even took one masters course (as part of my bachelors degree) in financial mathematics about options, future, derivatives etc. but it didn't click at the time.

I have funds to invest but every time I look into getting into I cannot bring myself to do it because I cannot stop my brain thinking it's gambling. Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market short term. In terms of long term investing in an index fund or ETF, that supposedly is more sensible but that sort of feels like gambling too, in a way everything is I suppose, buying a house is too, but I suppose you have to just get your brain to get over it. There's no guarantee of anything.

[auxym]

> ... I cannot stop my brain thinking it's gambling. Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market short term.

That's a smart conclusion that's correct in the vast majority of cases. Day trading, especially as a retail investor, is mostly gambling.

If you have funds to invest medium-to-long term, index investing using low cost, well-diversified funds really is the best thing you can do. Is it gambling? Year-over-year, an equity fund will certainly have wide swings up and down. However, since your horizon is long term, most people think that the market will be going up, averaged over the long term (a decade +). That is what the past has showed us.

While past results are not a guarantee of future performance, it would be highly surprising for the market as a whole to do down, or even stagnate, for a period of 10+ years. Yes, people often cite Japan, that's exactly why I stated well-diversified funds above: limiting yourself to a single country can be risky.

What is certain, is that if you are sitting on large sums of cash, inflation is eating away at it. You are actively losing money.

[Retric]

Liquidity has value. Keeping say 10-20k in a checking account seems really dumb, but if that let's you avoid bank over draft fees and credit card interest that savings can easily keep up with inflation.

[votepaunchy]

> Liquidity has value. Keeping say 10-20k in a checking account seems really dumb, but if that let's you avoid bank over draft fees and credit card interest that savings can easily keep up with inflation.

Or a Roth IRA for which th e contributions can be withdrawn tax-free and penalty-free at any time.

[Retric]

Even then it still takes time, effort, and involves risks around both system issues and market crashes etc.

Saying with more effort I can do X and get Y always has the cost of that effort.

[morgante]

If you just invest that money in a good brokerage, you should easily be able to take it out as a margin loan when necessary.

[Marazan]

Hint, huge market downturns wiping out your stocks account correlate with times people suddenly need access to free cash.

[auxym]

Definitely agree :)

By large sums, I was mostly thinking 100k+

[nosefouratyou]

I was introduced to the book "Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners" on HN[0] and it seems like a really good book (from the bit I have skimmed so far).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3177815

[RockyMcNuts]

Play poker once a week for small, but real money. Study the game (read Sklansky, Harrington, do the MIT poker school).

After a year, you get used to the idea of a bet where you'll win some, lose some, but know on average you'll do better than OK.

Investing is gambling, but with an edge, since it's not a zero-sum game. Also you have to be patient, you are almost certainly not going to consistently beat the market short term, but you should do better long term than not investing.

If that's not for you, then just buy target date funds, balanced funds, structure your own balanced ETF portfolio, or pay a robo-advisor or human advisor to invest for you.

TFA's type of trade is like advantage gamblers who read the fine print of casino promotions looking for situations where they have an edge. Whoever sold that (presumably) OTC exotic bullet option (probably) didn't realize leveraged short vol funds forced to cover could create a vol-pocalypse. http://kiddynamitesworld.com/xiv-volpocalypse-sea-disinforma...

[dsacco]

> I have funds to invest but every time I look into getting into I cannot bring myself to do it because I cannot stop my brain thinking it's gambling. Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market short term.

If you have programming skill and a good understanding of statistics, do the following:

1. Identify a subset of equities in the total market which a) have fairly one dimensional revenue streams, b) have a market capitalization of at least ~$1-2B, and c) are not prone to extraordinary hype or tech-centric accounting, such that e.g. a "win" or a "loss" in an earnings announcement is fairly straightforward to understand (and therefore you can more easily, if not perfectly predict how the market will react).

2. Identify a strong, legal source of alternative data that maps directly to the revenue stream of one of these companies. The more difficult to find and collect, the better. Use your programming skills to automate the collection and curation of this dataset.

3. Incubate your dataset for a period of several months, then build it into a timeseries. Using the timeseries, build a model that forecasts the expected revenue of each particular company using historical 10-K and 10-Q documents.

4. For the companies whose data imply a jump in either direction that is very unexpected (according to e.g. the aggregate analyst consensus), take a contrarian position in the equity. If you're feeling very confident and have a higher risk tolerance, study options and take the corresponding derivative position.

5. In particular, establish a target win rate overall, a target tolerable drawdown period overall, and a target exit price (sufficient win or bearable loss) for each position, then follow it.

If you do this correctly and consistently, you will profit significantly and consistently enough that your system will be fully distinguishable from uninformed gambling. To equip you with a bit of meta-analysis here, this outline works because a) all trading strategies profit from finding opportunities to exploit pricing inefficiencies in various securities (or groups thereof), and b) the only way to deliberately identify those opportunities is by having information, access, or techniques that the broader market does not have yet (or else the price would reflect that information).

The great difficulty in this process is finding and analyzing the alternative data in the first place. As a fallback, if you're not confident you can build a trading strategy with this data you can also sell it to hedge funds, who will be very happy to buy it if it actually maps to revenue and is otherwise unknown.

[defen]

To give a concrete example of what you're describing (one that no longer works) - this is from memory from an earlier discussion here on HN - years ago someone discovered that FedEx tracking numbers for Apple products were essentially serial in nature. In other words, if you ordered an iPhone and got tracking number X, and then a week later you ordered another one and got tracking number X + 500,000, it meant that Apple had sold 500,000 products online in that time period. Turns out that number was highly correlated with Apple earnings. The person in question claimed to have sold highly accurate "Apple earnings predictions" to hedge funds for 100K-200K per quarter per hedge fund.

[dsacco]

If I recall correctly, I was the person talking about this, barely a week ago :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291194

[defen]

Funny. I was recalling a conversation from even further back, but I don't recall who it was. Might have been you!

[mrchicity]

Awesome post and your meta-analysis rings true even on tiny time horizons.

Years ago I traded energy futures and we hired someone away from a rival. He knew a trick for seeing crude oil price changes on CME a few milliseconds before they sent the updates in their data feed. For a brief period we were printing money across the energy complex, but eventually it stopped working well. The guy who taught us the trick jumped from firm to firm, many others independently learned it, and it became the worst kept secret in trading: https://outline.com/MHp6Yu

If you've done this earnings forecasting yourself, how much size can you trade before the market moves enough to make the risk/reward unfavorable? For a retail guy it's probably not an issue, but curious if major funds are doing it at scale.

How does selling to hedge funds work when the information is valuable only insofar as few others have it? I suppose you could have an exclusivity contract but there's a strong incentive to sell to multiple buyers. Is it more of a relationship/reputation type setup? Are there brokers of some sort that help filter disreputable sellers out?

[dsacco]

> If you've done this earnings forecasting yourself, how much size can you trade before the market moves enough to make the risk/reward unfavorable? For a retail guy it's probably not an issue, but curious if major funds are doing it at scale.

From my casual observations, usually about 8 figures or so. It was not unusual for us to deliver a particularly impactful report, then have institutional capital rush into it and push up the price fairly quickly. Then they’d hold that position for a month or so before earnings. Typically “word on the street” would be that the big movements signalled smart money, but usually there was still premium left over to capture during the actual earnings announcement. Humorously, it was sometimes frustrating when institutional money would make large bets in the direction opposite to our forecast, because despite being eventually vindicated, clients would get restless about it.

> How does selling to hedge funds work when the information is valuable only insofar as few others have it? I suppose you could have an exclusivity contract but there's a strong incentive to sell to multiple buyers. Is it more of a relationship/reputation type setup? Are there brokers of some sort that help filter disreputable sellers out?

It’s not typically the set of all hedge funds purchasing the data for any given equity (that is, unless it’s groundbreaking), it’s the subset of hedge funds which already have an interest in the particular equity. That limits the competition and information diffusion somewhat. For certain exceptionally high value data we did try exclusivity contracts so that its value would last longer. For example, before I left the research firm I was working at last year I developed (to my knowledge) the only non-drone, purely web-based method for forecasting the exact number and type of all vehicles Tesla produced with a <1% margin of error - to the point we knew well ahead of time that the Model 3s would completely miss. We were marketing that data to particularly long term, well known clients who could be trusted not to burn the utility of the information.

From there, it’s as you say: there is absolutely a reputation system with a strong basis in long term relationships. It was common to have to jump on calls directly with analysts at funds to talk through the forecast. And yes, there are brokers to help facilitate this entire process.

If you’d like to chat about this more, you’re welcome to email me. I can’t go into deeper detail for much of the proprietary workings, but I’m happy to talk about things that don’t have an NDA covering them.

[anonu]

Trading successfully is conceptually simple: buy low, sell high. Finding these patterns is what's tough.

First you need to figure out what your investment horizon is. Microseconds or years? Or somewhere in between?

If you're good at programming there's a good chance you'll be attracted to the shorter time horizons (high frequency trading). At a longer time horizon your risks are different and so are the programming skills you need. Generally you'll need to be able to apply statistics and probability to what you're looking at. Look up Kelly criterion.

One of the best things to look at on any time horizon is liquidity differentials. Try to find two things that should be the same thing from a price or risk perspective, but trade with different volumes.

In the ETF space an example of this is the ETF versus it's basket. Or leaders and laggards within a specific sector.

[moondev]

Start with ETFs and ease your way into it. Vangard has a great site with lots of info to get you started: https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/

They also have a fund explorer where you can easily look at past performance and compare: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0970&...

[thesimon]

>where you can easily look at past performance and compare

Though this is probably not the best metric to use.

[pedrocr]

But do you want to invest or do you want to trade? If what you want is to invest your objective should be to get the average of the market as cheaply as possible not beat it. Here are two articles to help you with that:

For the rational part: https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

For the emotional part: http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...

And if you need a good source for knowledge and ongoing support boggleheads is an amazing forum/site:

https://www.bogleheads.org/

[dsacco]

> But do you want to invest or do you want to trade?

This is a false dichotomy.

First, just semantically speaking: investors "invest" in hedge funds that engage in speculation via trading strategies across a continuum of risk profiles. Hedge funds take their capital from "investors"; they typically have "Chief Investment Officers", and their traders execute trades in order to fulfill investment goals for clients according to fund-specific "investment mandates."

Second, by actual meaning: investing does not refer only to "value investing", which is substantially what you're referring to. Investors are, in the abstract, people who seek a positive return on their capital relative to another benchmark, where that benchmark is typically parameterized by risk, percentage return and liquidity. Trading is an activity in the service of investing, and a trading strategy is the execution of an investment thesis. The principles that allow for positive returns in value-based investing and index investing broadly generalize to other areas of investing, and essentially map to the concepts of arbitrage and (mis)priced assets in the abstract. Just as you can get invest your capital in real estate or young startups, you can invest your capital in trading strategies.

Whether or not it's wise to pursue a self-managed trading strategy (or seek others to manage one for you) is a completely separate topic; my point here is to emphasize that we're doing a conceptual disservice in education (and an abuse of well-accepted terminology) if we act as though trading and investing are different concepts. A much better way to frame your point here is to use terminology such as "passive investing" versus "active investing."

[pedrocr]

>investors "invest" in hedge funds that engage in speculation via trading strategies across a continuum of risk profiles

This is precisely the opposite of what I'm suggesting. Instead of implementing these trading strategies just buy the average of the market at low fees and don't trade anything.

>investing does not refer only to "value investing", which is substantially what you're referring to. Investors are, in the abstract, people who seek a positive return on their capital relative to another benchmark

Again a misrepresentation. I'm definitely not arguing you should be value investing or trying to get alpha by beating any benchmark. Quite the opposite. I'm arguing you should just hold the market average which requires no trading besides the initial purchases.

>if we act as though trading and investing are different concepts. A much better way to frame your point here is to use terminology such as "passive investing" versus "active investing."

I'm definitely arguing for passive investing but also in strategies that quite actively do not trade. Ultimately this is just splitting hairs on terminology but you'll be hard pressed to find the term "trading" in actual use for someone that just passively invests in the total market. I doubt you'll find anyone on bogleheads.org that will identify with the term. Trading is a term usually reserved for people who will actively trade in and out of various securities on a regular basis.

[walshemj]

For part of your portfolio yes but once you have a decent amount (when say your normal size of order is £2k) you want to start diversifying and playing on special sits and corporate actions.

An example from the UK electra private equity ELTA was on a massive discount activist investors came in and I made over twice my initial investment in two month - I would have busted my yearly allowance for dividend income just on that stock alone.

[pedrocr]

You can't diversify more than just holding the total market. And since market returns are zero sum for you to make that great profit someone else had to lose. I'll just take the market average at very low fees and not worry about it. That's what the first link explains.

[walshemj]

You can diversify across markets (different countries) and sectors and also to lay off risk, but I have been investing starting slowly with index funds 20 years ago so I think I have more experience.

I brought a commercial property fund when office prices crashed it tripled in less than 10 years.

[pedrocr]

>You can diversify across markets (different countries) and sectors and also to lay off risk

And you should. The ultimate goal is to own a cap weighted proportion of all the assets in the world. If you do anything other than that you're taking an active bet that some assets will do well and some poorly and someone else is taking the other side of that bet. The sharpe article is quite revealing.

[hyencomper]

Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor elucidates the principles of value investing as opposed to risky gambling. This is a book recommended by Warren Buffett too.

[defo_nonconvex]

I tried to get through this, but after one or two chapters it seemed really dry, and somewhat outdated for current markets. I've read dry material on financial markets before, but jeez. Did you actually learn much from it? If anyone wants to post a tl;dr summary, it would be appreciated.

[walshemj]

It's written in simple language (and modern editions come with commentary updating it ) if you cant read that book then maybe you should not invest in shares at all.

[skellera]

Like the other guy said, if you need a TLDR for learning stocks, maybe it's something you shouldn't be getting into.

It's a dry book yet still one of the most recommended out there. There's a reason for that. You aren't going to learn the market in a day.

[pmoriarty]

"Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market short term."

This is my own conclusion as well. Well, either that or luck.

This goes double for long-term success. As the disclaimers say, past performance is no indication of future results.

[dsacco]

> This goes double for long-term success. As the disclaimers say, past performance is no indication of future results.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, but it should absolutely be an indicator. Unless you view success in trading as a purely stochastic process, consistently beating the market is a strong signal that it can be done again in the future (by definition). If you do believe success in trading is a purely stochastic process, the disclaimer becomes moot in the “indicator” form or “guarantee” form because such a position is antithetical to trading in the first place.

To be more precise, if we're going to engage in deliberate trading at all, it's only productive to do so if we operate under the assumption that performance is random.

[justaguyhere]

I feel the same. I can understand programming, business etc - anything that involves creating something of value and exchanging it for something else of value with money as the medium. Two things that I never understand are - high end art market (a single painting is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, really?) and stocks.

How is stocks not gambling? What exactly is being created here? It is just gambling and speculation, and for that these people (hedge funds especially) get paid insane salaries? And many times they gamble with someone else's money!!! This is incredible to my simple brain.

[pjc50]

Stocks are an entitlement to a future income stream, created by a the real business of the company being invested in. It's just that there's a lot of levels of indirection.

[OscarCunningham]

A lot of traders are just gambling, but there is also something of value being created.

Stocks are risky. People don't like risk. So the current price of a stock will always be less than its expected future value. Therefore the value of the stock will tend to go up.

So when you own a stock you're being paid for bearing the risk. This is a real service of value that you're providing for the world.

[skellera]

Most people don't look further than the stock price and if they like the company. In that case, it is gambling. People think they don't have to spend any time and they should get a good return.

Like Peter Lynch says, most people spend more time deciding on what refrigerator to buy than the stock they're buying. If you spent as much time researching a stock as you do a house, you'd probably do much better in the market.

Stop buying stocks only because someone told you to or because you like the company.

[coliveira]

Nothing is being created. You're right, it is completely a gamble, unless you have some form of (not necessarily illegal) insider knowledge. But capitalists love the art of stock gambling because it gives the feeling that is related to something productive (a business). And they also perfected the art of extracting money from society (pension funds, retirements, sovereign funds) to fuel these stock-trading activities. So it is very lucrative for a small group, a little over inflation for many people, and a big loss for a lot of less fortunate investors. It also help concentrate business in the hand of a few, because if you have lots of money you can buy the advice of the best money managers and let the small investors bear the losses.

[amenghra]

If you keep your wealth as cash, it will get wiped out over time by inflation.

Now let’s imagine that you have enough money to buy 4 houses in a city/location you want to live in for the long term. I would say that’s pretty low risk because your cost of living is going to be roughly the same as what you can earn by renting out your 4 houses. I.e. you’ll be able to live off your rental income forever.

Therefore there are investment strategies that aren’t equivalent to gambling.

[dynamodispatch]

There is a difference between trading and investing. Trading is short term gambling, investing isn't. You invest for the long term.

> Without insider knowledge I don't understand how I could beat the market short term.

Short term, you can't. You'll have to bank on luck. Hence why it is gambling. Especially if you go the options route. That's pure gambling as options are a zero sum game.

[walshemj]

Possibly not options - you can identify potential value /arbitrage situations - higher risk than pure value to be Shure.

Binary bets absolutely are gambling, as I was told when I went to an interview with a big London spread betting company

[dyeje]

Check out the The Simple Path to Wealth. It really made everything click for me, in terms of personal finance.

[auxym]

Note: the author also has a freely-available blog post series that summarize most of the material.

http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/

[hackme1234]

Everything that has risk associated with it could be considered "gambling" by your logic.

[imustbeevil]

It's not so much "logic" as it is "definition".

From Google Dictionary: (2) take risky action in the hope of a desired result.