Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pyrrhotech 841 days ago
It's obvious that bubbles exist in retrospect, but determining whether current growth and valuations are sustainable in the present is incredibly difficult. As another poster mentioned, we are essentially talking about market timing here.

Most investors have been conditioned by many popular talking heads to immediately dismiss the idea of successful market timing - and for the most part, the talking heads are correct. For the average investor, successful market timing is nearly impossible.

However, we have many counter-examples of successful market timers over the long term. James Simons' Medallion fund has returned 50%+ CAGR over a multi-decade period and stomping the market, creating many centimillionaires and billionaires in the process.

I set out thinking, what's so different about Simons and his crew at RenTec? Why is it so difficult for their success to be replicated? Not one to easily back down from a challenge, I began working on my own algorithms to successfully hedge against market downturns and provide superior absolute and risk-adjusted returns compared to the S&P 500. While I haven't yet seen Simons-level success in live trading, since launching Grizzly Bulls (https://grizzlybulls.com) in January 2022, 6 of our 7 models have outperformed the market on an unleveraged basis:

SPX (benchmark): +7%

VIX-TA-Macro-MP Extreme: +39.98%

VIX-TA-Macro Advanced: +34.38%

VIX-TA Advanced: +12.92%

VIX Advanced: +9.91%

Vix Basic: +5.76%

TA - Mean Reversion: +15.46%

TA - Trend: +12.97%

Of course two years of outperformance also doesn't yet stand the test of time of Simons' remarkable run, but I'm confident that we've discovered alpha here.

2 comments

This is great, I am also running my own AI investment robots and this is the future and I believe you can absolutely beat the market and even thinking to use similar approach to other structured data sets and create a startup around the idea...

“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” ― Warren Buffett

> since launching Grizzly Bulls (https://grizzlybulls.com) in January 2022, 6 of our 7 models have outperformed the market on an unleveraged basis:

> VIX-TA-Macro Advanced: +34.38%

I'm not sure how to reconcile that with the numbers shown on https://grizzlybulls.com/models/vix-ta-macro-advanced

When 2022 is selected as the starting year, it shows an increase from 16,911,242 to 17,881,510 which is an increase of 5.7% in 26 months.

ah, sorry for the confusion. That's because the last 20 trades are excluded from the table/chart if you don't have the appropriate access level to view, in this case a Gold membership. That means when you are looking at the chart / table with starting year 2022 you are only seeing the trades up to 3/24/2023 instead of the present.
Right, I didn't notice the end date, sorry. So that was ~5.7% return for ~15 months (not 26) and the remaining ~28.7% was in the last 11 months.
Exactly, but if you compare to the market, even though 5.7% absolute returns is a poor 15 month performance, much of the model's relative outperformance came from those 15 months where at the same point, the SPX was still highly negative