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Ask HN: Any Day Traders on HN?

by dizzydiz on 11/25/20, 12:15 AM with 43 comments

• by arthurcolle on 11/25/20, 12:48 AM

  I use a hybrid complex event processing system that is mostly custom built, as well as a large scale data ingestion framework that takes in around 2-3GB of price data and other relevant information every day. It took a really long time to get this part of my setup working because without a decent way to kick off a process that subscribes to this data easily, everything else is going to be a huge pain in the ass.

  I put on trades on a 2week-1 month time frame, and aggressively sell winners and use stop losses to get rid of shitty positions. I use GARCH, ARIMA models, and have recently been playing around with some more exotic ML techniques, but I've found that momentum trades work the most reliably.

  I'm working on a SaaS API to try and make some money off of my data collection systems, but that's still in the works.

  EDIT: I try to identify interesting individual options that are, according to my model "mispriced" given a few signals. I seek out multibagger options. Most recently, I purchased the $PLTR 11/27 $22 strike calls two days ago, and made a killing (was around a 6x gain). If you are methodical in your data collection processing, there's a lot of valuable information that can be obtained. It just requires lots of data munging (which, honestly, is so painful all things considered). But turning 1k into 10k is a wonderful experience, especially if you can reproduce it.

  I have taken the well known 30-40 advanced options strategies and created a dynamic programming algo to basically run through every single listed security and every reasonable combination of options that would yield these strategies, with some filtering to make it computationally tractable, and then computed what the collateral costs would be (for spread trades, for ex.). That creates a reasonable doable list, and then I run a straightforward backtest. From here, I either pursue a trade or not. I like the idea of fully automating this stuff but its just not there yet. In any case, systematizing a lot of the boring crap is a great way to more deeply understand the landscape. You're never going to compete with execution-based firms but you can definitely take a view based on underlying fundamentals/macro landscape and then tune a slightly longer based system appropriately.

• by cik on 11/25/20, 9:04 AM

  My (personal only) side project trades weekly, and takes several positions. I never hold a position for more than a week, and occasionally trade the same position several times within a one-day period. I'm on version 5 of my robot, and have recently been thinking of turning the data it gathers into a service to make it easy for other developers to get real-world data at a reasonable price.

  I use my data to search for inefficiencies (however small) that exist in the market. I then arbitrage these efficiencies on a weekly basis. I do this across stocks, options, and futures (not Forex). To be clear my goal is not to find "stocks that will pop", or "stocks that will plummet", rather I purely exploit micro-inefficiencies that exist in the market, which means this cannot work at scale.

• by marketgod on 11/25/20, 7:57 AM

  From your description, the term you are looking for is swing traders.

  Yes, I swing trade options. All technical analysis.

  Only stocks. Pure technical analysis. Main items we focus on are price-action and price-volume. In essence, for every minute the price goes up, what's the volume? For every penny the stock goes up, what's the volume? For every 100,000 shares what's the change in price?200k? 300k? 1m? and so on. Also, weighted factors for all the different indicators, MA/SMA/CCI/RSI/VWAP being of most pertinence. Pitch fork trends weighted at a lower level. Also several other proprietary indicators based on stock correlation (i.e. BABA vs AMZN, if AMZN is moving down, BABA should as well because of what it relies on).

  I have been getting killed the last month but still up over 100%. Just hit on GS (100%+), and likely will on TSLA. Also did 1500% on TSLA this year on a trade which was my biggest so that helps.

  TSLA seems ready for a similar move to when I made my last huge run.

• by zaptheimpaler on 11/25/20, 4:56 AM

  I day traded options for a little while but now trade longer term options. I don’t run any complex strategies, partly so I can spend my time on identifying winners instead. Just buying calls or puts, sometimes spreads. I don’t have a way to automate that, it’s just reading a lot and trying to formulate and rank possibilities

  It’s my first year and I’m only at a 10% return in my fun money portfolio (vs 50% on just buy and hold QQQ) despite a few multi baggers because of not cutting losses earlier. Hoping to do better this year and add some basic stop losses at least.

  I may add more automation and start building my own tools now ,this past year I focused on trading manually so I know what would be useful to build in the first place. I’m building a basic Jupyter notebook to analyze previous trades and explore the API.

• by devchris10 on 11/25/20, 5:08 AM

  Apologies for piggybacking on the original question but couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask the daytrading crowd.

  Would you publicly post price predictions/odds to get ranked alongside other traders via Brier scores?

• by blackrock on 11/26/20, 10:28 AM

  I watch the options volume. Once I saw a majorly abnormal spike in Call volumes. It happened minutes right before a major Fed announcement or something. The market rallied, and continued to rally.

  It seems, someone got a leak of the Fed notes, and went long on Calls.

• by blackrock on 11/26/20, 10:21 AM

  Go long. The Fed is printing money!

  And the next Treasury Secretary is.. Janet Yellen.

• by heyyouthere on 11/25/20, 3:02 AM

  Do you mean profitable traders or non-profit traders? =)

  Myself, I'm just a algotrader focusing on short term trades in the crypto and equities(microcaps) markets. Tech stack is EC2/screen/pypy(python).

• by webmaven on 11/25/20, 5:25 AM

  Yes.

  Now, to be clear, I am not one myself, but the answer is still yes.