Backtesting is only 1/2 to 1/3 of the actual task of algorithmic trading. When it comes to actually trading money, if you're not careful and cover every corner case, you really could lose your shirt. I can't believe that 100 lines of code is all that you would need to cover all the edge and failure cases that could lose yourself a lot of money.
What happens if the network drops while you're in a trade, or in the middle of executing an order? What if you have a partial fill, and you have a partial buy order hanging around and a full sell order out there? What if you have a stop limit order to exit a trade, and it blows through your limit? Do you have a backup stop order just in case? There are a lot of issues that you can't backtest that can only be learned once you start trading real money. I've had situations where I ran my algos on the DAX overnight, and I woke up to find that the exit order never executed, and I was 1000 euros away from where I should have gotten out. Luckily, this trade was in my favor, but it scared the shit out of me because it could have easily gone the other way. I've also had my internet connection drop overnight, and I had to scramble to figure out how to get out of a trade I was in.
The other issue is interpreting backtesting data, and knowing the difference between over-optimized data (ie. curve fitting) vs something with an actual edge. You can make almost any algo profitable if you curve-fit, even a simple MA cross-over can show extremely profitable results, if you over-optimize the data. But it won't work in real life. So being able to sift between falsely good algos and actually profitable algos is very, very hard, and takes experience. This is the biggest problem with trying to find an actual algo with an edge, it's very very hard.
I wrote my own backtester and I download my own data nightly, and that definitely takes a lot of time and effort, but the hardest part is the actual trading, by far. The psychology involved with trading is an order of magnitude harder than coding, and the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I blew through a shitload of money, just to learn the ropes.
In terms of algo trading books, I really don't have any recommendations. I found most of the algo trading books are similar, telling you to watch out for curve fitting, etc. Where they lack is helping you come up with actual trades. My recommendation is a book called "Mastering the Trade" by John Carter. He gives out trade setups that he actually used. They may no longer be profitable, but it's the closest thing you can get to actually learning various day trading techniques, and you can implement those to get an idea, and then work your way from there.
I'm not hating on Quantopian, it looks pretty nicely done, and hopefully it takes off. But from experience, I know that algorithmic trading is by far the hardest thing I've done. If inexperienced traders jump in, they'll spend a lot of money on "tuition" for sure.
It's an interesting idea, but most successful retail algo traders probably won't trust their bread-and-butter algos to a cloud-type solution. I've been algorithmically trading for a few years now, and I've invested money into Ninjatrader, where I program my algos and run things from my own computer.
If anyone had their own algos, they would probably be too paranoid that Quantopian would run backtesting on every single algo, and cherry pick the best ones for themselves. Whether or not it's true doesn't matter, it's most likely the common thought process that any successful algo trader would have.
That would leave only the inexperienced and beginning traders that would be more apt to fail, since algo trading is very, very, very hard.
2) If you're talking about chargebacks, it would be YOU that the buyers would be charging back the money from, not the warehouse, since you were the merchant that accepted the payment.
And am I right in that you are basically saying that the buyers take on all risk of storage at the warehouse facility? If so, you should probably outline that as well, including what the insurance policy of the warehouse, covers, etc.
This is an extremely important message. Fraud is very easily the thing that can sink many small companies that aren't used to the levels of fraud that you will see on the Internet. And because there are so many ways to defraud a merchant that isn't obvious, merchants need to be extremely careful and educated on the process. And handling chargebacks will become a full-time job for someone in your company, once your company becomes big enough. I work at a payments company, and fraud is something that ends up being a headache, although we are at lower-than average industry norms.
It seems relatively easy for someone to turn credit card payments directly into cash, by making a trade and then extracting cash through the bank account. And the gap between your withdrawal policies and the chargeback policies of credit cards are pretty wide. I would be very careful about this. Forcing users to enter bank accounts make it a bit harder for average people to defraud, but not a motivated fraudster. Also, allowing people to take delivery of wine through the purchase of a credit card, and then being subject to a chargeback will be extremely painful, although I'm not sure how easily chargebacks are fought in Europe. If you do suffer a lot of chargebacks though, even if you successfully fight them all, be prepared to be dropped by your credit card processor.
I think your business is actually very interesting, but I'm surprised that credit card companies would allow you to accept credit cards at all, since I would think they would lazily lump you in as a form of brokerage site. Not that I believe this, but it seems like an easy translation to stock brokerages, which don't accept credit card payments, but force you to transfer real cash into your accounts before you trade. Then once you have money in a brokerage, they can extend margin, but they maintain their own risk by monitoring the margin levels, etc.
Good luck though, I read through your site and I think it's a very neat idea!
Please don't try to twist your dumb rant into some sort of free speech issue.
The multiple people telling you to shut up isn't because they are trying to squelch discussion on the topic. They are telling you to shut up because you, specifically, bring negative value to the discussion and you are responsible for decreasing the signal to noise ratio.
In your example about the dumb, drunken football fan yelling at the TV, the people in the bar are now starting to tell him to STFU because they want to watch the game and not have to listen to the useless, drunken ranting of someone with zero credibility.
No, but the likelihood of the argument having any value is greatly reduced if the person themself doesn't believe in it enough to actually follow the argument.
I doubt there is a high likelihood of a meaningful conversation from someone who is screaming "Why doesn't Google stop working on stupid problems and fix this, while I continue working on my own stupid problems".
> "Hypocrisy" is one of those empty criticisms, like "Unprofessional." If someone says to you, "smoking is bad," it doesn't matter whether he smokes. Maybe, his advice is actually more relevant if he's an older fellow who smoked and now regrets not making a different choice when he was your age.
It's not an empty criticism. It speaks to your credibility. You are admonishing Google and Facebook for working on "stupid" ideas, when you yourself are working on a presumably stupid idea, since you're not saving anyone's life but instead working on a way so that you can make money. How credible can your rant be if you aren't following your own advice?
I would rather hear the same rant from someone in the field who is frustrated because they are "fighting the good fight", not from someone who is engaging in the exact same "stupid" behavior that they are ranting about.
I agree with mikeash here. If a hellbanned person still wants to remain part of the HN community, it's really not that hard to create a new account. Sure, sometimes they get it wrong, but the vast majority of the case, they get it right.
That means, that by you turning on dead posts, you are subjecting yourself to the 80% case where they get it right. If one of them is spamming with huge blocks of text, etc... well, you signed up for it in the low-probability case that one of the dead posts actually contained valuable information.
Keep it simple. Don't start adding multiple layers of hellbanning protection just to fix a low-probability edge case.
A very good open source package for handling date-time is ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/) which handles a lot of globalization/internationalization issues.
I think HN has the highest quality comments of any tech-related forum site. There are consistently tons and tons of great comments from people that are very well-informed.
Reddit sometimes have a lot of very great comments, because of their reach they can get comments from a lot of experts on a wide variety of topics. But it also has a lot more noise, and a lot of "joke" posts, something that HN actively discourages, and which keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high.
EVERY forum is going to be filled with trolls and assholes. HN certainly has its share, but I would say for the most part, the signal-to-noise ratio is the highest. This is the reason why I left Slashdot after being a member for so long.
I only knew Aaron Swartz from the things written about him on the Internet. But it really feels like he had a lot more to contribute to this world, not just technologically, but socially and philisophically as well. His death to me feels much like when Kurt Cobain died, back in 1994. Both were artists who had much more to contribute, but their lives were cut much too short by mental illness/depression. It's sad.
Kurt Cobain died just a few years before the Internet really took off. I always imagine that he would have embraced this, and would have done things like released his music for free, and would have radically changed the way music was distributed. In a few years, there will be even more technology invented, and it could very well be that had Aaron Swartz stayed alive, he could have found other ways to contribute new things as well.
Whenever I've been in NYC, I've never had a problem getting cabs. Going to Newark airport however cost me something like $110 if I remember correctly, because the cab driver gave me these special "fees" at the end, it felt like highway robbery.
Now in SF, it's the worst cab situation I've ever seen. I've had cabs that I ordered via the phone never bother to show up, and once waited 90 mins in front of a hotel, as the hotel employee tried to flag taxis as they passed by the line. I don't bother taking the cab anymore. If I need to be somewhere for a day like New Year's Eve, I'll park downtown earlier that afternoon and then take the Muni there.
I just might try out Uber this New Year's Eve and see how that goes.
The real culprit that needs to be fired is Steve Ballmer. He was great from the inception of MSFT until maybe the turn of the century, when their business strategy of making and maintaining a Windows monopoly worked beautifully and extremely profitably. However, he is living in a legacy environment where he believes he needs to protect the Windows/Office monopoly BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, and he and the rest of Microsoft can't keep up with everyone else around them because of innovation.
This mindset has completely stymied any sort of innovation at Microsoft because they are playing with one arm tied behind their backs in the midst of trying to compete against the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. In Steve Ballmer's eyes, everything must lead back to the sale of a license of Windows/Office, and that no longer works in their environment.
If Microsoft engineers had free rein to make the best search engine, or the best phone, or the best tablet, without worries about how will it lead to maintaining their revenue streams of Windows and more importantly Office, then I think their offerings would be on an order of magnitude better and more creative.
This agrees with my entire point, which is that eBay has shifted towards a buyer-oriented site. They offer asymmetric protection for buyers over sellers. Buyers know more about the sellers than sellers know about buyers, making it much more buyer-friendly and more risky for sellers.
The only logical conclusion that can be made from eBay's and Paypal's policies is that they no longer want small sellers to use them. They want professional sellers to sell from their site, people who are used to dealing with chargebacks, etc, and can foot the bill when it comes to chargebacks/fraud. They want to facilitate BUYING from regular people, but make SELLING by regular people very difficult.
There is no other explanation for getting rid of buyer reputation and providing no protection to sellers. They only want people who don't care about buyer reputation, and have deep enough pockets and the expectation that chargebacks and fraud will occur. If they deal with these larger customers, this increases their selling volume (and fees) and decreases their support costs.
I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules" were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out.
I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe, etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the iPad were intuitive right off the bat.
To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but terrible UI.
The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.
This seems like an overreaction. Facebook has a billion users, so trying to do things like encourage voting is a nice sentiment, but practically useless in my opinion.
It's better for the company to just do what they want, and if they overstep their bounds and if people don't like it, they'll leave, just like they did with MySpace and Friendster. And if people stay, then it means they don't care. People are allowed to have the right to not care what people do with their personal data. I personally care, so I would close my account, but I'm sure there are swathes of people that simply don't care.