Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/11/why-google-and-facebook-need-to-go-dark-to-protest-sopa/ <comment><USER4> Google might be well served by some sort of partial blackout on its home page, but Facebook would need to get more creative -- and, dare I say it, more social.

A blackout of any kind on Facebook would create a minor to major annoyance for an audience that we can presume is largely ignorant to apathetic about SOPA. If, instead, Facebook released profile widget of some sort -- say, a standardized black box as one's default profile image, with a solidarity message or link -- they'd probably see better uptake. People would be curious about why their friends were blacking out their profile pictures, and they'd click to find out more. Even if for no other reason than to see what the fuss was about, or to jump on a trendy bandwagon. In this way, Facebook would be piquing interest, rather than creating confusion.

Anecdotally, I've seen friends use this tactic to great effect when promoting anything from parties, to launches, to causes. It works because it spreads easily, it's hard not to notice, and it's less easily ignored or tuned out than generic site-wide messaging. And, as the folks at Facebook know all too well, we tend to notice what our friends are doing more readily than we notice what disembodied corporate messages are saying.

<comment><USER5> I'm a lot confused. Are you saying that people _wouldn't notice_ if you replaced the whole Facebook site with a protest message, but if you offer a protest widget to "an audience that we can presume is largely ignorant to apathetic about SOPA", it will spread like wildfire? That doesn't make any sense to me.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much what Wilduck said. People would absolutely notice a service blackout, or a blanket reskinning of the entire site. But they wouldn't necessarily care. Additionally, they'd first be annoyed about it before stopping to read about why it was happening -- if they even decided to read about it at all. I suspect Facebook would generate as much resentment and/or confusion over the blackout as it would interest in the cause.

Conversely, a more "organic" message uptake strategy would be to seed the profile badges or pictures to highly influential users with big, engaged followings. These people would influence others within their networks, who would in turn influence their own friends. The opt-in nature of the protest would not engender any resentment toward Facebook, and it might be received more readily by the users -- each of whom could also act as an evangelist for the cause if they learned about it and engaged with it.

Even having influential Facebook employees (Zuckerberg, et al.) replace their profile pics with protest badges would work wonders and get lots of pickup.

However you want to slice it, my point is that it's better to _use_ Facebook to spread the word than to spite Facebook to spread the word.

<comment><USER6> >I suspect Facebook would generate as much resentment and/or confusion over the blackout as it would interest in the cause.

So what? What are people going to do, another "mass exodus"? People always get mad at the person who inconveniences them first (in this case, facebook) and then when they see the first one won't move then they get mad at the person who caused that (in this case, SOPA).

Facebook, G+, everyone should shut completely off with a big scary warning that SOPA means the end of the internet. If that many people have to go a whole day without cat photos you're going to see a shit storm the likes of which the US hasn't seen in a very long time.

<comment><USER4> _"So what? What are people going to do, another "mass exodus"?"_

No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that pissing people off and/or confusing them is putting them into a mindset in which they're not going to be very receptive to the message. The goal should be to get users to care about the SOPA issue on their own volition -- not to beat them over the head with it, especially when it's likely than >90% of them have no idea what it is to begin with.

My point isn't that pissing off the users would be dangerous for Facebook's longterm health. Rather, it's that pissing off the users is unnecessary -- and probably counterproductive -- in the mission to get them to care about SOPA.

 _"People always get mad at the person who inconveniences them first (in this case, facebook) and then when they see the first one won't move then they get mad at the person who caused that (in this case, SOPA)."_

It's a big leap from A to B here, and I'm not so sure your average user will make it. More likely than not, a typical FB user will get mad at FB for inconveniencing him, but will stop investigating at that point. He'll just be mad at FB for a service disruption, and he won't really care about why it's happening. He will be less likely to care about SOPA, because he's pissed at the company trying to get him to care about it.

If Facebook were aiming to maximize receipt _and_ uptake of the anti-SOPA message, then as the saying goes, they'd catch more flies with honey than with shit. Badgering your users into reading about a political stance is bound to be less effective than encouraging them to read about it. Second -- and even more important -- a service blackout does not allow users to do anything about SOPA, even if they cared. All that most of them will do is sit there and fume while waiting for service to be restored (it's a big stretch to think that the typical user will actually read through literature on the subject and then file or sign petitions, or write congressmen, or what have you). A grassroots strategy, on the other hand, allows them to spread the word.

It's not a perfect analogy, but consider the case of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Back in the old days, PETA activists used to show up outside of shopping boutiques and throw cans of red paint onto consumers wearing fur or leather goods. It got attention, and it certainly pissed people off. But it backfired: people got pissed off _at PETA_. Nobody made the logical leap from "I'm pissed at these hippies who just threw paint on my $3,000 coat" to "Well, they have a point; I guess I'm really pissed off at the fur trade." Eventually, PETA wised up to the folly of this tactic, and they adopted a new one: getting high-profile actresses to pose nude in tasteful, but provocative print ads. Needless to say, this concept received more attention, and the attention it received was a lot more positive.

<comment><USER6> >The goal should be to get users to care about the SOPA issue on their own volition -

Never going to happen. How much money has been spent for how long to get people to care about the millions of things they should care about and they just don't.

What makes people care about something is not being able to do what they want to do. If something gets in the way they rage at that thing first. Then when it won't move they rage at what ever put it there. The rage keeps moving further up the tree of effects until something happens.

<comment><USER4> _"Never going to happen. How much money has been spent for how long to get people to care about the millions of things they should care about and they just don't."_

Are you saying, categorically, that it's impossible to get people to care about things? With all due respect, I'm a bit confused by this statement. I agree with you that most people tend to be apathetic, and that it's hard to reach them. But I can name dozens, possibly hundreds, of examples of successful cause-based campaigns that relied on generating positive solidarity with, or good will toward the campaigner; I can name precisely zero successful campaigns that relied on deliberately pissing people off at the campaigner.

 _"The rage keeps moving further up the tree of effects until something happens."_

I just don't see that happening. People don't connect dots as readily as you might assume. Again, see my PETA example. It's not a perfect analogy -- but it gives an indication of how attempts to generate and redirect rage usually just result in the generation of rage, without the redirection.

<comment><USER6> >Are you saying, categorically, that it's impossible to get people to care about things?

For most people, yes. You're never going to get to them your way because they're not interested in your message. As soon as they detect that you're talking about something that has nothing to do with their goals they'll drop you and move on.

That's why the "pissing people off" method works; because they can't move on. As for examples, I can think of maybe one or two examples where some kind of touchy-feely campaign has made more than an obscure amount of people care, but my success in business often relies on the latter method and I can tell you that it not only works, in a business setting it is the only thing that will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Going dark for a day is a pretty scary proposition for a company whose continued success is largely based on habitual usage.

As a practical matter, Google search is not really that much better than Bing. Making 600 million people use your competitor's equally capable product for a day would be pure insanity. Especially for such speculative gain.

I can't believe people think Google is dumb enough to try a blackout.

<comment><USER8> Look at it this way. Either they do a blackout and (probably) save their entire company, or don't and lose everything.

While I'm not a businessman, I'd rather take the chance of making everyone use Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo/Whatever for a day rather than risk losing my entire companies main product(s).

<comment><USER9> False dichotomy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma>

<comment><USER8> That is true, I over simplified things. However, the point remains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be truly amazing to see this. Reddit going dark is fantastic, but to an extent it's "preaching to the choir"- Reddit is already the centre of SOPA activism.

Google, Facebook or Twitter going dark would be a huge statement. Is there a movement for other sites to go dark on Jan 18th as well? My startup going dark by itself wouldn't have a huge impact, but if it was part of a national day of activism it could be great.

<comment><USER11> I believe Facebook is the least one willing to stand up for civil rights - <USER2> long as not about some 3rd world dictatorship. With their ongoing questionable practice in regards to privacy they are certainly going to duck and cover as soon as something controversial comes up. Google and especially Twitter are from my view substantially more supportive to causes like these.

<comment><USER12> That's too bad, because under a law like SOPA, the social sites will be affected _first_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

<comment><USER14> > Going dark is not something either company would do

Until someone decides that they're hosting infringing content, of course.

<comment><USER15> I find it exceedingly hard to believe that Google would be brought down as a repercussion of Google. It's very unlikely that any widespread, powerful websites (like Google or Facebook) would be taken down, because removing them from the ecosystem would prompt an enormous user reaction. Say what you will about the intelligence of those involved with SOPA, they know about how much they can rock the boat.

<comment><USER14> > as a repercussion of Google. I think you meant SOPA.

> It's very unlikely that any widespread, powerful websites (like Google or > Facebook) would be taken down, because removing them from the ecosystem > would prompt an enormous user reaction.

Probably not. I haven't read SOPA in detail, so I don't know what the procedure is - who gets to decide whether to shut the site down or not? What if the clerk working that particular desk is an 80 year old luddite and has no idea what a google is, but knows for sure it shouldn't be stealing all those movies or whatever?

And what happens to Facebook if I suddenly start uploading video clips from unreleased movies? The obvious answer is that Facebook shuts down my account, but what if some RIAA goon sees it before that happens and pulls the SOPA lever, or some congressman? If they can't use SOPA to shut down an infringing website, how could they have justified using all that cash to lobby for it?

<comment><USER16> Facebook won't get shut down because it's too big, well-known, and rich.

It's all the would-be competitors who will get shut down, because who cares about some no-name "pirate" site? Suddenly, we'll stop seeing new sites that allow user content and the big players will be effectively entrenched by law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I posted this elsewhere, but I think it got buried. IMO it is worth reposting here:

Assuming this spreads, I believe a potential ramification of major sites blacking out would be new laws that would attempt to make such black outs illegal.

It could be seen as equivalent to strikes in essential service industries like transportation. Such strikes are semi-regulated and governments can and have ordered strikers back on the job to maintain public order. I see this possibility as a potentially major unintended consequence of putting Facebook "on strike".

<comment><USER18> I really don't see how a law like that would ever get past the Supreme Court, seeing as how it's a major restriction of 1st Amendment rights.

It would also be a major signal to every web app out there that this is the wrong country to be in.

edit: wrong institution.

<comment><USER19> By the time something reaches the Supreme Court, years of damage have been done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No - Google and Facebook will not go dark and SOPA will pass.

The big internet companies such as Google and Facebook etc. will probably get some exception from SOPA (like they will not liable if they allow easy censoring tool for big production companies) and because of that they will be quiet.

Look, paying few million to lobbyists to exempt you from some legalization is much more efficient - and in parallel you can kill competition like duckduckgo.com

</comment><comment><USER21> I still believe Wikipedia going black would also make a decent statement without causing giant economic losses. They've done it before in Italy, and it worked there.

</comment><comment><USER22> Utilities cannot "go dark". The power company couldn't go dark to make a political point. The water and gas companies couldn't either.

Google has acquired (for better or worse) utility status. Interrupting service to make a political point would do unbelievable damage to Google itself.

Better to just outspend Hollywood, if Google has the will to defeat SOPA.

<comment><USER23> In what way? I don't see how the two equate. Utilities are natural monopolies with strict regulations. They can't shut down because you couldn't just buy your power from someone else. That's not the case at all for Google.

Google has every right to suspend offering their service at anytime. The only way the government could force them to stay open would be to buy a controlling interest in the company like they did with the banks.

<comment><USER22> You are correct: my use of the word "utility" was not very rigorous. Nevertheless a lot of people depend on Google, and if Google took themselves down capriciously it would demonstrate that they can't be counted on.

Of course they have every right to go black, but I can't help but feel they'd suffer the consequence in a big way.

Not even Google can buy a reputation back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My money is on the side that says they're too far in bed with politics to chance it.

<comment><USER25> This strikes me as a far more important consideration than the loss of revenue or potential harm being discussed in the other topics.

Blacking out Google's front page will reach 38 Million (or 12% of the population) [1]. Compare that to the effort involved in more traditional political advertising--The largest TV audience is around 27 Million [2] (And drops by 50% to the most popular non-football program). There's also the question of how invasive the ads are. I'd bet a notice on the Google homepage getting in your way every time you do a search will have far more impact than newspaper ad that you skip over once you realize it isn't an article.

We know there's a level of discomfort concerning business's influence on politics. There was fallout over the supreme court decision in _Citizens United v. FEC_ \--the issue is being brought up again [3].

Google has a lot of power over the internet and a lot of knowledge of what people do on-line. Most of us can overlook that since we don't see a personal impact (except every few months a site vanishes from Google's results and the owner's blog post shows up on HN). Though they are getting attention from congressional inquiries and lawyers seeking to kill opposing sites.

Consider the fallout if Google went ahead. You have people uneasy with how businesses can effect politics from just the abstract idea of donations being shown a very concrete example. You have politicians with the power to regulate Google being shown that Google can be a danger to them.

I don't see how they could risk losing their perceived neutrality and harmlessness.

[1] Using the statistics from <http://google.com.hypestat.com/> for a rough estimate: 129M unique visitors daily, 30% from the United States, that's 38.7M or 12% of the population.

[2] <http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/television.html>

[3] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020436810457713...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204368104577139100369896494.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google would have a lot more to lose than Facebook. Most of the posts on Facebook are not necessarily links etc... and even if the links were banned it wouldn't have that much of an effect on Facebook itself, other than people getting PO'd that the link they click on are decommissioned. Most people tend to be smart enough to realize this is not Facebook's fault.

Google on the other hand is almost exclusively driven by other content so having a sudden lack thereof would be far more detrimental.

Therefor I would be surely surprised if Facebook did something like this while I could every well see something happening on Google's side - <USER3> offsetting the money being poured in support of SOPA to counteract it would also go a long way to help.

<comment><USER27> I've heard two interpretations of the "going dark" idea; one is to completely shut off the main functionality of the site, and the other is to simply _change the background color_ of the main landing page and have a banner about SOPA. Something that's eye-grabbing / shocking and encourages users to act would be immensely effective, and doesn't necessitate turning off the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been following the SOPA issue on the periphery and I agree there needs to be more awareness and publicity around it but I don't find a blackout to be the most effective way of defeating this legislation. Reddit is fine because they don't have that much money to lose by going dark for a day but we know clearly that money has a big influence on the outcome of elections and political races.

Why not take the revenue that would have been forfeited to a single day blackout which would probably be about $100+ million (between Google, Facebook, and let's say 2 other sites) and funnel it towards a Super-PAC that will use it instead to fund opposition ads during election time against those who supported the legislation.

What about finding a way to influence the primary supporters of SOPA, content creators and media companies? These companies will rely on the very tech companies they may damage with SOPA in the future to be the primary channels for distribution (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc.), which means that there's leverage that can be applied.

Just my two cents.

<comment><USER29> >much money to lose by going dark for a day

Google doesn't need to blackout and stop service, they just could change their homepage's logo to have a black censored bar across it and that is all it would take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why go completely dark? Partially put black censor bars over most of the search results. Throw in a prominent banner to a page explaining SOPA and a button to remove the censorship. Then there is less chance of users assuming some technical problem, and a greater chance for education.

</comment><comment><USER31> One thing Google can do instead of a total blackout is a black background google . Instead of its white zen background, if they go total black , people would be interested why this change and will read why google did this. Blocking will only make people go for another search engine.

</comment><comment><USER32> While this would make a statement, somewhere I saw a good point--someone will be googling to see if the snake that bit them was poisonous. Google is now critical infrastructure, like power. If it goes out, people will quite possibly die.

<comment><USER33> I don't think that is a particularly good point.

If a snake bites you, and you are not sure if it is poisonous or not, _assume that it is and go to the hospital_. Life or death health issues should not be googled, they should be taken care of by professionals.

<comment><USER32> OK, lets use our imagination.

How about heart attack symptoms? Directions to the hospital? The phone number for your doctor (on his website, which you find by googling). How to safely use a chainsaw. What do when your toddler stops breathing. How to perform CPR. Drug contraindications. Where to call in a gas leak.

<comment><USER33> The answer to most of those is "911" (or your regional equivalent). The others are not time critical, read the manual, ask whoever you rented it from, or figure out how to use Bing.

I'm starting to feel old here...

<comment> mike-cardwell Whilst you may not like his examples, you _do_ understand the point he's making right?

<comment><USER34> The point he's making, largely, is that Google going out is a bad thing because people use internet searches as a replacement for common sense. That's not Google's fault.

<comment><USER32> Using google to fill in gaps in your knowledge is not "replacing common sense" --doing so is USING common sense. Lets remove the straw man who visits the hospital and calls 911 for all possible emergencies from the argument. Learning that a numb _right_ arm is a heart attack symptom changes the picture, and for better or worse, google is the main spicket for knowledge these days.

Fault is irrelevant once the dependence is there. If you're at google, flipping a switch, just like our dependence on power, could cost lives, and if you care about human life, you have to think about it before you do it regardless of whether would say it is your "fault."

I am about as anti-sopa as they come, so I'd personally like to see a gigantic message, and see them name names and explain what services won't exist if this passes.

<comment><USER33> Googling _"Where to call in a gas leak"_ is almost certainly _not_ common sense.

Similarly, the time spent looking up how to do CPR would be better spent calling emergency services so that they head out as soon as possible. Emergency dispatchers can talk you through CPR while you wait for them to arrive.

You see, the thing about CPR is that it's not really meant to revive somebody. It's meant to keep oxygen in their brain until something can actually be done. Delaying the call for help so that you can learn all of this on Google is the worst thing that you could do.

<comment><USER32> I have googled NSTAR's gas leak hotline from my phone, while walking down Beacon street and reported a strong gas smell near an apartment building. You think I should have called a different number first?

<comment><USER33> Just call 911. I assume you do not actually have the training to fully assess the situation, so let the professionals do it. For all you know there are people that need medical attention in that sort of situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> No, if Google and Facebook went dark they'd prove the political power that they have and would immediately set in motion massive regulation of themselves by governments. It would be a small victory followed by losing the war.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just Dark any Facebook/Google Traffic going to Washington DC. Not enough to cause stock/revenue/world panic... just enough to cause localized panic where the target audience can feel it.

</comment><comment><USER37> They should make it go dark in Washington only, these companies are good in targeted 'advertisement' anyway. I wonder how the government would react on a blackout targeted only at them

<comment><USER38> They should also target the offices of the MPAA, RIAA, Viacom, etc. for a blackout. And if people really want to do something effective, they should boycott movie theaters, iTunes, and Netflix streaming that day. Am I the only one cynical enough to think that the Google is only against SOPA so they'll get a special exemption from the law, like McDonald's and the health care law?

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2010-10-07-h...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2010-10-07-healthlaw07_ST_N.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Google should display "Google is unavailable today because of SOPA [bla bla bla] If you still want to access google go to google.fr or any european google".

</comment><comment><USER40> Google and Facebook should remove all references to all politicians who supports SOPA, even if they are running for president.

</comment><comment><USER41> What about large user based content sites?

Wordpress and Tumblr account for millions of post/day.

<comment><USER42> But they are divided into individual users and the space belongs to the users and not tumblr/wordpress. I don't think changing other's blogs would be a very good idea and will be frowned upon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Google:

"If SOPA passes, the search you're about to enter wouldn't be possible."

</comment><comment><USER44> It would be a good idea to run a big black banner on Google instead of going completely dark. Or one interstitial ad that interrupts search for 10 seconds only once a day.

</comment><comment><USER45> I liked this one even better: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/11/reddits- so...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/11/reddits-sopa- blackout-admirable-but-google-and-facebook-must-follow/)

</comment><comment><USER46> SOPAthetic</comment>


I've reproduced 130 research papers about "predicting the stock market" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/algotrading/comments/cr7jey/ive_reproduced_130_research_papers_about/ <comment><AUTHOR> Spoilers:

> Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of > favourable data was selected (I guess ultimately they're all the same thing > but still) OR a few may have had a smidge of Alpha but as soon as you add > transaction costs it all disappears.

> I should caveat that I was a profitable trader at multiple Tier-1 US banks > so I can say with confidence that I made a decent attempt of building > whatever the author was trying to get at.

<comment><USER4> But also:

> Almost every instrument is mean-reverting on short timelines and trending on > longer timelines.

i.e. he confirms the momentum factor, which isn't surprising since there's more solid evidence for it than anything else, going back hundreds of years.

He doesn't say what fundamental factors he looked at, so it's possible that value, size, and profitability/quality would hold up as well. All those have been studied pretty extensively in academia, in papers going back decades. The author took only a fairly random sampling of recent papers.

<comment><USER5> All the finance folks I know use "fundamentals" to mean some class of attributes, that they all know what they are. Like when I say "GPL3" to someone who has a-priori knowledge.

Not exactly sure but I think the "fundamentals" are top-line revenue, unit cost, unit margin, yoy-growth, EBTDA, cash-on-hand, default-alive - and likely the ratios those values produce.

<comment><USER6> Fundamentals mean zilch for trading unless your'e talking earnings announcements or like news.

<comment><USER7> Please don't downvote this comment. There's a huge difference between short term trading and investing. And yes for short term trading (minutes/hours/few days) fundamentals matter rather litte - after all you can be a successful trader of Bitcoin, which has pretty much no fundamentals. Except on volatility events like macro data releases, earnings, FED decisions, surprise news (looking at you GE) etc.

<comment><USER8> > fundamentals matter rather litte

Having a small impact is not the same a having zero impact.

Traders operate over longer timeframe even if they are holding an individual stock for minutes there is a limited pool of stocks. Keep playing the game and longer term impacts add up.

<comment><USER9> But do the fundamentals of an individual investment matter in the short term compared to the fundamentals of the market as a whole? I would suspect that the "longer term impacts add[ing] up" would just be market health. Day-trading randomly-picked stocks with random buys and sells is a Markov approximation of an index fund :)

<comment><USER8> I think that depends on how stocks are chosen when you are day trading. Limiting things to high volatility stocks for example creates a bias in your index fund approximation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the same result from most papers. My personal conclusion is that when people get a winning strategy they don't publish. I personally put my money where my mouth was for a few years:

[https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit- ge...](https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-generating- strategy/)

That being said, I try to be honest too. This can disappear any time and the model I use may only be good in this environment. I do not know. I think that's the challenge with papers, you don't honestly know when or if the strategy works. It clearly won't forever regardless.

That's why I don't share my exact method. And after doing all the research myself AND trying to sell my algorithm. I honestly don't think the industry knows what it's doing either. People are worried about sharpe ratios and all this BS stuff. The reality is for these models you mitigate risk via temporary and ever changing methods. Can't really publish on that.

<comment><USER11> If your algorithm was successful, why did you try to sell it?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Just a guess, but: if you come up with a successfull algorithm, you still need to have money that can be invested in order to use the algorithm. So maybe someone else with 100x more money to invest would pay more for the algorithm than you could earn from it in a lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1e-9 In my view, the predominant mistake made by those who seek to create profitable strategies is that they approach trading as if the market is a zero-sum game. In particular, doing things that harm the markets, like naively adding to existing momentum, is just promoting price overshoot and instability by reinforcing positive feedback loops. Such approaches hurt others and while they might make money for long periods of time, they will almost surely end up losing all that profit and more during a small number of extreme market events.

If you want to be reliably profitable, you need to first understand how the markets are not a zero-sum game and then you need to construct methods to improve the markets with your trading. There are countless ways that markets deviate from truly efficient behavior. Find some and develop strategies in areas that can benefit from your cognitive, experiential, and educational strengths. General examples of how one might improve the markets include things like providing liquidity when it's needed, limiting price overshoots when it's warranted, and incorporating new information about instrument values. The market will pay you in return if you do such things in a sound way. As long as you also do a good job of estimating and limiting your risk, you can be consistently profitable.

There will be no significant public disclosures of detailed ways to trade profitably. The markets rely on the robustness provided by many different points of view addressing market needs in a variety of ways. Any parties that overweight one of those points of view will ultimately lose money in the process of adding market instability. There's too much of that already. Don't trade until you figure out how to make the markets better.

<comment><USER12> > you need to construct methods to improve the markets with your trading

What percentage of traders do you think will approach the market with such altruism?

I think the markets are way too complex to rationalize "improving a market". Markets are by definition good markets when you have long term and short term traders mixed in with technical and fundamental traders all with different alpha time horizons. This is a healthy market.

If you're a speculator, so be it. As you point out, the market may teach you a lesson at some point. Those guys go away but new ones will join.

It's a beautiful virtuous cycle.

Not to say there aren't bad actors. Most speculators are not IMHO. But they cross the line when they undertake certain market activities, like spoofing for example. This is why good markets also have good regulatory oversight (finra, sec... )

<comment> 1e-9 > What percentage of traders do you think will approach the market with such > altruism?

Approximately 0%. I don't know of any entities that trade as a nonprofit. The point is that if you find something the market needs, you will have inherently discovered an opportunity that can make money because there is demand which exceeds supply for the service. As an additional benefit, such strategies are unlikely to run afoul of regulatory oversight or be eliminated through future rule changes.

> I think the markets are way too complex to rationalize "improving a market".

This is not rationalizing, it is about how to effectively identify profitable opportunities. Let's turn the argument around. Do you expect a trading strategy that harms a market to be reliably profitable without risking fines, banning, or imprisonment? If you don't, then it probably makes sense to exclude such approaches from your strategy search space. Additionally, I would argue that strategies which are of neutral benefit to the markets are likely to generate small returns relative to their risk because entities on the other side of your trades are not receiving value and thus the market is more likely to turn against you. If we eliminate "harmful" and "neutral", we're left with "beneficial".

I completely agree with everything else you say.

<comment><USER13> > Do you expect a trading strategy that harms a market to be reliably > profitable without risking fines, banning, or imprisonment?

Non-trader here, what do you mean by a particular trading strategy "harm[ing] a market," how would you actually measure harm to a market by a given trading strategy, and would whatever metric you decide on for that not just be a dressed-up subjective argument?

<comment> 1e-9 By "harming a market", I mean "causing a market to be less efficient". It is typically easier to identify harmful behavior than it is to quantify the amount of harm caused. Sometimes you can easily estimate a rough lower bound on the harm's cost. Easier cases include 1) Spoofing, where you could estimate the harm as being greater than the captured profit, and 2) Self-trading for the purpose of receiving liquidity provider incentives, where you could estimate the harm as being greater than the incentives received. Harder cases include situations where poor strategies caused market instability by underestimating risk or trading in a way that is too similar to others. Extreme examples of these include the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) blowout in 1998, the 2010 Flash Crash, or any number of firms that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. You should be able to find plenty of academic papers attempting to quantify the harm of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Professional quant here. I have to say I strongly disagree with the conclusions of the OP.

> They were all found by using phrases like "predict stock market" or "predict > forex" or "predict bitcoin" and terms related to those.

Yeah, searching for any finance papers with "predict" or "machine learning" is literally the lowest quality tier you can get. These papers are often written by grad students who can pump an easy paper out by "applying" some already known ML algorithm to financial markets. Of course it's not gonna work. It also kills me when I see ML models who need stationarity assumptions applied to non-stationary time series data. Yeah, good luck with that.

THAT being said, there is lots of high quality research which has been replicated over and over, showing that alpha does exist in the market (and which funds have made billions off of). I would like to see the OP try to replicate some of these instead. To give some simple examples:

1\. Try searching for papers with the keywords "and the cross section of expected returns". For example, the momentum factor which can be tested and replicated with only linear regression. > There is substantial evidence that indicates that stocks that perform the best (worst) over a three- to 12-month period tend to continue to perform well (poorly) over the subsequent three to 12 months. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=299107](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=299107)

2\. Statistical arbitrage strategies which were known to work well until the mid 2000s. Also been replicated many times, furthermore, you can see the gradual decline in profitability pointing to the theory that "alpha decay" in this case is real. [https://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/avellane/AvellanedaLeeStatA...](https://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/avellane/AvellanedaLeeStatArb071108.pdf)

3\. High frequency strategies. No way OP or any retail trader can replicate this, but firms make billions of dollars per year consistently doing this.

In conclusion, to make a claim that there is no alpha in the market seems highly suspect, and perhaps just needs a more nuanced view of how trading firms make their profits.

<comment><USER15> I also find it highly unlikely anyone is able to implement 130+ papers in 7 months.

This would require insane productivity, implausible access to pricing and news data resources (which are often not freely available) and expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, finance, and data science. OP had to implement financial, time-series and linguistic feature engineering pipelines, as well infer the architecture and hyper-parameters used AND train all these models.

He also claims he "web scraped" all the data which is highly unlikely as pricing datasets are often sold for a pretty penny and not publicly available in the detail described in several of these papers.

OP must be a genius to pull this off, all the while being a trader at "a Tier 1 US bank" (in itself that description is ridiculous).

All OP has to show for all this work is a hastily written Reddit post with dubious claims. There is no proof of the work done whatsoever, no code samples, not even result tables or graphs. And at the end OP chills his cryptotrading bot.

What's worse HN seems to gobble it up naively. Seemingly because OP is critical of something that is popular to criticize.

<comment><USER16> > OP must be a genius to pull this off, all the while being a trader at "a > Tier 1 US bank" (in itself that description is ridiculous).

Mostly agree with you, but what's ridiculous about that description? His LinkedIn says he worked at Merrills and Citi. Those are normally considered top tier US banks?

<comment><USER12> If those aren't top tier I don't know what is...

Generally the banks are no longer the place to do prop trading though. You're better off at a hedge fund. They will not only pay better but have way better access to resources, tech, experienced traders, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Best survey of the subject I have found (most are bullshit) is Finding Alpha by Eric Falkenstein which he has graciously offered for free on his blog. By the subject I mean, finding an edge in trading. Spoiler alert there is no system to follow. He wrote algos for a local options market maker, had a significant Econ PHD thesis. The basic premise of the book is that real Alpha is rare, idiosyncratic and gets exploited by those in the know and eventually the edge goes away after several years. He gives several classic historic examples which are what made this book so interesting and unique to me. [http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/finding-alpha- pdf.htm...](http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/finding-alpha-pdf.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Currently I remain skeptical, 130 pages in 7 months plus meaningful experiments is quite some going. A list of the papers (so at least the authors can defend themselves), the source code and data used (because some of these methods require social media inputs) would definitely help.

After doing so much work though, why wouldn't you go the extra small few steps to publish? That way the work can be peer reviewed and the Scientific community has a chance to learn from it.

<comment><USER18> > That way the work can be peer reviewed and the Scientific community has a > chance to learn from it.

After trawling through so much peer reviewed work which in their view is utterly broken, I can understand why they'd be despondent/mistrustful of submitting it to a peer review process.

<comment><USER17> If you want to go that route, why not write a detailed blog post? Or a white paper in an archive? Or a GitHub repository? Not putting anything out there seems awfully unproductive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not surprised by this finding; too many smart people are working on the same problem.

When it comes to investing in public markets as an outside player, I've seen three moves which can work....

1) Identify a consumer product category going through the technology adoption S-curve, ideally something which isn't very subject to short term innovation cycles or disruption.

My wife spotted the trend of people spending more on pet drugs before we got married and invested. We've ridden it for well over 20 years...

2) Buy when the entire industry is a flaming wreck and there is blood in the boardroom; assuming there is a good reason that demand for their products to continue.

I've done this several times in natural resources (gold in the early 2000's, oil in 2016) and it worked out decently.

3) One I haven't executed yet; certain firms are basically bets that a specific event will occur, at which point the demand for their product will go bananas. Buy in the quiet period and sell once the event happens.

Requires great patience to execute well.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish it wasn't this easy to get crypto-scam SEO articles to the front page of Reddit and HN.

<comment><USER21> THANK YOU. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills watching everyone eat up the article where HE ASKS FOR YOUR MONEY.

<comment><USER22> Wait, what did I miss? I thought the writing was bad (both contents and style) so I didn't click through to the medium article, is that where they ask you to invest in their stuff instead?

<comment><USER21> That's where it is. He then calls it a "set it and forget it" crypto bot. Yes, please forget about the $1,000 you just gave me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How did you do 130 papers in 7 months? That's just over a paper every 2 days.

What was the setup, how did you set up a pipeline? Was it R or Python? What was the data source?

I am more surprised by your productivity than anything else.

<comment><USER24> I don't think he actually did it. He linked to a crypto scam medium post lol...

<comment><USER25> > crypto scam medium post

Could you expand on that? I've only skimmed the article, but I don't see any "crypto scams" pushed in the article. The article is just about something the author seems to know about (algorithmic trading), applied to the cryptocurrency market. It does promote the authors project (why else would you write a Medium post), but in the worst case, that would be a normal scam and not a crypto scam.

<comment><USER26> The whole article just seems like an attempt to steal money from uninformed people. He starts by giving vague information about trading strategies in general, then linking to an article about Renaissance Technologies as an example for successful algorithmic trading, then stating that most trading bots aren't successful and that the crucial differentiator for deciding whose bots to trust is the person's professional experience, which is obviously a reasonable thing to do, however the picture at the beginning of the article of him at a trading desk and him repeatedly mentioning his 7 year experience as a trader combined with the complete lack of any actual proof that his bots are actually profitable, make it seem as if he just tries to profit off his previous experience.

He ends the article writing this:

"All you'll need to get started is: 1\. $1000 2\. To press a single button to get the bots started"

Furthermore in the reddit comments in response to the following question: "130 papers re-implemented in 7 months? I'm blown away. Write a software engineering book about how you did it so quickly. Then write a self-help book about having enough motivation to see it through." he writes:

"100-hour weeks and a desire for a better life for the ones you love will get you there pretty quickly"

This guy seems like a complete fraud, I find it sort of sad that this has landed on the frontpage of HN with that money upvotes.

<comment><USER25> Oh don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trust the guy farther than I can throw him either. I just wanted to be a bit pedantic about "normal fraud" vs. "crypto fraud" (= ICO or similar).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is one of those cases where I would have guessed this would be the case, but it's nice that somebody else spent their time to verify, since I'm unwilling to spend my time to do so. Also nice that they shared their experience with the rest of us.

If it worked, it wouldn't be published, or at least not until it stopped working.

<comment><USER22> > Also nice that they shared their experience with the rest of us.

Except they didn't share the results with the rest of us. I know you said "experience" not "results", but when disproving papers, the least you can do is write down three sentences about each paper as you go along reproducing them, noting what you are seeing, perhaps with a snapshot (just a zip file or so) of the code. This is calling a whole field nonsense (that everyone expects to be full of nonsense) without giving enough evidence for anyone else to dispute your claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> OP makes highly dubious claims and does not pass a basic smell test:

ALL CLAIMS MADE ARE DUBIOUS: Implementing 130+ papers in 7 months is highly implausible. This would require:

\- Insane productivity.

\- Implausible access to pricing and news data resources (which are often not freely available).

\- Expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, finance, and data science. OP had to implement financial, time-series and linguistic feature engineering pipelines, as well infer the architecture and hyper- parameters used in all papers AND train all these models. ALL WITHIN 7 MONTHS. All while previously being a trader professionally i.e. not likely an expert in many of these fields.

\- OP also claims he "web scraped" all the data which is highly unlikely as price datasets are often sold for a pretty penny and not publicly available in the detail described in several of these papers.

\- Down the thread, OP says he does not know what a "meta analysis" study is al the while being capable of implementing 130+ papers. So someone who is an expert in ML, statistics, data science and finance does not know one of the most basic types of scientific study. All the while essentially engaging in a meta analysis study.

\- OP describes himself as "a trader at a Tier 1 US bank" to lend credibility to his post: in itself that description is ridiculous and sounds like a naive attempt at instilling authority.

\- When others encourage OP to publish results, he answers evasively: "probably a bit deep for a public forum but I was kinda glad to see the back of that work. It was an awesome learning experience but it's pretty soul destroying experimenting with tonnes of stuff that just doesn't work."

EVIDENCE PROVIDED: Non-existent.

All OP has to show for all this work is a hastily written Reddit post with dubious claims. There is no proof of the work done whatsoever, no code samples, not even result tables or graphs. The discussion of basic results are often made criticisms of this line of research.

MOTIVATION:

At the end OP shills his cryptotrading bot. This post was likely all just purely made-up to market his cryptotrading bot service. OP uses some common criticisms of market prediction research to garner authority as a wizz-kid to attract people to his crypto scam.

What's worse many on HN and Reddit seem to gobble it up naively. Seemingly because OP is critical of something that is popular to criticize.

</comment><comment><USER28> I read the post and .. he basically _said_ he did it, and just claims the results (that are so tasty because they fit everyone's preconceptions). And that's all the information there is. _Not even listing the papers that he supposedly reproduced._

And then at the end of the post, you get a link to a blog post about crypto trading bots, which isn't even relevant in context, starts out reading like a intro/tutorial but it ends with "all you need to get started is $1000 and to press this button" ...

Upvoted all the way to the front page? What the hell, HN. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER29> more important than this study if done correctly is the fact that he built a framework that can ingest all this data and that he had access to all these datasets

typical hedge fund spends millions of dollars in order to build such frameworks and buying datasets, sure most academic papers fail if you replicate but the framework and datasets are very valuable because you can eventually find something on your own or an improvement on existing ideas if you keep trying hard enough + there are other sources of ideas like quant research from brokers, ideas from platforms like quantopian etc. but yea in general if you have an outstanding idea that works - you would have very less or no incentive to publish it. why would jim simons have his researchers publish anything when they can make money for him all day long everyday ... just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER29> i asked the author where did he source his data, his reply was "i scraped data"

how can you scrape pricing data? not every data in this is on public domain, otherwise there would be no Bloombergs, CapitalIQs selling data for millions(sure they're overrated and overpriced but still!). Or in other words, if he is right - he can sell data and make millions. no need of looking for an investment strategy. just my skeptical side saying :)

you need clean data to accurately test ideas. for instance getting tick data is quite expensive. most universities have free access to Bloomberg, CapitalIQ etc. datasets the reason professors can test and also the reason some smart guys in the industry work for university on the side

<comment><USER10> You can get data for free from places such as alpha vantage

[https://www.alphavantage.co/](https://www.alphavantage.co/)

<comment><USER29> it's not enough data to test all of those 130 papers, he said he has also tested short term reversion trends. for that you need tick data(or atleast minute/hourly data)

<comment><USER24> Agreed — something about this post doesn't pass the smell test.

1\. He's a profitable trader at a tier 1 firm who has the spare time to not only develop a series of algorithms based on 130 research papers, but also sufficiently backtest them in 7 months?

2\. He said he looked at the past 8 years of papers, but refers to multiple models correctly predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

3\. Where are the code samples?

Edit:

Lol, just realized his medium post ends with a crypto scam.

<comment><USER30> Ditto on the "130 papers in 7 months." I am not familiar with the field, but I assume the process would look like this:

* Read and understand paper

* Find and download appropriate input data

* Code paper model and validate (he said he wrote his own code)

I can see myself being able to do this for ONE paper in maybe a week. He claims he was doing 1-2 of these per day. Wow. So either there is some exaggeration on his part, or he is a total wizard in his field.

<comment><USER31> I think you are a quick study; typically it takes me a week to figure out the detail of what's being done in a paper. Getting the data and testing would take longer. Charitably he/she has a framework with all the data required sitting ready to go and is just writing wrappers to the models. But even downloading frameworks from Github and getting them working takes a couple of days - for me. For example I've been playing with the Graph-network code from deepmind for a few weeks - I had to learn how the graphs were represented, how to build them and access them and how the models were made and put together. Just working that out was a solid three day job. Now I can build things and test out what's going on in the examples and get a feel for the framework, probably (if there was a problem) I would be in a reasonable position to say "this doesn't work like they think it does" (it does, but no surprise) but unless you've done that leg work I think you can't really. I think a proper replication effort is really 1 man month of expert time - or really you're just throwing stones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected

including methods that use:

>News Text Mining. - This is where they'd use NLP on headlines or the body of news as a signal.

I have to call this out.

Is this author suggesting that you couldn't have made money by shorting Enron stocks milliseconds after the scandal was made public? Is it impossible to make money by buying a stock in a small company, seconds after an acquisition is announced? If a CEO gets sent to prison, will that company's stocks not be affected?

And then there are other methods that use:

>Fundamental data. So ratios from the income statement/balance sheet

So buying stocks in companies with good financial health is not profitable?

Something's being left out here.

<comment><USER33> The important concept to understand about profitable investing is that you have to have a strategy that others are not also using.

Sure, investing in companies in good financial health is profitable. Unless everyone else does it too, and they drive up the price of the profitable companies, until all upside is gone (i.e., price is baked in). You're not better at finding profitable companies than anyone else.

Shorting stock on headlines? Sure, if you can beat everyone else. (You can't.)

The other is merely stating that, according to his analysis, apparently all these strategies did not bring an edge to the market.

<comment><USER34> > The important concept to understand about profitable investing is that you > have to have a strategy that others are not also using.

Not quite, because stocks tend to go up.

What really is hard is making more profit than just holding stocks would. Because that takes actual new ideas.

<comment><USER35> Stocks do not tend to go up, that would imply a greater than 0 return average for series. We instead get mean blur and skewness (which is actually often to the left).

The aggregate of the traded stocks, i.e. the market, goes up on average. That's why you make money by holding diversified portfolios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think this is not rigorous enough to draw any real conclusions.

If he had done a proper job of reproducing he would have created a write-up of his work explaining his reproduction methodology. The next step would be to get his work peer reviewed.

I think only then you have come close to the amount of analysis and rigour necessary to discredit so many authors of (possibly peer reviewed scientific articles) academic research.

The fact that he mentions that he doesn't know what a meta analysis is in the comments suggests that possibly _his_ results might not be what he purports them to be.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, I also find it extremely dubious a "Tier 1 professional quant trader" implemented 130+ papers in 7 months.

This means obtaining the same data, reproducing feature engineering and hyperparameters. Implementing learning algos. Maybe the guy is genius and god- like in NLP, finance, data science and machine learning but even then 7 months is too little time.

I was amazed at how few people call out this obvious lie here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Some of the papers I've seen are ridiculously obviously over-fitted.

For example published in 2018, but "tested" on 3 months of 2010 prices of GBP/USD, USD/SEK and USD/THB. Quality forex data is so easy to get freely, that picking 3 months from 8 years ago on one major pair and two other random minor ones just stinks.

<comment><USER38> Where can I get good quality forex data from?

<comment><USER39> I used TrueFX for an assignment in a statistics-for-finance class I taught: [https://www.truefx.com/](https://www.truefx.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Has anyone tried a simple approach - trying to predict which of the S&P 500 will have the lowest 10% returns, and build an (S&P 500 - 10%) index? It seems obvious that the S&P is stacked with some great companies and some old dogs. Does that method not work?

<comment><USER41> Since it's obvious, everyone knows it. And since everyone knows it, it's already priced in. You cannot find an edge by acting on widely-known public information.

<comment><USER40> I'm acting on the fact that almost all my investments are in the S&P 500, and I don't have a (easy) way to pick my favorite 450 out of those 500. How would knowing the worst 50 be already priced in? They would be priced lower than they should? Good let's get them out of my index. How else?

<comment><USER42> They'd be priced low. There is no "should" when it comes to markets - <USER2> market price is whatever people will transact at.

The problem is that stock price movements depend upon _future_ events - <USER3> money in the markets is effectively a future-prediction problem. So if your strategy is to discard the bottom 10%, great, you got rid of Foot Locker and Sears. You also would've gotten rid of Apple in 1998, which was responsible for a good portion of the index's gains over the last 20 years. And you would've kept losers like PG&E, which went bankrupt over a black-swan event (they were doing fine until they burned down a town).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Everyone can drive a car in a straight line looking into the back mirror. Trouble only starts on the first turn.

</comment><comment><USER44> The stock market is a complex adaptive system where the agents are constantly changing their strategies so that even if you were to find inefficiencies or patterns, they are only ephemeral.

<comment><USER45> This is why the truly successful quant groups like Renaissance continuously adjust their strategies and come up with new ones. Renaissance in particular has invested heavily into their data processing pipeline which enables them to have a significant advantage over the rest of the field.

<comment><USER44> Yes, if I remember correctly from an interview I saw with the founder he mentioned that the barrier to entry used to be high and that commodities markets 'used to' trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting but it would be nice if the author would, you know, write up his/her own detailed analysis with replication steps and post on arxiv or something.

<comment><USER47> I got the feeling this was more of a case of "I did all this work for myself. Nothing useful came up, so here's what I found." The author may be ok with spending an hour sharing the findings, but doesn't want to spend more time than that.

<comment><USER48> >Nothing useful came up,

Except plenty useful came up. "Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected" out of 130+ is a significant result. The media would jump on this, and they just might even without any proof of work.

<comment><USER47> I was referring to the word "useful" within the context of the author's hypothetical goal, not the parent poster's (i.e. a strategy useful for making money opposed to sharing knowledge).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> the author is trying to sell crypto trading bot ! looks shady to me if anything guarantees you profit, run away from it as fast as you can : [https://credium.io/](https://credium.io/)

[https://towardsdatascience.com/crypto-trading-bots-a- helpful...](https://towardsdatascience.com/crypto-trading-bots-a-helpful- guide-for- beginners-60decb40e434?source=friends_link&sk=6c68390cbf6ae7f464ad1666d55dba4b)

</comment><comment><USER49> "The most frustrating paper:

I have true hate for the authors of this paper: "A deep learning framework for financial time series using stacked autoencoders and long-short term memory". Probably the most complex AND vague in terms of methodology and after weeks trying to reproduce their results (and failing) I figured out that they were leaking future data into their training set (this also happens more than you'd think)."

\- Not sure how author tried to implement it , but is this not how you train LSTM networks by feeding t+1 data back into the cell again to predict t+2 data. It will be easier if author made it open source as well

<comment><USER50> Leaking future data in would be using t+1 for t, e.g. something like a bi- directional LSTM. I assume he means the actual training dataset had some kind of signal in the data that was also in the test data.

<comment><USER31> People do this by doing things like testing that their features contain information in both the training and test set. Because they are not exposing the data directly to the classifier they think that they haven't compromised the test set - but what they have done is increased the chances of a chance correlation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I could bet a ton that most people will make excuses as to why the papers failed. There's something within us that wants to hit the stock market lottery.

I truly believe that there are streeks to profits in the stock market in the same way you will find streeks in any set of random numbers but they are impossible to find in a consistent manner. The road to wealth for most in the stock market is time and investing in a basket of good stocks.

Whoever thinks that they have found a system to profits in the stock market. Test and retest your method a few times. It's unlikely you have a winning system.

<comment><USER52> But there is a foolproof way of profiting from the stock market. Insider trading! I find it fascinating that people do not believe it occurs at a grand scale given the low risks and huge rewards. Exactly like how people believe athletes don't use steroids so they get all upset when every once in a while one is caught. :)

<comment><USER53> One of my favorite not-quite-conspiracy-theories is that all of quants and crazy trading algorithms are just to provide cover for the insider trading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wouldn't any given approach rapidly lose efficacy as soon as its published?

I would even guess that a paper being published means that, at the point the paper started to be written, its alpha had already decreased to zero. Otherwise the writers of the paper would still be using that approach. That's how it can appear to provide no value even if you extrapolate it back in time.

<comment><USER55> The author mentions this, and said he tested for "alpha decay" by applying method to datasets that preceded the data on which the model was tested/trained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I barely skimmed this [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180944) for the "most frustrating paper" but how did he determine that they were leaking "future data"?

</comment><comment><USER57> TLDR, no results, no code, no details, just admission of failure from anonymous redditor with SEO link on his unrelated crypto-trading project.

<comment><USER58> It's baffling to me that anyone would believe this post. Do people here not have an ounce of skepticism?

<comment><USER59> I think people aren't skeptical about this because it lines up with what they already expect. That's the case for me.

If the guy is lying and it's all made up, I'd _still_ wager that if you assembled a collection of 130 papers on this topic, at most 10% would be valid [1]. So even if he's wrong, he's probably not wrong.

[1] I have an academic background, and I think invalid papers make it through peer review constantly. Peer review is not what people think it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I tend to follow Jack Bogle's advice. Jack made many people wealthy.

His advice? "Nobody knows nothing." (Read Bogleheads.org to see how to leverage this into wealth.)

</comment><comment><USER61> Some of the smartest people I've ever known from college became professional stock market investors and traders. Not a single one of them has significantly outperformed the market.

I think of stock market investing as a white collar gig economy job. Both depend on some central entity, which makes a killing (brokerages in this case), and have extremely low barriers to entry.

</comment><comment><USER62> Hasn't there recently been shown that only strategies using simple momentum- derived technical indicators were able to consistently bring returns in the stock market?

<comment><USER4> Not just recently, it's been known for a while. The author actually confirmed it:

> Almost every instrument is mean-reverting on short timelines and trending on > longer timelines. This has held true across most of the data that I tested.

(But momentum isn't the only thing that appears to work.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> He didn't state the time frame things are predicting. Going long is still the best way to beat any hedge funds or "pros"

</comment><comment><USER64> Source OP deleted the post. Is there a mirror?

</comment><comment><USER65> Buy low, sell high. Focus on reliable, proven stocks. It's not hard. Buy on bad days, sell on good days. Dont overcomplicate things.

</comment><comment><USER66> To OP (janny_kul@HN and chiefkul@RD): "Show me the code! Show me the code" \- in obvious Cuba Gooding Jr. voice

Until then I call this a fraud

</comment><comment><USER67> Disappointed that this made it to the front-page of HN. Had it show up in my push feed because it was so popular; quite upset to click it and see the comments in here falling for someone who's a crypto scammer:

\- Redditor for 28 days; first post made to /r/investing and contained self- promotion for a website that functions as a search engine for stock market fundamentals (post removed by moderators, take a look using [https://ceddit.com](https://ceddit.com))

\- Has made a few, low impression comments across other trading subreddits (/r/algotrading and /r/securityanalysis)

\- Claims to have been a trader at "multiple Tier-1 US banks" for 7 years but a glance at their LinkedIn shows less than five and a half years (65 months) between two organizations

\- Claims that they found, analyzed, and reproduced "130+" academic papers in only "7 months". Even by superhuman standards, the outlook for completing this much work (at high quality) is grim. Here's some napkin math:

7 months * 30 days = 210 days 16 hours (superhuman) * 210 days = 3,360 hours 3,360 hours / 130 papers to reproduce = 25.8hrs per paper

These numbers are intentionally rough to show that even if we're being generous, the idea that any one person could somehow recreate a full academic paper in less than two 16 hour working days is absurd. Add to this OP's claim of spending "weeks trying to reproduce [a paper's] results" and it the task becomes even more daunting.

This is possibly the biggest red flag of all -- or OP is the world's first (and only) 100x developer.

\- Does not provide any empirical data to back their claims, only provides the name (not a link) of one paper, and when asked in comments to provide more information -- fails to deliver.

This post desperately wants to come off as a research article but it's missing all the fundamentals to make it so. If OP's claims were true, why wouldn't they post their raw findings? We could make that argument that there's far too much to post, 130 papers would be a good bit of code, but there's no reason that OP couldn't provide a listing of the papers they "reproduced" at the bare minimum.

OP has made extraordinary claims: most if not all "predicting the stock market" papers are fraudulent, but has failed to provide any supporting evidence to back this up beyond their own words. As someone who just analyzed well over a hundred papers and postures themselves as a data scientist, OP should know that citing yourself doesn't fly in this scenario.

\- OP ends their post with the following: "I try to write a bit on medium even though I'm not a great writer if you wanted to read more from me."

There's absolutely nothing wrong with self-promotion, provided you're a quality creator and are transparent about what is being promoted. OP is neither of these things.

Clicking the Medium.com link will take you to a blog post titled "Crypto Trading Bots · A helpful guide for beginners [2019]". If you're like me, you might assume this is a tutorial related to crypto trading bots. Perhaps information on setting one up, coding one yourself, or an overview of the landscape. It is none of these things.

Much of the article explains how cryptocurrency trading bots work -- which is great, but quickly goes down the path of telling the reader that most bots are garbage and won't return a profit. Near the end of the post we're advised how to choose a viable trading bot and are provided with three questions to ask ourselves:

1\. What is the professional experience level of the senior leaders of that firm? 2\. Are their algorithms widely known and openly available to anyone? 3\. Is their success aligned with your success?

Immediately after these questions are the following lines: "Unfortunately, choosing a trading bot to go with isn't as trivial as answering these three questions. In my opinion, everything ultimately comes down to people."

What people, you ask? Perhaps someone like OP, who happens to be the founder of a trading bot platform. The post finishes off with a not-so-subtle advert for his company, along with the extraordinary claim that it will "take full responsibility for the profitability of our clients". According to the OP, all you need to get rolling on his platform is "$1000" and "to press a single button to get the bots started", never mind that the platform hasn't launched and AFAIK there's no start button to press.

Clicking through to the platform's website will bring you to a scroll-jacked landing page full of marketing fluff. Scroll further down (or click the "Get Started" button) and you'll see a pricing table with only one option currently available: pre-order a "$145 single fee lifetime license". Compared to the two unavailable plans, $145 is a steal -- the next plan down would run you $660 ($55*12) a year. Combine this with the "First 90 days profitability or money back guarantee" and the whole damn thing sounds like an incredible deal. But you better act fast because this offer is only available to the "first 1000 members".

OP's other trading bot articles aren't much better and in my opinion, directly promote his platform.

<comment>

The whole thing sets off numerous alarm bells in my head -- and it should for you too.

A trader who worked at "Tier 1 US banks" should know that guaranteeing the profits on your first 1,000 customers is not only ridiculous but so ambiguous as to be useless. Every developer on this site should know that not a single one of us would be remotely capable of maintaining a death-march level working pace for 7 months, launching a (credible) startup, followed by making non- zalgoized Reddit posts lacking any reference to the void.

OP isn't an OG superhuman developer who worked for a bunch of big banks and learned all the secrets. They're a former trader turned wantrepreneur that's resorted to dirty tactics to promote their venture. As far as I'm concerned, and maybe it's inflammatory, but OP is a liar. Nothing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Technical analysis is pseudoscience.

</comment><comment><USER69> Let's say an event occurs and you know a particular stock will go up 20% but you pump enough money into the stock to make the stock go 30% and then you let others chase the stock and publish news about this market move through media houses / content spamming / fake accounts. Then you short the stock once you get the desired movement and finally you remove the money from this stock so it goes into free fall and all people start selling. Finally, you close the short position when you notice there is no room for stock going further down. Now let's say stock ended up at 10% so you buy more stock so it goes 15% just below what you initially predicted.

Assuming you've billions to move the stock.

Why such strategy will not work?

<comment><USER70> Such a strategy does work and it's also illegal. It is called market manipulation specifically 'pump and dump' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> yeah but you can make a lot of money preaching technical analysis to your congregation a few times per week

protip: a fibonacci retracement from a randomly selected extreme will always tell you something

protip: it takes 5 months for your congregation's account to get eaten up from transaction costs when their stop limits keep getting hit

in the mean time you can just play TA roulette and they'll always be impressed by your "uncanny" perceptive abilities

<comment><USER72> If you know that 5.6% of the users (automated, or parroting the preacher) of an exchange will use fibonacci retracements, and that 15% of the amateur market will follow the market price change caused by either buying or selling activity, then you can play roulette with a decent edge. Of course, not as much as the preacher, who is allowed to bet before (s)he will speak to his or her congregation.

When you gather enough of these commonly used technical analysis, it's like having to predict in which startup Ron Conway will invest, but you can calculate Conway in a Python one-liner, and keep up-to-date by going to weekly sermon.

<comment><USER71> yes, this is possible, with more trades becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and have stop limits in place all the times it didn't work.

I wish the technical analysis flock would merely incorporate different things. TA takes a time series chart and imagines time series patterns. It primarily neglects what didn't get printed on a time series chart, and why. How big are the orders at the resistance level, do you have a record of the order sizes that appeared at the last resistance level? who is selling at the resistance level and why? The TA answer is "just because its a psychologically round number for the resistance price" or "because thats how high the last high candle was", but you can greatly improve your win rate by understanding who is in the market and why, which is possible to understand and a large portion of my trading strategies. It can be much more data intensive though so I can see why 1980s gurus did not do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> _Literally every single paper was either p-hacked, overfit, or a subsample of favourable data was selected (I guess ultimately they 're all the same thing but still) OR a few may have had a smidge of Alpha but as soon as you add transaction costs it all disappears._

I could have told you that without testing. If anyone had a lucrative strategy would they disclose it in a paper to the general public? I think not.

<comment><USER74> Proof can be more useful than a hunch.

<comment><USER48> And the author has shown none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This is unsurprising. P likely is not equivalent to NP [0], and predicting the market is NP-hard [1]. It's nice to see empirical work in the field, though, and especially nice to see reproductions of published papers.

[0] [https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf](https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284](https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284)

Edit for downvoters and repliers: If enough market participants are irrational, then it can still be possible for people to predict _other people_ , instead of the market, and make money that way.

NP-hardness indeed doesn't rule out heuristic approaches, but experience with 3-SAT and other NP-complete problems suggest that there will be arbitrarily bad times, and that in those times, the amount of loss can be exponential in the length of time that the heuristic poorly predicts the market.

<comment><USER76> Philip Maymin seems like a serious guy... but that EMH ↔ P=NP paper is absolutely not even remotely a _proof_. Was genuinely very curious and it's at best an intuition. Some claims, e.g. Knapsack and 3SAT are (almost?) isomorphic to the efficient market hypothesis, are pretty bold. And the justification is hand-wavy at best.

<comment><USER77> He's not a serious guy at all, he's a nutjob who likes listening to himself talk.

<comment><USER78> Why must serious guy and nut job be my only two options. And why must they be mutually exclusive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Mad' Mike Hughes, flat-Earth theorist, dies in rocket mishap - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/02/23/mad-mike-hughes-dead/ <comment><USER2> previous discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395528)

and apparently he wasn't a flat-earther, it was for publicity.

<comment><USER3> What sort of publicity stunt leads to your almost certain death? What was he publicising, because it wasn't himself

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not really a flat-earther. An attention-seeking stuntman/daredevil who would say anything to get publicity?

<comment><USER5> All these people dunking on the guy out of imagined intellectual superiority. Guy was a marketing genius, decent engineer/fabricator and had giant brass balls.

<comment><USER4> Hm - I never heard of him, but ok maybe it worked for him. The OP indicates his engineering credentials were maybe not that decent.

<comment><USER5> Show me an engineer that has never made a mistake.

He designed and built two separate steam-powered rockets and at least one mobile launch platform that was able to carry a human hundreds of feet into the air. He obviously fucked something up but on average I'd say he did OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any research on how to talk to these people? I know a flat earthed and anything I say just makes them dig in more.

<comment><USER7> Talking is easy. Convincing them to rethink their position or even abandon it is much harder and takes a lot of time, patience, persistence and friendliness.

The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more.

The best example I know of is Daryl Davis ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis)). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them.

He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord.

The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.

<comment><USER8> Darryl's work is amazing. Today we see people doing the polar opposite, label someone, shum and deplatform, label some more, harass, destroy his/her livelihood, destroy his/her reputation.

<comment><USER9> It's challenging because the optimal strategy for converting an individual is not necessarily what's best for society as a whole.

Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.

<comment><USER10> No, it doesnt. Responding to mere speech with escalation or violence has not ever worked in the responder's favor. It has instead fueled coups and revolutions (like the American civil rights movement).

Killing someone for their ideas sends the wrong message and grants them more legitimacy than anything. You elevate them to the same status as Jesus Christ, whose popular namesake religion is predicated on sticking to your beliefs in the face of any and all consequence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He might have hit the firmament of heaven, which happened to be lower than he expected.

</comment><comment><USER12> Clearly a candidate for a Darwin Award

<comment><USER13> No more so than any casualty of extreme sports like climbing, biking, paragliding etc. It's cliche but I'd like to think the man died doing something he loved: piloting a home-made rocket. The world is a richer place for people like him following their passion.

<comment><USER14> uhhh.... i'm pretty sure we're going to find several orders of magnitude difference between 'extreme sports' (except maybe base jumping) and 'homemade rocketry'

this infographic isn't exactly authoritative... but it's sort of fun to look at: [https://www.tetongravity.com/story/news/your-chances-of- dyin...](https://www.tetongravity.com/story/news/your-chances-of-dying-ranked- by-sport-and-activity)

<comment><USER13> But there are several orders of magnitude between different extreme sports. The principle is the same either way imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Natural selection strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks like we're going to have another thread of people gloating about the death of a man who's done nothing to wrong anybody here; who's only 'crime' is failing to treat science with sufficient reverence.

Really disgusting behavior.

<comment><USER17> Some may be gloating, but I think the majority are simply pointing out the tragic irony of someone losing their life over a demonstrable, undisputed fact that has been known for several hundred years. Conspiracy theories and the anti-science thinking behind them are dangerous, both to society and to individuals, as this case sadly demonstrates.

<comment><USER16> He didn't lose his life because of a belief in the flat earth. He lost his life because he was a daredevil. His use of the flat earth meme for promotional purposes is incidental to his death.

Furthermore if a few nutjobs on the fringes of society believing silly shit is genuinely a threat to society, then society must be fragile beyond belief. I reject this.

<comment><USER17> There have been measles outbreaks and other outbreaks of essentially eradicated diseases because of anti-vaxers. They are no longer simply fringe, and they do pose a real threat to society. A rejection of science, facts, and reason that can be spread instantly over the Internet resulting in something like the possible compromise of herd immunity to solved diseases is a huge problem. How does society continue if it is not based on facts and reason? One person, sure, no big deal. But who would have guessed a hundred years ago people would seriously consider the earth was flat in the numbers that people seem to today?

<comment><USER16> If you need to jump through so many levels of indirection to explain why a silly daredevil is a threat to society, maybe you should ease the fuck up and stop celebrating the man's death. Mike Hughes' share of the blame for measles outbreaks is _immeasurable small and indirect_ compared to people like Oprah.

<comment><USER18> They're _the same idiots_. I can't stress that strongly enough. Spend some time actually watching what they're doing and learning who they are.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is IE6 still so popular? - <AUTHOR>

And will it be for much longer?
According to some stats[1], IE6 has about 11% market share. Seems kinda high. Are these users worth bending over backwards for to allow them to use your site?
I'm almost done implementing a new web app. I've been using Chrome during development almost exclusively due to its great set of debugging tools. From time to time I'll then go open it up in firefox and fix little CSS inconsistencies.
But now that we're nearing the launch of our v1, we have to consider IE compatibility. Since we used tools like JQuery, the site behaves as expected, but the CSS is all messed up.
By technology standards, IE6 is ancient. Why don't IE6 users install Chrome, IE8, Firefox, or anything else?
Is IE6 still popular because it was the default browser in XP, people don't want/can't upgrade to Windows 7, and since they're using a pirated copy, they can't upgrade IE?
I'm sure there are some enterprise users, like my wife, who are forced to use IE6 because IT hasn't been given the budget to upgrade everyone. But they shouldn't be more than a percentage point in browser market share, right?
How do we kill it? Do we turn our noses up at it and force users to at least install Chrome Tab? Have other developers found this to be a workable compromise? Is there a javascript library that will automatically convert a site's CSS to a versin that's IE compatible?
[1] http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2 <comment><USER2> IE6 is still the browser of choice in some rigid, older enterprises, and if your target audience consists largely of Enterprisey folks, you've got to support it. Their reasons for refusing to upgrade vary, but are largely irrelevant-- it's a reality that has to be faced, for whatever reason.

If, on the other hand, you are after the consumer market, I'd suggest you forget IE6 altogether. Any home user still using an un-upgraded copy of WindowsXP is not going to want to spend money for software anyway, so forget them.

The point is: it doesn't matter if IE6 has 11% of the global market share. The important question is: what percentage of _your_ target audience do they own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. But if enterprise developers continue to support IE6, then there will continue to be a lack of pressure to upgrade, which will perpetuate the need for IE6 support. How can we break out of this vicious circle?

<comment><USER2> _How can we break out of this vicious circle?_

Decide you don't want the money the Enterprisey folks represent. Or, be so important to _their_ business that they'd rather upgrade than do without you.

<comment><USER3> The way I see it, a lot of corporate people shop from work. If you're LL Bean or Amazon, support it.

If you're selling something people aren't going to purchase from or for their enterprise cubicle(s), forget it.

\--

Oops. I forgot to add research. A family member needs their site to remain usable/attractive to the significant corporate population in this area who will visit it while researching options from work. A lot of big, stuffy businesses whose employees are potential customers for this local business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our research shows IE 6 at 4% of the market and our numbers take the most optimistic results. I have seen other at 3% with a more pessimistic model.

We recommend to out clients that they use the compounding development cost of chasing IE 5-6 and non-JS browsers and apply it to targeting mobile platforms. You get more bang for your buck doing so. By eliminating IE < 7 and none JS browsers you are walling yourself of from a little less than 10% of the market but the development effort to chase them increased development cost nearly 2x, targeting the iPhone (especially if your web was built with a REST backbone) is significantly cheaper 5K is the average app build, will net a better return on investment.

As well some assumptions can be made about older browser uses, they are either not early adopters or are using a corporate PC and may have access to a more modern environment at home or via a mobile device while not quantifiable, these factors will certainly work to reduce that total market size of non- modern browsers.

As I always say to clients, if you get to the point where you have to chase that < 10% for growth you have a good problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> If Microsoft had introduced Google Chrome style browser updates (either at the beginning or as a default XP service pack) this wouldn't be a problem. But even without problems of enterprise lockin, the average person doesn't update software that appears to work OK very often. Some of them are probably still using Windows 2000 or ME, which doesn't even support newer versions of IE but is still fit for most simple purposes

A significant proportion of internet users don't know what a browser is, and if they see a website that advises them they need to download a piece of software to get it to work, they instantly distrust it. In all honesty it's probably better overall that people who don't know about browsers _do_ ignore websites with buttons telling them they'll enjoy a better viewing experience if they download and install extra software.

Like people using the latest cutting-edge iPads, they'll just have to miss the occasionally useful flashiness that their default browser doesn't attempt to support. The average person that hasn't upgraded by now probably isn't going to be swayed by yet another broken rendering or "this site is only viewable in IE7+ or Chrome or Firefox"

The only party that can seriously reduce IE6 market share is Microsoft, by using OS updates to force upgrades and creating an "IE6 mode" that allows those kludgy enterprise apps to continue to function.

</comment><comment><USER6> In large corporations, there are often webapps that depend on ie6's buggy behavior, and break with anything else. And it may not even be under the company's own control --- I know of one SaaS player in the financial space that has a major bank pinned down to ie6, even though the bank would like to upgrade.

Chrome Frame is one way out of these situations, but convincing IT that it's a good idea is a struggle at best.

</comment><comment> chad-lundgren I didn't understand why NetMarketShare's Internet Explorer market share numbers were so much higher than other sources. Then I found this page - <http://marketshare.hitslink.com/weighting.aspx> \- which says "...We now weight Chinese traffic proportionally higher in our global reports".

China has a LOT of IE6 users because of historical issues related to SSL export restrictions. NetMarketShare's 11% number for IE6 is higher than IE7 (8%), which is ridiculous. So unless you have a lot of Chinese users, the number from StatCounter (5%) is probably closer to the truth - [http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww- monthly-201001...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww- monthly-201001-201101)

</comment><comment><USER7> Any web developer that adds IE6 support to a new web application deserves to get their house TP'ed.

</comment><comment><USER8> For the love of god please stop supporting IE6 people. It's not the Enterprise that's keeping it around it's US (developers that continue to support it).

If the entire internet didn't work on it, you bet your ass these slow-poke Enterprise folks would figure something out ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just found a JS library that's supposed to fix IE5-8's browser compliance. I haven't tried it yet though. Is this used a lot?

<http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/>

</comment><comment><USER9> one word: compatibility.

Most (if not all) of the management tools that are currently being used by major corporations are made for IE6 (because thats what was big when it was designed and purchased).

The other particular reason happens to be _schools_. In highschool (and still now in college) the IT team hasn't managed to get clearance to upgrade (it might /cost money/!)

Congratulations, A winner is You for anything in the US. I can't vouch for anything else, so there's 5% of the share.</comment>


+30 Android Developers and Experts to Follow on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudmagic.com/2014/02/11/30-android-developers-and-experts-to-follow-on-twitter/ <comment><USER2> Missed @evleaks. Talks handsets. [https://twitter.com/evleaks](https://twitter.com/evleaks)</comment>


The Uni: a portable, open-air reading room - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uni/the-uni-a-portable-open-air-reading-room-for-publi

<comment><USER2> Man, those chairs look uncomfortable.</comment>