Show HN: With a 9-5 job and 2 kids I have finally finished my first MVP
I would like to get some honest feedback from this great community.
I made https://freeoptionscreener.com/, to scratch a personal itch. I myself trade options as a hobby, and I didn't find a screener that satisfies my need to be able to explore raw options data freely and without preset constraints. So I made this app that allows playing with options market data and extract interesting opportunities.
The techs used: - Laravel + Jquery + Mysql - Tradier API for market data - DigitalOcean for hosting - OVH for domain name
It costs me 5$/month to run the website. I'll be glade to continue if it proves to be a viable product in the long run and maybe I will take it to the next level and try monetize it. Note: the app is not suitable for phone screens yet, although this is a planned feature.
197 comments
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No check in time - just arrive anytime before 10.
Lunch break is easily 2 hours, naps included.
Dinner break is another 1.5 hours, people would walk laps and sometimes play basketball.
Everyone hang around until 9PM because then there's free food and free rides home (also traffic is much better). only applies for weekdays, some people check in on Saturdays for a few hours.
Of course this is not busy time in general - when people do the real 996 for a bit - but that can't last, and everyone knows it.
I've heard the situation has started to change as well - hopefully it gets fully stamped out.
Like a lot of things in China, the problem isn't with the laws but the selective enforcement of it. The labour law says:
> 36 The State shall practise a working hour system wherein labourers shall work for no more than eight hours a day and no more than 44 hours a week on an average.
There's also a widespread practice of making employees who have been with the company for more than 8 years or so quit and rejoin after a month to bypass some other labour law provision I don't fully understand.
https://youtu.be/zzt0xBXTNhI?t=200
So now what?
FWIW, early in my career I would welcome 996 as long as it came with rewards. Now I prefer high intensity, constrained 9-6, but with high scale.
In reality, companies in tech sectors don't declare themselves as "996", because they're by default "996". Companies that work 40 hours per week would declare themselves as "965" or "955" because it's rare and attractive.
Let's have a glance at how bad it is:
As an example, the work schedules for "FANG" companies are relatively sane. The counterparts in China would be "BATJ" (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, JD), and Uber-like counterparts (Bytedance, Meituan, Didi), their work schedule all largely exceeded 40 hours. The worse of them all is Pinduoduo, the very successful competitor to Alibaba's Taobao, they work 13 days before they get one day off (6 days on one week and 7 days on the other).
It's even uglier if we dig down to the rabbit holes:
1. Job with lower pay doesn't mean less working time, it's often the opposite.
2. "996" doesn't mean it stops are 9 pm. If a recruiter is being "honest" and says they're a "996" company, be prepared to work till 11pm for most of the days, and over midnight sometimes.
3. More often than not, the salary package IS the amount people get. There is no extra pay for overworking. People are working overtime because the deadlines are ridiculous and they don't want to lose their job, because most jobs are the same anyway and they have to go through the fierce competition process again.
4. The most toxic one: overwork for nothing. The leader of the team wanted to show his/her competency to the boss by letting everybody just sit there and overwork, even though there's no real task to be done at all!
At the bottom line, there are still a few decent options that like Google and Microsoft in China, but the competition is even more fierce.
On that basis I work 864, but I guess in China people are just another natural resource from which to extract value, once all the value is extracted (burned out) they dump that person and take the next one off the heap. Its a sad state of affairs that the Chinese think that this work ethic sets them apart from the rest of the world. It does in a way, but what it really allows is for the chinese government and chinese companies to make them work longer for less and to feel like they are special for doing so.
There is a reason that the west has labour/employment laws that protect people from this sort of exploitation. Sad to see that the chinese people have fallen for this sort of bullshit.
Germany comes to mind, in particular, as an example of how collectivism can actually help allow for sane work hours. I worked there for a few months. One of the things I deeply respected is that my co-workers were completely okay with the bakeries closing at 3:30pm, supermarkets closing at 6:30pm, being open for only 2 hours on Saturday, and completely closed on Sunday because "the supermarket employees also have families and need time to rest", words which you would almost never hear in the US. (In larger cities of Germany, supermarkets have longer hours, but rarely past 8pm or 9pm, and definitely never 24 hours like you often find in the US.)
What is at fault is rampant, extreme capitalism, which at that extreme milks humans of every last drop at the expense of their health, because their health is not a part of the financial optimization function at all. If you can profit by driving your employees to insanity, you profit, and that is deemed optimal by an extreme capitalist system.
(And before some social media flamewar-instigators accuse me of advocating for extreme communism, no, I'm advocating some balance between mostly captalism and some strong labor laws that everyone must abide by to maintain the physical and mental health of the country.)
Just kidding, OP. As someone exactly in your situation, congrats for shipping!
And for that, I say kudos to him. It takes a lot.
It is no mean feat around a day job and a family.
Nice work getting over the hump!
But, I’d love to know you found time, I’m years behind on personal projects, 2 young kids as well - genuinely interested in how you made it work, I’m just shattered by the end of the day!
Upvote from me because if you can ship a useful tool whilst managing a family life then go you! Gratz!
Constructive criticism: I had no idea what this site was about until I spent a minute looking around.. and now I only _think_ I get.
Granted I am (probably) not your target market, however I think maybe a landing page or at least a popup tutorial - which I can then "Skip" at my peril would be a smart addition.
Interface-wise, what a lot of people do now when facing a large number of filtering or sorting options is they collapse them and provide a summary with a filter button to pop them back out. This may reduce visual clutter. The description field information is also 100% redundant. Strike and other price columns should have a currency symbol. It is conventional to use either decimal point vertical alignment or right-alignment with fixed-width fonts when displaying numbers in series. Do not underestimate the value of color for comparing figures, eg. high vs. low volume or interest.
Some kind of clickable action to purchase brokerage via third party services for which you can obtain referral kickbacks might generate revenue.
Have you looked into https://optionstrat.com/
NVidia? Sep 17 2021? $405? (Current price appears to be 220.68)
Also I can't find NVDA anywhere on the page right now. Tried to fiddle with various options without really knowing what I'm doing. Is it gone now?
Nvidia in your example would be the underlying equity that the options derivative contract is based on
sept 17 2021 is the expiration date of the contract
405 is the strike which is the price at which the contract allows you to buy or sell (depending on if the options contract is a Call or Put contract)
I read SO many comments on here from folks lamenting their lack of energy + time to do something like this despite the desire to do so. So 10000 congrats on pushing through and getting something live.
Now to actually check it out (and I'll come back and update this comment with actual feedback ;)
Some minor nitpicks:
1. I filtered to ITM but got options that were out of the money in my results
2. Rather than needing the 10,30,50,any moneyness picker, why not a slider?
3. In fact, there should probably be a slider for Delta… it’s really difficult to find options that are near or at the money since sorting by delta either starts at 1 or 0
4. I didnt see a CSV export button anywhere?
Overall nice job though!
[edited for spacing]
You can sort by ITM/OTM column to find near or at the money options.
The CSV also is something I should add.
In case it helps, my normal filter is something like:
- Type: PUT
- Days to expiration: 20 - 40
- Delta: -.30 - -.20
- Open interest: >100
- Premium: >$1
- Underlying price: >$50
- IV: 10% - 30%
That gives me a range of out-of-the-moneyness I'm looking for, but I don't care what the absolute % is.
I worked on this project on weekends and evenings."
I can't wait until my kid is old enough that I can really work on stuff when watching them on nights and weekends.
"Dimming" the entire screen on a choice change is extremely visually distracting. A small spinner on the data sheet would be an excellent indicator that "this data is about to change".
Excellent tool, I'm going to play around with it tonight.
I was looking for a way to screen for unusual option volume (Volume noticeably above Open Interest), but didn't see a way to do that directly. I do see the filters for Volume and Open Interest, and I can play with those in various combinations to see what I want, but I think something like a single filter that allowed viewing all contracts where Volume > Open Interest would address this in a more direct way.
p.s. I know the level of commitment required to launch an MVP, and to grow and support thereafter. I had a job at the time, and it was a lot to juggle. I don't think I could have done it if I also had a family. I wish you the best of luck moving this forward!
The URL of the product itself very clearly tells us what the product is (at least, if you are in the target audience)
So many web apps have inscrutable names. This is just refreshingly clear, it's a free option screener .com!
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not to hijack your thread but I want to leave some thoughts as a former vol trader.
Anyone trading options more than lottery tickets should really invest time into learning about BSM/greeks and some more advanced options structures and vol strategies.
For instance, if you paper traded a delta neutral book simulating a market maker, you’d understand how options pinning works (it’s not manipulation, it’s a side effect).
Great comment. With added apologies for hijacking, is there any resource you'd recommend with nuggets like the above? Is there any better way to learn than slowly paper trading and testing different things over long time spans? I'm interested in vol trading and dispersion strategies, but the lack of easily available historical data makes it difficult to run experiments.
You could start collecting it starting today, but you wouldnt have a huge back-test and it wouldnt reflect different regimes. It would regardless start giving you insights.
I'd guess the best ways to learn it are either doing it and learning bits over time, or joining a hedge fund where you get it all as common infra and learn there.
I'm also curious if anyone has ideas here. I havent seen a non-internal historical dataset.
Very true. The best quant shops don’t have the smartest people, they have the most data and the best systems. Everyone has smart people. Not everyone has great infra.
You can read about convexity until you’re blue in the face, but you won’t really get it until you watch the interaction of every leg in your book and the resulting risk/pnl. Once you see that, it’s like ascending to a higher plane.
> You either get vol or you don’t.
I think I get it, on a conceptual level -- option prices include the market's expectation of future underlying variance, so if you subtract/hedge-out everything else, you can trade that fluctuating expectation. With dispersion, you're taking advantage of index options and those of the components eventually converging, while being mindful of the changing correlation of components.
> you won’t really get it until you watch the interaction of every leg in your book and the resulting risk/pnl. Once you see that, it’s like ascending to a higher plane.
You're spot on. I can tell I'm missing something "clicking" at a more intuitive level in my head, something that feels close, because my book almost does what I expect, but.. there's always some "error" in the pnl at the end of the week. So I must be missing an "aha" moment.
> There is no better way than doing. It’s not slow.
My "real job" skills (C/C++, numerical programming, systems engineering) I only learned by doing, I guess no reason to expect this would be any different! Though, I can easily write and test code on my laptop with no consequences if it's wrong. I feel like I'd learn fast if I could set up a trade experiment, click a button, and then see how it fared at the end of the week, immediately, instead of waiting the week. I've got dozens of questions I think would be answered quickly that way.
But you're right, the path to learn more is clear, I'm gonna start paper trading those experiments.
Thanks for your comment, it's really encouraging. I can't wait for Monday.
Depends what that thing is, but most likely you're not. If your pnl/risk expectations have the correct direction, and rough magnitude, I would say you're doing pretty well.
What sort of strat/structures are you wearing at the moment?
- I spot a typo on the About description, should be opportunities. - Email us to contact@go2.broker? - I'm not sure why expiration date 2021-08-27 has 2d