Show HN: Algorithmic trading for everyone (justfor.fund)
Hi there. I built a company that makes algorithmic trading strategies for its users to invest with.
--> https://justfor.fund
Advice and feedback are very much welcomed!
Disclaimer: New born business with its first beta version (12 users) currently live.
Details:
- I'm the sole developer and founder
- I applied to YC S22 batch on the last day
- Currently facing a big KYC compliance wall (code and protocols)
- My priority right now is obtaining funds to cover minimal operational cost's. Need to pay for broker partnership costs too.
- I have essentially no funds to cover cost's right now.
- Currently applying for dev positions on several companies.
- Developed the beta version on 3.5 months full-time.
Thank you
79 comments
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what does this mean, and how would open sourcing help, and what is the G?
I'm pretty sure that's not what "solicited" means.
Is there a way to contact you regarding this - specifically Algo trading software related?
Kindly, Matías
The main reason Alice would like this is to create an audit trail that defends her against any hypothetical insider trading accusations. That is, your brokerage will have records that explain not only what trades occurred (as any brokerage will do), but also why those trades occurred (you ran algorithm F on X input and F(X) is what popped out).
First, some publicly traded companies have freezes and employees can only trade in specific windows. The algorithm will need to take this into account.
Second, is "an algorithm did so" a legitimate defense ? It will probably depend on the jurisdiction but i can imagine lots of courts dismissing that because regardless of algorithms, it's on the human not to act illegally, and humans have created, tuned and parametered said algo. I don't think laws have been updated for such cases ( like with self-driving cars).
The two biggest roles that “algorithmic” or “high-frequency” or “electronic” traders play are:
- market making: someone has to warehouse a bunch of thing A a and thing B so that buyers or sellers can find a counter party. this used to be an Italian guy from Jersey called a “specialist” and he quoted in eighths so that the minimum he could make per unit was $0.125. he was not giving you a better deal than optiver.
- arbitrage: thing X costs a lot in Chicago and is cheap in New York, or vice versa. buy in the cheap place, raising the price, sell in the expensive place, lowering the price. wash/rinse/repeat: shit costs the same in both places now. people have been doing this since before the wheel, on foot.
The common misconception is that in order to sell you a share of AAPL, the market maker first buys it cheaper and then sells it to you in some unfair way. There isn’t time for that: they already had inventory.
Lots of wiggle room in that "had inventory" definition as well.
It is, instead, simply gambling. Like poker, it is not really a game of chance, so those with better algorithms and faster hardware win, but it provides society absolutely nothing of value. Generally it amounts to leeching off of other traders who might be providing something of value.
It has got so many have custom electronics connected directly to the fiber that delivers market event reports, and trigger sending an order even before such a packet finishes arriving, the response calculated in an FPGA in under 100 nanoseconds. Nowadays those traders have equipment in cages in the same building as the exchange, and the fibers to all the cages are exactly the same length.
They may have a collection of order packets already formatted, and just pick one of them to send according to the update.
For a while some would trigger sending an order early, and then add a bad checksum if calculation indicated it was not right. The exchanges banned that, not because it was unfair, but because it added load not paid for.
A way to preserve value for the non-gamblers would be to place a (proportionally) small tax on trades, so whoever does it most frequently pays most.
Site is currently up. Having some unexpected issues with traffic.
Sincerely, Matías
2. The adverse selection here is really really high: if you could generate alpha, you would find some capital from a big multi-manager or allocator (which is incredibly easy to get these days), and just focus on running their money. The fact that you are making a retail focused site instead of raising private capital says a lot.
3. Looking over the trading algorithms, seems pretty clear that you don't have a background at a prop firm or a quant hedge fund? It takes years to learn this stuff, and the only way you can reasonably do it before going out on your own is at an established shop.
Sorry to be a little harsh, but something like this is never going to work and no one in their right mind should allow your algorithms to trade for them. Generating alpha is incredibly incredibly hard, and teams of experts often spend years working on it with nothing to show for it.
Basically, im looking for help to build the best possible platform.
Cheers!!
2. It says this person is new, and doesn’t have connections or inroads to get capital from “a big multi-manager”.
3. Sounds about right, but I disagree that the only way to go out on your own is by starting at an established shop. That doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Very likely won’t make a profit. Sure. Will it get him a job offer, connections, or experience. Absolutely.
edit: actually no, I can think of a couple counter-examples of successful firms started by people with no professional trading background, but it's exceedingly rare.
PS: My original comment came off as exceedingly harsh and am sorry for that. OP if you read this mb, just got kind of triggered for a moment. However I will say the design of your site is really slick!
2. You could say this about any startup in YC. "If XXXXX then YYYY would do it".
3. Again, you could say this about any startup founder.
Seriously
Cheers!
Some advice: Read lots of books, stay away from Reddit, be prepared to get lamented by other algo traders, expect every idea you read about to have lost all it's alpha, get ready for several misguided "I've done it, I'm rich" moments, and most of all have fun. It's a long and arduous journey with very little hope, but if you like impossible challenges then there's nothing quite like it.
Also some books i would recommend are: - Hands on Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading, Stefan Jansen, Packt - Python for Finance Cookbook, Eryk Lewinson, Packt
Cheers!
- The links didn't work in my mobile browser.
- What I've seen similar platforms do is let users create strategies and then let other users invest in those, for a share of the profits.
- Are you actually accepting investments already?? I hope that's just your family, but you might be in deeper legal trouble than you realize. Take that feature out asap until you talked to a specialized lawyer.
- If you get a job offer, I'd take it if I were you. And take down the site, and pay out the investors (in full or above that; I'd cover any losses by the algorithms out of my own pocket).
Kindly, Matías
> Currently facing a big KYC compliance wall (code and protocols)
.. but yes, you're going to learn a _lot_ about the difficulties of legitimately marketing to retail investors.
Check some of my ML projects here!: https://github.com/MatiasMingo/Machine-Learning-Projects
Cheers!
Another interesting platform which grows on similar concepts is Composer: https://www.composer.trade
A big missing piece in OP's project is a backtesting - I think that a very important part of testing your strategy is trying it on real-world data.
If you really want to pursue this, it would be helpful if you provided a bit of info on how the strategies worked, what type of hedging / risk management is going on, etc.
Best of luck
"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference" Winston Churchill.
Give it some time haha!
Cheers