Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day (readthetape.cc)

> Read the Tape gives players the same 5 S&P500 stock charts per day to predict. You select low, medium or high confidence and then call the chart UP or DOWN. It's a 1d chart which then resolves over 5 days. Alpha is scored against the Monkey Index, a basket of 11 random coin flips at low confidence which provides a tangible win/lose condition.

Your description here and on the website is not clear to me about what I am predicting. Am I predicting whether the stock is going to continue to go up the same day? Is the chart of one day and I am predicting whether it will go up or down the next day? In my opinion, you need to get the explanation of what I'm looking at and the directions of what I am predicting down to one clear sentence.

Needs a way to copy and paste text to share with friends. I feel like this is what made wordle viral

To me the description was very clear, the game is fun to play. Would love to see the "prediction" of a LLM in the stats after playing

This is fascinating.

That said, if it's possible to do better than random guessing, then does this reflect the fact that the five charts are presumably hand-selected to be "interesting"?

My naive guess, and I'd be very curious to learn if this were wrong, is that something very close to the efficient market hypothesis is true; that, if it were possible to beat the monkeys on randomly chosen stocks on random dates, then someone would have figured this out already and deployed bots to capture whatever profits are available.

Technical analysis is astrology for boys.

Oh boy, I know more than a few guys who will get a kick out of this, hah

It’s a fun game and it throws funny shade for getting the answers wrong, but who would have guessed and sized these answers right based on this sparse data without any additional context? There’s barely enough data in the charts to do TA properly.

would love to see Volume on the chart

you should probably rename it since reading the tape is the opposite of charts :p

you should include volume

I ended up generating alpha so this is clearly a great game and I'm a genius investor (compared to random monkeys). When I lose it all tomorrow, my opinion may of course change.

Seriously though, this is a clever idea and I'm interested to see if I can consistently beat the monkeys. Time will tell! Thank you for sharing!

From a very non altruistic point of view part of me wants to encourage this

Love how you implement bet sizing, this is a signature of professional traders. How did you come up with the idea?

You mentioned stocks are "seeded random draw", but professionals don't trade random stocks - there is no edge there, price movements are mostly noise. You want stocks-in-play, stocks with heightened interest from investors on that day.

My suggestion is to manually pick interesting stocks each day and ask players what happens next. Don't hide names, so that players can asses market strength and group strength - 75% of success comes from these factors, and only 25% from individual stock selection.

I 100% think you are going to harvest these decisions to train an ML model to do the inverse.

I did 5/5, looking for quant jobs now

This is impressive and a tremendous concept.

Thanks for posting. It's an interesting concept, but needs some work in my opinion.

First, that chart is super zoomed in. You can't zoom out or switch timeframes. You're not told how many bars you need to predict. You're not told the dates or what the stock is.

Not much you can see there other than a handful of candles, that's doesn't really tell you much.

If the stock and dates are a secret so people don't cheat, I don't see why. People can cheat on Wordle or Worldle, and they're still fun to play. But here you're basically just guessing, you have so little information it's basically a coin flip.

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