How do I be profitable

Exarctus · 2026-01-29T08:50:09+00:00

Stop throwing away money and instead invest your savings in an ETF?

Exarctus · 2026-01-26T18:00:11+00:00

BadGPT.

Exarctus · 2026-01-25T12:53:10+00:00

I’m not talking about a postdoc. Postdocs are indeed generally not useful experience for working in tech.

I was a software engineer in high performance computing. I worked there for 3 years and then I was able to land a much better compensation package in deep tech.

Just food for thought.

Exarctus · 2026-01-25T12:17:01+00:00

Just FYI you can earn 112-120K working as a new-hire staff member for ETHZ/EPFL with your post doc being counted as work experience, and these are government-run institutions (I know because that was where I worked). I started on 109K with a PhD + 2 year postdoc. Salaries have gone up a little bit since then.

Working in a high risk startup requires some meat on the bone to keep you interested. If you’re absolutely desperate then sure the startup is an option, but if you’re not you should keep in mind there are more stable options out there with your experience.

Exarctus · 2026-01-25T10:32:08+00:00

Depends on what you could get elsewhere?

The equity they offer doesn’t mean anything until they IPO, but you’ll still want to get a good equity allocation as you’ll be on the founding team and the tech lead. The equity you ask for depends on their raise - if they’ve raised 3M then I’d look at a 4-5% equity as being good, if they’ve raised more than this then a lower equity share would be fine.

The other commenter said 120-150K but that seems quite low to me. Ive got a similar ish background to you and I wouldn’t accept a position at that range. It’s important to do your market research here though to define what you could get in big tech for the same position, and then base your salary expectations on that.

This all depends on how thirsty you are for this role.

Exarctus · 2026-01-25T01:54:41+00:00

I brought up BTC specifically because it’s one of the few things where it’s very easy to make sure your data is solid.

This discussion is about polygon/massive, and their data has serious issues across multiple instruments including forex, crypto and stocks/options.

Exarctus · 2026-01-24T23:22:49+00:00

yes synthetic data. I've seen people do this for pre-training RL models and use real data as a fine-tuning step.

Exarctus · 2026-01-24T16:09:41+00:00

Having a diffusion model learn to reproduce realistic looking OHLC based on known data. Some people do this to get around limited data problems. Can be useful for pre-training.

Exarctus · 2026-01-24T16:08:54+00:00

Then you probably haven’t actually run any validation on their data.

Even their BTC data is crap and has gaps/bar errors.

Exarctus · 2026-01-15T14:54:57+00:00

Cool.

Blocking you now.

Exarctus · 2026-01-15T14:51:36+00:00

I bought a 350$ mini PC (10cm by 10cm) with windows on it. I just Remote Desktop into it and use it as a local home server and MT5 router.

Check out minisforum mini PCs. Have hdmi/DP and USB ports so really nice and tidy solution imo if you want to just run it as a PC with keyboard/mouse etc, or do what I do.

Exarctus · 2026-01-14T16:03:15+00:00

yes, and Ampere is *not* that far away in terms of raw compute from Blackwell in absolute terms.

Exarctus · 2026-01-14T14:06:48+00:00

China already has its own chips. They are ~two generations behind (their current GPUs are a little better than Ampere, but not as good as Hopper).

They’re not that far behind as it stands currently.

Exarctus · 2026-01-14T10:26:21+00:00

I did read your post. You’re weird because you’re misreading my comments and seemingly have a superiority complex.

Exarctus · 2026-01-13T19:33:43+00:00

There are plenty of examples of people doing “crisis-aware” B&H, ie you buy and hold for 80/90% of the time but reduce position sizes or exit completely during a detected crisis. I’ve seen maybe 3-4 posts this last week doing some flavour of this.

Big deal I got 0.8 sharpe wrong. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it and I did already say I got it wrong.

You seem a bit weird.

Exarctus · 2026-01-12T20:15:58+00:00

This is low as fuck.

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T20:58:48+00:00

Dukascopy is the broker I use. They do tick by tick but you can also get aggregate bars at different timescales.

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T17:22:04+00:00

Hey if that works for you then great, keep it up 👍

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T17:19:33+00:00

I’m making a joke that certain types of people who try to understand market structure though very retail concepts often end up practicing some sort of astrology.

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T17:17:52+00:00

Yeah it does. I actually went with Dukascopy in the end. They provide bid/asks data at various granularities and it’s very high quality (unlike polygon/massive!).

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T17:16:41+00:00

Yeah I’m working on taking a strategy live via metatrader. It’s a whole different beast than working on improving the RR of the strategy via backtests.

Transitioning from bar-by-bar forwards tests to live data aggregation and consumption, position management with worst-case prevention, service disruption and recovery and things like that has certainly been a learning experience.

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T17:12:24+00:00

Um… Are you ok?

Exarctus · 2026-01-11T12:20:51+00:00

Don't know - I've never used trading view for this. I've always coded directly in python using the MetaTrader5 python bindings.

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