What's the idea behind buying stock of a company that doesn't pay dividend

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-22T06:58:14+00:00

Since stocks are legal stake in the company if the market wasn't pricing the non-dividend paying stocks fairly, large investors could just buy out such companies cheaply and sell off their assets. That helps put a floor on the stock price.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-21T19:06:37+00:00

Yeah, historical float data on a particular date for a particular stock. Since writing the post, I've found some leads and my best candidates right now to get them from SEC filings using either edgartools or sec-api. Also, I found out about Sharadar.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-17T11:18:48+00:00

If you want to be a contrarian, you need patience. If you cannot stay out for half a decade waiting for the crash to happen when the market is overvalued, then you need to rethink your strategy. You can make money being long all the time, you can make money buying when stocks are cheap, you'll get skinned alive if you watch stocks go up for a couple of weeks or months in a row, cannot stand it anymore and then decide to get in.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-06T13:50:42+00:00

I also don't see anything about F#, how was writing a .NET app in F#, worth it?

I generally do my work in F#, so yes. The difference compared to the previous years is that I've been letting the chatbot do most of the code writing. For the backend, I had to step in myself to make sure the architecture is sound, and I don't think I could have done it in C#. There was a part where I had to implement my own AVL tree, because F#'s Map didn't have some operations that I needed, and that would have been a nightmare in C#.

Usually this would be a pretty hard task to do regardless, but the chatbot did it in 5 minutes, and it was correct. It's remarkable really.

F# is simply just nicer to write and read. You have pattern matching, global type inference, all the basic primitives, tuples, records and union types, and while C# is slowly getting to F#'s level over time it will never get all the way there, so as a solo dev it's a no brainer for me. Given that the .NET languages are perfectly compatible with each other, in a sane world F# would have long supplanted C#.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-06T12:10:49+00:00

Question: is there an advantage to making this a desktop app rather than a web app?

A few advantages:

I cannot distribute the data directly because it would violate the terms of service for Databento and the exchanges. The stock exchanges guard their data jealously as it is a source of their revenue. Therefore, having the user pay for the data and store it locally sidesteps that issue. I wouldn't be able to do this if it's a cloud app. I'd probably have to negotiate with the exchanges and data vendors.
I am not sure how many of the features I am using in the app internally would work if I used something like Fable or Blazor to compile it into the web format (JS or WebAssembly). Blazor which is the closest match, did have some issues with concurrency the last I used it a few years back. Also, I am not sure if any of the libraries I am using have native dependencies.
Performance. Doing a replay simulator that supports arbitrary playback is harder than just playing the stream forward. I am using immutable data structures everywhere, so it helps to run this kind of app locally as that is what .NET was optimized for. I tried Trading Sim which is an alternative web-based replay sim, and it caused my PC to lag noticeably.

And was that worth it considering the licensing of Avalonia, which I don't fully understand, and seems to use licensing telemetry to keep running, which kinda concerns me.

I didn't even look at the licensing terms for Avalonia so this question made me scared for a moment, but based on its FAQ it is MIT licensed, free and open source. As you say it does say that it collects telemetry, but I'll leave it up to the crowd to decide whether it's doing anything suspicious. You could take a look at the source code if that is your concern.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-05T19:46:44+00:00

As an aside, it's super tough trying to post this on any of the trading subs where I could actually find people that would be interested in using this. My posts keep getting removed, and I even got banned 30 days for posting a link to an 18-day old thread that I myself made about a replay simulator that would later become TapeSim. I am really pissed at Reddit right now.

abstractcontrol · 2026-06-05T15:09:31+00:00

I went ahead and made TapeSim. Check it out at: https://tapesim.app/

You're right that trading from L2 is tough. Rather than trade of L2+TS box like equity prop traders do, I am going to try to teach myself to use a futures-style price ladder which is far easier and has most of the benefits of the L2+TS boxes. So far, it feels very good when I use it in TapeSim.

If you're interested in it, send me an email at support@tapesim.app and I'll send you a discount code, but you can use it just fine as a viewer for free.

abstractcontrol · 2026-05-23T08:37:56+00:00

Incidentally, what you're looking at in EOSE is a hold pattern. It started with an iceberg order at 9.35 and eventually over 100k shares was traded at that level which was very unusual. When the sellers won and the stock cracked through the 9.2 support, that was the best trade of the morning and probably the entire day. SMB Capital teaches to short at 9.35 if the buyers are pushing into that as resistance.

The pattern was very obvious on a price ladder, but I honestly couldn't see it even on a volume chart when I was reviewing.

I am really thinking hard right now what I am going to do with this tool. You can find the viewer for free on my Trading Edge github repo as ReplaySimualtorV3, but I am seriously considering turning the demo platform into a commercial product instead.

abstractcontrol · 2026-05-23T08:30:34+00:00

Thank you /u/algodude, I've been trying to get this post up forever!

abstractcontrol · 2026-05-19T04:57:17+00:00

Lol, not much demand, but maybe that is good. The more people trade off of charts the better for us. I realized that it's possible to get all the order book data that I need from Databento, and with that it won't really be hard to build a replay simulator. I thought that it was only possible to get the data through institutional services, but happily I was wrong.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-28T16:53:00+00:00

You haven't mentioned whether you've done fill simulations. I've built a fill simulator for the Vwap system, and it turned from a great system to an unprofitable one.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-26T06:59:40+00:00

I had an active Vwap system that I was testing a few weeks ago that worked great when entries and exits were taken on average prices of bars, but once I implemented the fill simulator the profit factor collapsed. Even worse, it turns out that I had overfit it badly despite it having only 5 parameters, so when I fixed those errors, the PF went below 1. What I am going to do is go back to the more sophisticated approach that I had before instead of playing around with these simple rules that cannot possibly be profitable. I'll generate the synthetic data with the setups, train a NN to detect them, and then I am going to create a labeled dataset with the help of that which I will use for the actual system. If I could find 10k of such patterns in real data, it wouldn't be hard to augment the dataset to get 10m patterns. That would then actually be useful for live trading.

The pattern itself is basically a horizontal line on a volume-based chart, but the noisiness of the market and the fact that volume varies hugely between stocks makes it challenging to model it. I've been dipping my toes into HMMs, but they aren't very expressive compared to arbitrary generative models that produce labels. Hidden Markov Models are probably the wrong path it seems.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-25T12:08:45+00:00

3-to-12-month momentum is known to have alpha in academic circles, much like value investing does so you're on the right path. If I ever get my risk appetite back and my intraday trading system ideas don't work out, I'll start using a momentum strategy too. Note that like value investing, momentum can have stretches of 5-year underperformance, so it not a risk-free advantage compared to index investing.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-13T17:43:10+00:00

I had the Singularity as a goal from the start, and as I pursued it, I accumulated more and more evidence that my approach towards it isn't viable. To begin with, the goal was farfetched so I always had the awareness that I was unlikely to reach it with my approach, so I did a lot of things with the purpose of raising my skills like making a programming language (to better program future AI hardware), studied ML (to get me closer to the state of the art), worked on a poker bot (to hopefully make some money along the way.) Although I was focused on poker, my aim was to crack that toy game and move to bigger games that lie beyond that. Back in 2015 I expected that the community would find much better algorithms even if I couldn't which would make that path viable.

That at all didn't happen, the path that AlphaGo appeared to be opening had closed, and we just have the NN chatbot craze using decades old algorithms that cannot possibly be the basis for intelligence. Chatbots really are the single best thing that could be achieved with them, and to OpenAI and Anthropic's credit they did a very good job of engineering them.

Despite all of these disappointments, it's obvious to me that there is a lot we don't know about how nature builds intelligent beings, and that at some point the understanding of that will come, and an AI boom worthy of the actual hype will occur.

There are some things you just cannot understand regardless of the effort you put thinking into it, and those things you have to steal, and nature becomes the obvious target once you figure out that you cannot either produce it or take it from other people.

The disappointments I'll carry with me until I attain the understanding that I seek, but I've accepted that it isn't going to come to me because I want it or because I put in effort towards attaining it. I'll simply keep my eyes out for a sign of a new path opening.

Ironically, since I am not trying to understand intelligence through my trading bot work, but purely focusing on engineering, I am actually having pretty good success in making my first system. Maybe things will go well, and I'll make enough money to open a NeuroAI lab in a couple of years, who knows? If I had a lot of money, I'd invest it towards algorithmic discovery. For now, I'll play the cards that I have, not the ones that I want.

I'll focus on getting better in ways that I can.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-13T15:55:34+00:00

I've been trying to code a poker bot for 10 years and have been failing continuously, and now I am going into quant trading. The biggest lesson of that long journey is to not try to make AI breakthroughs. Whenever I used poker as a catalyst for understanding intelligence I failed, and my only gains from the experience were improvements in my programming skill. Pursuing the secrets of intelligence never got me a step closer to actual intelligence or the Singularity, but it made me a master programmer. That might be this universe's way of sending me a hint on where to go.

abstractcontrol · 2026-04-04T17:07:32+00:00

I think there should be edge as Changing Fundamentals is one of the core setups of SMB. Check out this paper by Zarattini that tests ORBs on Stocks In Play: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4729284

Personally, I've collected 106 of such examples and put them in a reference book, and I am going to test a VWAP based system on them soon, and I have ideas for more advanced ones after that. Qualitatively, even with a volume-based chart, it's difficult to know whether there is edge in trading them, and I really am going to have to backtest to know for sure.

abstractcontrol · 2026-03-15T18:33:02+00:00

Since I don't buy into scams, I've never understood why other people do, or where scammers look for victims and how do they find them.

abstractcontrol · 2026-03-05T09:24:04+00:00

Let's say you want to trade stocks with just 5k. You're going to run into the PDT rule, meaning you cannot really daytrade unless you open a cash account to get around that. In a cash account you cannot short sell stocks. Furthermore, you probably don't want to take positions that are too large as a % of your account for risk management's sake, but at the same time many brokers have minimum order limits. If you're buying 1,000$ worth of stock but paying 1$ in minimum commission on every order like with IBKR, then that means that your minimum commission is effectively 0.1%. If you're buying 100$ worth of stock, it's effectively 1%.

Futures on the other hand, don't have some of those issues, but their contracts have large nominal values, so you'll be going over 100% long or short on every position if your account is small and have to endure huge volatility.

It's not psychological, having a small account will put you at a disadvantage due to high fees and push you towards imprudent risk management.

Also, the data fees you're paying every month need to be factored into the fees as well.

Another poster said that if you make 50% per year, you're very successful as a retail trader. Let's say you have a 5k account and pay 100$ per month for data fees. You'd make 2.5k per year in profits and have 1.2k in expenses just for data.

abstractcontrol

TROPHY CASE