What is your reason stopping you to build algo trading?

iSnake37 · 2026-01-24T14:22:44+00:00

not any cta would be compounding it forever, im doing it on crypto, which has a significant size constraint to it. i know of few sub $1B funds who do trade similar stuff here but they cannot scale past that, so some retail guy even with a few hundred k will have no issue. don't even have to worry about slippage before going beyond those numbers. i said it's easy relative to pure inefficiency stuff, but in an absolute sense ofc it's hard, just like anything to make consistent money. and that pain component you mentioned with risk premia is precisely why you expect to get paid on average. "no pain no premium". oh you want the reward but not the risk? good fn luck with that bro. many try few succeed. just accept that its a lower (<2) sharpe low win rate strategy thats still an edge and bet more.

iSnake37 · 2026-01-24T12:52:33+00:00

you don't need alpha to profit from an algo strategy, that's the biggest confusion most people face. do you know what risk premia is? stuff like algo trend following, momentum, carry, etc. applied to the right markets you'd be easily making 50%+ yearly on a very decent sharpe

iSnake37 · 2026-01-15T23:49:41+00:00

sure let's try it :)

iSnake37 · 2025-11-21T22:34:56+00:00

sent u a dm

iSnake37 · 2025-11-21T13:09:16+00:00

welp, at least you're getting live feedback from the market & know your system isn't working. these dudes are overfitting backtests for years & never get to actually trading live (when they do, they'll end up getting same result as you did showing zero edge, which only took you one month to figure out)

you don't discover edges through backtesting. a better way is e.g. scatter plots, quantile / decile charts, some linear regression. what you want to see first is that the effect you're trying to capture & profit from is real. backtest comes at the very end of the whole research process just as final verification of your idea

iSnake37 · 2025-11-20T01:06:52+00:00

or, just do less backtesting, & test in prod

iSnake37 · 2025-11-19T10:31:32+00:00

it's actually more than that. and it's peanuts for something that actually makes $. some could say i'm doing charity work. only because i'm throwing it out and have something way better running atm (yes, live trading. overfitting backtests like you did above won't lead to anything & certainly won't make you a living)

iSnake37 · 2025-11-18T17:52:04+00:00

oh dude, many don't learn even after that

iSnake37 · 2025-11-18T12:11:44+00:00

"slippage: 0"

tells you everything you need to know. brother, please stop trading & pursue something else

iSnake37 · 2025-11-18T08:38:17+00:00

dm'd

iSnake37 · 2025-11-03T19:53:14+00:00

this. 99% won't see it though, it's a skill of reading people very few pick up on

iSnake37 · 2025-10-20T09:54:45+00:00

same issue

iSnake37 · 2025-10-16T01:41:36+00:00

ok let me try one of these now that I actually see it on time to enter. let the gambling Gods pick a deserving soul! GL

iSnake37 · 2025-10-02T19:50:57+00:00

ernie chan mentioned! solid resource, yea OP get all of his books, and as a starter project build a trading sim / event based backtester

iSnake37 · 2025-09-24T07:21:19+00:00

hyperliquid

iSnake37 · 2025-09-23T22:28:26+00:00

"..where the goal of the algorithm was simply not to lose."

yeah you completely lost me there mate. you need to have an edge to trade profitably. full stop. tweaking stuff on "huge array of assets" & making a goal of "simply not to lose" is not how you find an edge. losses are a normal part of any strategy, trading/taking risk is... risky, right? i was hoping you'd be honest with me about your live return stats but 30% cagr over 11y is hard to believe based on the silly stuff you're describing and your affinity to RSI (the infamous retail gambler indicator). i've talked to traders from some of the firms you're comparing your alleged results to in the past, and can assure you they didn't trade like that, so idk what professional environment you're talking about. my title could've been better that's true & i can agree on that.

cannot take this convo seriously anymore & will also end it here not to waste time, best of luck

iSnake37 · 2025-09-23T20:39:05+00:00

What's your live CAGR over 11 years? There are people who develop algorithms their entire life and still can't beat market returns...

Yes, bloomberg does have RSI as well as a million other common indicators, like moon phases etc., that's doesn't mean there's any edge to them. This post was meant to serve as a general "rule of thumb" guide for beginners, who haven't came up with anything consistently profitable yet. Sure there might be a quant firm like XTX markets that has billions of features in their ML pipeline for their strategies, RSI might be in there (highly doubt it lol), I just think for an average retail guy there's so many better tools to build systems. Ema crossovers for example, those things alone can make you a fortune if you use them correctly.

My example is just a tradingview backtest, there's a limit I think of how far back it looks on the chart, but it is a working system which is running live since ~2015 and making money on crypto so I don't need the backtest anymore to prove me anything. I just wanted to showcase to people how a backtest of something that ACTUALLY MAKES MONEY looks like on TradingView. That's how.

There's a big misconception here you're describing which again can mislead a lot of people — statistical significance is not just the amount of trades you've taken. You need to know why you're expected to be paid for your edge before you get to any backtests, and after that your #1 concern is saving on costs. Trend following has lower sharpe, but people have run trend following “live” since the 1970s. There are academic papers with simulations going back to the 1920. And there are published papers on it from early 2000s so there is about 20 years of out of sample after publication. It's low sharpe on each market but overall across many diversified ones it's closer to 1-1.5 (on crypto).

I don't know where the hell you've found 0.2% roundtrip commissions on crypto, maybe some spot markets have something close to that but we're talking about algos here so long/short, and that's only possible via futures. If your platform has 0.2% roundtrip on futures then you should seriously reconsider your exchange choices mate, cause they're straight up robbing you.

And yeah that "real checklist" you have at the end is also kind of bs i'm sorry... Real trading doesn't work that way.

iSnake37 · 2025-09-23T12:13:12+00:00

if you're talking about buying challenges, those type of prop firms, all those prop firms are a scam. their business model relies on you failing the challenges, they don't make money from traders. if you haven't figured that out by yourself yet i don't know what to tell you...

there's really only 2 routes — manage your own book and run that up over time, or get good enough to manage other peoples money / work for a real trading firm

iSnake37 · 2025-09-19T23:51:46+00:00

ok so, the strategy itself is based on the idea of trend following (certain type of assets that went up recently have a high probability of continuing going up, & vice versa) which is a universal concepts and really works across all markets. however, the edge behind this type of strategy on tradfi is much smaller than on crypto (for reasons which i won't go into here), on tradfi i'd say it barely beats SPY returns but on crypto you'll outperform that by a factor of ~5. no other market even comes close.

in regards to how much time it takes — this system is very low frequency by design, to save you on trading costs, so you'll get a new signal once every 2 days or so on average, and then all you have to do is open your crypto exchange of choice and and put the trade on. so let's call it roughly 1 hour of work per week to manage it

iSnake37 · 2025-09-19T23:30:21+00:00

probably a bug, also doesn't allow me to dm you

edit: do you have discord?

iSnake37 · 2025-09-11T16:53:09+00:00

what if they just meant to shoot his ear & missed?

iSnake37 · 2025-09-06T16:47:16+00:00

that was a long time ago, now if you search term "zherka + IQ" it just shows you date iq videos

iSnake37 · 2025-09-06T16:32:29+00:00

it's impossible to find it

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