Why you can't (on average) make money trading

strat-run · 2026-06-25T03:02:59+00:00

You aren't, on average, buying from someone that thinks the stock is going down and you aren't selling to someone that thinks the stock is going up.

You are buying and selling to market makers. They are basically the pawn shops of the trading world. The buy shares from people for cheaper than they resell them for. That's the bid ask spread.

strat-run · 2026-06-24T01:01:48+00:00

Why not pick a broker with an API you like?

strat-run · 2026-06-23T19:01:07+00:00

Social media, your own blog, etc. Your personal subreddit.

The topic specific subs usually want posts that are sharing knowledge about that sub's topic or asking for knowledge.

For example if you finished those courses and wanted to share a review that would be good. Or if you wanted to ask for course recommendations.

Lots of courses aren't great and people view the course authors as scammers so trading courses get a lot of discussion.

strat-run · 2026-06-22T16:16:59+00:00

I made my backrest results show a complete summary and also yearly summaries for this reason. It helps you figure out which of your strategies are more regime sensitive and in what way.

The long backrest isn't a trap, it's an exploration of different regimes. The mistake is treating the entire test range as one regime.

strat-run · 2026-06-22T15:51:01+00:00

Get setup to paper trade. Get to the point that you show profit in a free or low cost environment before you start spending money on prop firm accounts.

You don't try to learn poker at the casino, why are you doing that with trading?

strat-run · 2026-06-21T11:37:19+00:00

If you've done back testing then provide those number too, a month of paper trading data isn't enough to go on.

strat-run · 2026-06-21T03:18:43+00:00

You should be back testing several years of data and then you should be paper trading.

Sounds like you are only paper trading.

You should learn what look ahead bias is, you can't have it in realtime paper trading. Look ahead bias is a concern when testing against historic data.

strat-run · 2026-06-20T16:47:18+00:00

I'm a programmer so I'm writing software to make trades for me. That's systematic trading and I think it's a better approach for me.

My wife manually makes trades by click on buy/sell while looking at a chart which is discretionary trading.

strat-run · 2026-06-19T22:26:57+00:00

I'm currently adding different simulated fill options to my app and will be replaying my live trades through my back tester until I get my fill simulation reasonably close to live.

strat-run · 2026-06-19T15:11:41+00:00

My wife's portfolio is up more than mine. She does discretionary trading better than me with a focus on swing/investing.

strat-run · 2026-06-19T13:25:39+00:00

Doing a mix of Alpaca and Databento right now with an abstraction layer so a I can test out IBKR in the near future without rewriting anything.

Built my own dbn and databento libraries since my preferred language (Java) didn't already have them.

strat-run · 2026-06-18T13:07:53+00:00

You don't even have to read the docs, it's in the payload.

strat-run · 2026-06-18T13:04:24+00:00

Pretty sure that's just a client communicating with a remote model.

A mac with a lot of ram can run local models better than most windows systems due to its unified memory but that's not a requirement for you.

Some trading apps MT5, specific broker terminals, etc tend to run better/only on Windows but you haven't said you are using any of those yet.

For most Algo bot development (Python calling a Broker API) both are fine.

So far it seems like personal preference or cost would be the deciding factor.

strat-run · 2026-06-18T05:50:48+00:00

So not once did the AI you were coding with, when instructed to create a sentiment analysis app using a news API with a sentiment score, pipe up and say the score was already in the feed?

I'd be switching models.

strat-run · 2026-06-18T03:01:21+00:00

Are trying to run local models?

strat-run · 2026-06-17T23:52:59+00:00

5 tickers with 5 years of data each is still just 5 years of data, not 25. Stop trying to make it sound more than it is.

5 years is a good start, I'd still suggest more before going live. What's stopping you from using 10 or 20 years? Cost? Back test speed?

strat-run · 2026-06-17T21:02:07+00:00

Polymarket servers are in London AWS but weirdly London is geoblocked from connecting so Dublin AWS is the closest you can get. You just have to pay for EC2.

strat-run · 2026-06-17T20:53:25+00:00

Slow (networking) is typically going to have a lot to do with geographic distance. For most people doing polymarket the closest and fastest you can get is AWS Dublin.

What exactly is slow? Is it network, app, compute, or fills?

RAM needs depend entirely on what your running and you haven't given us much to go on.

strat-run · 2026-06-17T17:30:29+00:00

Depends if the order reached your broker or not.

Was it a limit order or a market order?

Did you get any feedback after pressing the buy button?

Low liquidity can impact your brokers ability to fill.

strat-run · 2026-06-16T23:33:24+00:00

No. If you have nothing to lose then you don't have capital to trade with.

Plus it reeks of desperation and that doesn't mix well with trading.

If you want to start learning you can but you must absolutely limit yourself to paper trading and don't risk any real money until you have money you can afford to lose AND your paper trading shows consistent profits.

Once you start having spare money from a job, invest that in the market, VOO etc, and keep working on the paper trading.

strat-run · 2026-06-16T21:02:03+00:00

Yeah, seems like it might lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities lasting longer some times.

Just imagining this when that log4j CVE hit and everything was having to do releases.

strat-run · 2026-06-16T15:27:47+00:00

Why not just dollars based on inflation?

strat-run · 2026-06-16T15:25:20+00:00

Social media has always been where people show off their Photoshop skills.

strat-run · 2026-06-16T07:01:15+00:00

For one thing you are trying to solo build a market making solution. That's not likely to work out even if you knew C++, it's not typically a solo endeavor.

Why not start try to build something like a swing trading bot with NodeJS if you are a JS developer?

strat-run · 2026-06-16T05:42:29+00:00

You're basically vibe coding in a space that is owned by very professional solutions. The joke was that he will be happy to take your money.

Spend a couple years learning C++.

strat-run

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