Comments

• By bko 2025-06-1917:373 reply

  I'm very skeptical of systems that claim to help with trading signals. Primarily because if you had a system, then you would use it yourself. Trading is pretty much a zero sum game especially when it comes to signals. If you had a profitable signal and you publicized it, it would disappear almost immediately.

  If your performance is correct and you're getting 200% per year, why sell the sauce for $20 a month?

  I would just post the historical and open trades. Charge a subscription if you want to get exactly when you're selling them, otherwise release them on a few week lag to incentivize subscription. But give the rest away for free as you want others to pile in to your trade.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1917:552 reply

  This is typically true for day trading signal services. I'm very skeptical of them too. I've tried many of them and none worked for me. There are a lot of scams.

  The best model I tried was from The Technical Traders. They offer a trend based model for SPX/QQQ and they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now.

  We were inspired by their service and wanted to take a modern spin on trend based models with a more affordable price point (they charge $2500yr).

  Trend changes don't happen all that frequently. Therefore, they wont disappear immediately either. Timing trend changes correctly can make a huge difference.

  By fasthands9 2025-06-1921:17

  Even then you have to be careful.

  It would be trivially easy to build an algo that beats the market 90% of years but 10% has huge losses. Just construct a slightly levered portfolio, with some protection against minor losses, but totally exposed to big losses.

  If you sold that, it would appear like its working for awhile and you'd probably have lots of trusted customers by the time it fails.

  (I'm a bit cynical, I worked in finance briefly, and I realized the fund we were selling to investors was essentially this)

  By ImPostingOnHN 2025-06-1918:071 reply

  > The best model I tried was from The Technical Traders. They offer a trend based model for SPX/QQQ and they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now.

  - Has that been independently verified?

  - Have they only been trading for 10 years?

  - How do we make sure this isn't a case of chance + survivorship bias?

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1918:141 reply

  Not sure, but I personally used their service for 2y and they're the real deal. Looks like they've been around since 2008. So almost 20y now. The main guy that runs it (Chris V) is top notch. I'm not affiliate with them in anyway but I would highly recommend their service to anyone.

  By ImPostingOnHN 2025-06-1918:241 reply

  - From where, then, did you get the info that "they consistently outperform buy and hold for 10+ years now"?

  - What does "they're the real deal" mean?

  - Two years is not enough to test a strategy like this. 20 years would be better better, but it sounds like they already did that and the strategy fails half the time (hence the 10-year claim)? Does it fail randomly, or did they market a strategy that worked for the first 10 years, then didn't, and now have a new strategy with the same claims?

  I'm asking these questions because people usually work hard for their money, and when someone makes (or relays) a claim that they can consistently multiply it better than expected, skepticism and scrutiny is imperative.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1920:161 reply

  They're the real deal means they're not a scam.

  I don't know everything about their business. I recommend just looking at their website. They've been in business for nearly 20y and have consistently outperformed buy & hold.

  By ImPostingOnHN 2025-06-1920:211 reply

  > they're not a scam.

  Nobody explicitly said it was a scam, just that the claims are questionable and unverified. There's certainly no shortage of people on the internet who claim to have a get-rich-quicker-than-average scheme with claims exactly along these lines. Obviously those claims should be verified.

  > I recommend just looking at their website.

  A random website can't be trusted as an unbiased source about itself. I did check their website, but couldn't find anything there regarding your claims that was independently verified.

  > [Chris has] consistently outperformed buy & hold [for 10+ years].

  This is literally one of the most common hook/marketing lines from investment advice "businesses"/scammers.

  ---> Where did you learn this? <---

  ---> How do you know it is true? <---

  ^--- These questions should be answered if one wishes to avoid scams, just as a general life rule.

  > They've been in business for nearly 20y

  If Chris has been in business for 20 years, and Chris' strategy has worked for 10 of those years, that means Chris' strategy works 50% the time.

  Thus, even if the claims of beating the market for 10 out of 20 years were true, that could be easily explained by random chance.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1921:281 reply

  There must have been a misunderstanding.

  They've been around since 2008 and appear to have beaten SPX yearly since then.

  I'm sure he has thousands of people that will vouch for him. Ask around on Reddit, etc. if you're curious.

  By ImPostingOnHN 2025-06-1922:261 reply

  > They've been around since 2008 and appear to have beaten SPX yearly since then

  =====> Where did you learn that? <=====

  ====> How do you know it is true? <====

  I appreciate that you built a cool thing, and appreciate even more that you're sharing it (even if you're selling too, I respect hustle).

  That said, struggling with the concept of hypothesis/claims testing isn't a reassuring look for someone selling an investment product.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1923:242 reply

  Thanks!

  My claim is that The Technical Trades (TTT) was the only service that worked for me. I stand by that. And I have no affiliation with TTT. Beyond that, please contact Chris if you want more detailed proof of their track record.

  By ImPostingOnHN 2025-06-204:03

  You're selling an investment strategy, and the below two questions speak to how how you evaluate investment strategies.

  > [TTT] appear to have beaten SPX yearly since [2008] ⁰

  Where/how did you learn that they "appear to have beaten SPX yearly since 2008"?

  How did you evaluate the truthfulness of that claim?

  0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322687

  By IAmGraydon 2025-06-200:111 reply

  Of course it’s a scam. The product they’re selling is hope, not actual trading intelligence.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-200:361 reply

  Care sharing how you came to that conclusion? We've been completely transparent about everything we've built since the start. And our trades are transparent as well.

  By IAmGraydon 2025-06-2018:02

  This is simple economics. As someone else stated, if this worked at all, you would have poured all of your resources into investing your own money or starting a fund to manage others' money. If you could beat the market by just 5%, you would be a billionaire within a very short amount of time as everyone would bring you their money. Instead, you decided to build a website and sell it to others for $20 per month. Surely as someone so knowledgeable in markets, you realize that selling something so valuable for so little would not happen.

  I stand by my statement - your product is false hope and is a scam, as all of these systems are. Some sucker who doesn't understand that the best move is to just buy the broad market an hold reads your marketing, buys it, and pays you. What you've sold him is certainly not the ability to make more money. You and I know he won't do that unless by pure luck. What you've sold him is a sense of hope that he will make money, and the ones who often fall for this do so because they've gotten themselves into financial problems with trading and want to believe that this is the system that will fix it all for them. That hope is a very addictive drug that will last as long as he can hold on to the lie.

  If you're ok with that being your business model, that's your right. It isn't illegal. In my opinion, however, our society is completely overloaded with people who take advantage of others while adding zero value.

• By helsinki 2025-06-1920:472 reply

  If you’re making real money trading, you’re not telling people about it.

  By dataviz1000 2025-06-1921:101 reply

  I set out on a journey to learn quantitative trading based on signals. The first thing I did was study linear algebra, calculus, statistics, probability, and deep learning. Four months in, I’m on chapter 11 of a deep-learning time-series forecasting book, working through the problems when the author mentions that, to date (it has changed since), there hasn’t been a published paper proving deep learning works better than traditional statistical analysis—i.e., everything in scikit-learn. That sucked.

  So I moved on to the next step. There’s an industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue from blogs and videos on how to trade. For several months, I tested each of these strategies using a backtesting library, vectorbt. People had blogs and videos about using XGBoost and LSTM with other deep-learning libraries—every single one failed.

  There’s so much BS in the industry, and I got sucked into the rabbit hole. At least I’m honest enough not to take advantage of other people. Maybe I’ll start a YouTube channel where I backtest every strategy to show everyone that they all fail—and explain why.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1921:163 reply

  Anything that is related to HFT or day trading is almost impossible in my experience as well. The big funds can do it but I dont think retail has a chance with these approaches.

  Have you researched trend or stage analysis? They're slower strategies and dont offer the get rich quick hype, but they do have far better success when done well.

  By sheepscreek 2025-06-1921:331 reply

  Yeah, I think all arbitrage setups of any kind are already being exploited by those with a hard to replicate edge (nano second execution/latency, very very deep pockets - typically your large market makers like Citadel). Just think about it: Jim Simons (RIP) had been doing it for longer than most of us have been alive.

  Pretty soon AI won’t be optional, it’ll be the only way to run a profitable quant shop.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1922:05

  Agreed

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1921:16

  Btw I think your YT channel would be a good idea.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1920:571 reply

  What about Hedge funds?

  By HenryBemis 2025-06-1921:021 reply

  They want _your_ money as well as their profits, because they will charge you some nice fees irrespective if 'this year' was profitable or not.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1921:07

  The fees are no joke

• By dzink 2025-06-1916:391 reply

  The market is a battlefield of adversaries. For someone to cash out on a signal profitably, the others have to get less. A signal system is then easily abused by the signal maker who takes a position before hustling a bunch of people to take it. Or it is abused by a hedge fund or market maker who does the same and raises spreads on you when you are trying to make trades, etc.

  By wolfman1 2025-06-1917:36

  That's a fair concern.

  Because TrendFi is a trend based model, the signals are not for HFT or day trading. Instead, we identify major market shifts that play out over weeks or months. This long timeframe means the signals are less vulnerable to the immediate front running or spread manipulation that plagues short-term signals.

  Also, the AI's ability to self optimize after trades means the underlying parameters are not static. If external players were to try and consistently game the signals, the system is designed to adapt to those new dynamics.