tradimo - $36,000 stock picking competition

On May 02 2013 04:21 Creem wrote:
I strongly advice against participating in short term trading. It's generally a fool proof way to lose all your money. The absolute majority of people that try day /swing trading are losing money in the long run, but of course you only hear about the 0,001% of the people that actually succeed.

On May 02 2013 04:21 Creem wrote:
I strongly advice against participating in short term trading. It's generally a fool proof way to lose all your money. The absolute majority of people that try day /swing trading are losing money in the long run, but of course you only hear about the 0,001% of the people that actually succeed.

On May 02 2013 07:40 Saumure wrote:
Can I still play if i missed week 1?

On May 02 2013 18:30 laegoose wrote:
On Tradimo website it is said that they tested their basic forex strategy on history, and got 40% annual income. Basic strategy is 15 pages long, and is based on 3 very simple indicators.

It looks like a pure lie to me. They _may_ have got 40% if they overfitted/tuned their algorithm based on whole history itself. But it was a dirty experiment, and algorithm will not win in future. It will be breakeven itself, and you pay fees for each transaction.

I'm poker professional myself. In poker you can model the strategy of your opponent based on history or GTO in some spots. There are good strategies, and bad strategies, you can calculate ev in many spots. On the market you know nothing, and looking at simple "candles" and "fractals" can't give you any advantage.

We can't verify or falsify your theory - but most experts don't think this is the case.

On May 03 2013 01:52 marcesr wrote:
Great idea! We still dont have enough pointless trading in this world!

On May 03 2013 07:55 GrandInquisitor wrote:
Man, things like this are the worst way to get into investing

Open a Vanguard account and put your money in an index fund or Target Retirement Date fund. There, you're already investing optimally.

Everyone's investments eventually converge to the market. You can't beat the market in the long run, so don't be the sucker that pays high fees trying to do so.

On May 03 2013 07:55 GrandInquisitor wrote:
Man, things like this are the worst way to get into investing

Open a Vanguard account and put your money in an index fund or Target Retirement Date fund. There, you're already investing optimally.

Everyone's investments eventually converge to the market. You can't beat the market in the long run, so don't be the sucker that pays high fees trying to do so.

On May 03 2013 08:42 micronesia wrote:

If you spend every waking minute pouring through financials, news, and trends, you actually can get an edge. It's extremely difficult and probably not worth the effort for most people though.

On May 03 2013 21:07 GrandInquisitor wrote:


This is hilarious. You're going to outcompete millions of very highly-paid people with much faster computers, massively more capital, and significantly greater expertise in subject areas, because you read the WSJ and watch CNBC?

It reminds me of all the personal investors that bought into the Facebook IPO.

There's a reason why Morgan Stanley spends tens of millions of dollars on extremely fast connections to shave off milliseconds from their trades. If you identify a good deal, it's already too late.

If you want to just gamble, sure, whatever, it's your money.

But that is a very different concept from investing. You cannot do better than the market in the long run, and so if your investments' expense ratio is higher than 0.5-1% you're already falling behind.

I don't have a problem with tradimo in particular. I'm sure if you want to do it, then tradimo is fine and not trying to rip you off. But I just want to clear up this mindboggling misconception that investing ought to mean buying and selling stock.

On May 04 2013 07:01 GrandInquisitor wrote:
My criticism was directed at high-frequency trading, but applies equally well to picking stocks in general. No one, a priori, beats the market picking stocks. You can look backwards and pick out some people that beat the market previously, but going forwards none of them continue to overperform the average.

So if you go down that path, you're either paying someone for "knowledge" that won't particularly help you, spending too much time, creating potential tax inefficiencies, and/or paying transaction costs. Any of those four will set you back compared to investing in the market as a whole. And it is definitely not the way to "start out" investing.

On May 04 2013 00:07 micronesia wrote:
No. I didn't say that. There is a tremendous amount of information available (some at a slight fee) for people who are willing to do research prior to investing their money. CNBS and the WSJ aren't particularly useful since everybody sees what they are saying. It's people who do their own detective work who have a chance of being successful in the long run. This is incredibly time consuming though.

I don't see the relevance. Personally, I thought buying into the fb ipo was a terrible idea.

That fact that you brought up the facebook IPO in response to my comment earlier about personal investing leads me to believe you didn't actually understand what I meant. Hopefully this post is clearing it up.

There is more than one way to invest. If your goal is high frequency trading then it's extremely difficult to compete unless you have experience working in the field and have the same hardware, software, brokers, and connections, as you said. However, you don't have to use high frequency trading strategies in order to make money. You just have to make good decisions, even if your average holding time is 2 weeks or 4 years. Granted, there are no guarantees. Personally, the strategy I would be most inclined to use would be pure long-term value investing a la Margin of Safety.

You may notice I advised people not to do this despite the fact that it's possible to successfully manage your own money (if you put a lot of time into it). Most people are just going to lose out. To say that you can't beat index funds in the long run is nonsense. There are people who do it religiously. I am not one of those people lol.

You should invest according to your needs. If you don't feel like studying the financials of companies and doing research constantly, then your method of investing is far more appropriate than day trading for pretty much anyone. Still I don't see the need for you to make the claim that any type of investing other than the super-simple strategy you suggest is automatically doomed to fail. How did you arrive at that conclusion?

By the way I'm pretty sure there are a few people who will start playing with virtual money through this competition, do really well for a week or two, think they must be good investors, and start investing with real money as a result. That is not the way to do it.

On May 02 2013 04:21 Creem wrote:
I strongly advice against participating in short term trading. It's generally a fool proof way to lose all your money. The absolute majority of people that try day /swing trading are losing money in the long run, but of course you only hear about the 0,001% of the people that actually succeed.