This reminds me of the old story about how selling shovels and mining tools to the gold miners in the 1800s offered more guaranteed success than to actually mine for gold. I suppose the same could be said for many industries: Publishing companies earn more money than authors, youtube as a media platform probably makes more money and has a more sure thing business model than an individual who starts a youtube channel.
Thank you for the video. It's always good to remember that the financial market does not generate the money, it redistributes it. And if you don't see the one who is going to lose their money in the deal, it's probably you.
An interesting rabbit hole is the channels financial incentive is UA-cam Ad revenue. If a video including "algo trading is fake" gets more views than an algo trading strategy video, you have to wonder are the strategy videos fake, or does calling them fake get you more views therefore more ad revenue?
Thats a pretty good fucking question. After watching half-way through this video I realised that I shouldn't be listening to people talks so much. I should spend more time working on my trading. Only experience and time will tell you what is the reality of trading algos. I will continue to develop my algo no matter what shit head on youtube says and see what happens for myself. I'm taking this video with a single grain of salt.
@@RyeBreadSucks I'm not mad, just frustrated that I haven't progressed with my trading because I'm always in the search for answers on UA-cam and end up wasting my time watching videos like these that discourage me to do my own due diligence. The main message I got from this video is that algo trading is extremely hard and that there is almost zero chance of making a decent algo that gives you consistent returns unless you're an institution with big pockets.
I hear you it takes alot of time trying to figure out and decide what to do and what to believe is a true way to make money and not a scam kind of scheme to get money from you
It is possible it's just really hard it took me 3 years of learning reading coding testing and retesting to create a reliable system that makes decent money in the long run. There is just too many factors and most people give up early and overwhelmed pretty fast.
An additional benefit to “quant” trading that has nothing to do with Alpha is the elimination of emotion: as long as you can truly follow your systems. Having a system can be as simple as never going long when the asset you are looking at is below it’s 200 day moving average. This sounds almost idiotic in it’s simplicity, but I would say that 90% of all people I have shared this technique with have been unable to follow it, let alone anything else that is more complex. Following a simple 200 day rule could be the first step in reducing volatility and drawdown in your portfolio, thus making it more emotionally easy to actually stay invested. I’ve used this technique (along with a lot of more complex ones) as part of my toolbox for over 30 years and it has helped me out significantly.
Significantly in trading = ££££. 30 years , wow. You should be in millions , at least.Or managing tenth of millions.Yes , the 200 is a known thing and actually 300 seems to be more accurate. But there is also let's say market structure, that can offer you opportunities. Trading is a complex thing and people are different so there's no universal solutin .As about algo trading , I think a statistic several years ago showed how ''human'' traders had better results. Also saw a docu about an algo firm with some very bright guys that somehow went bust .
@@cooltrades7469 A couple different studies I've seen found that most technical indicators slightly improve performance when using longer period inputs. Market regime changes are what mess up most traders when they try to apply a single tool or toolkit to all situations. Re: algo firms going bust, there are plenty of them in the past two decades b/c most of them create and test a methodology that works at inception, but that market edge is perishable and erodes over time if they cannot sufficiently adapt and update their methodology to follow market conditions over longer timeframes. It's the same tool limitation problem, writ large with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.
@@bubbleboy821 Depends on whether the slope and concavity of the MA are positive or negative. If your MA is sloping upward, and especially if concavity is positive (showing upward acceleration), then yes, buying the dip is great. Downward slope and especially negative concavity would mean buying below the MA into an accelerating downtrend -- better to sell. John Maynard Keynes himself said the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. :P (I take issue with that quote though, since the main part of the fault lies with us for irrationally pitting our ego against the market's direction in the first place)
@@marekan1410 Over any large sample size of price data, I've found this to be true. But in my experience price data sets constantly see localized inefficiencies that demonstrate significant kurtosis in distribution. That is, price data is "streaky" and has both disproportionately larger and longer outlier tails AND narrower and more concentrated middle peaks. That kurtotic distribution represents an opportunity that is surprisingly easy to capture. Understanding time-volatility also helps, but is secondary. It may not be a viable model for you, but it has definitely been viable for me. There are a number of both traders and investment firms that have used this to build long term edges. Doesn't affect what I do, but it's a bit reaffirming to know that I'm using an established concept. But hey, I'll only have the final score in at the end of my life, and there'll still be a non-zero chance that it was just luck of the draw on my life's random walk.
Really good and instructive video on financial services as a whole. That being said, I think the algorithmic trading tutorials you're referencing are still useful for getting from 0 to 1. That is, how can one get to a point where you're actually analyzing data and coding primitive trading strategies. Once you get from 0 to 1, then you have the tools you need to research deeper and more complex machine learning strategies.
What most retails traders think that Alpha is just the excess return over the benchmark, whereas you have to consider risk adjusted return to compare it to benchmark. It is not alpha, if you beat the benchmark with over exposed and leveraging into riskier positions. And yes, it is not consistent as well.
If you look at the most successful hedge fund manager, Jim Simon, who has outperformed the market with an annual return of 66,1% before fees for his medallion fund from 1988 - 2018, it clearly shows that it requires the brightest minds in the world of mathematics, computer science and physics. The point is that most retail traders don’t have the necessary skills to analyze the right data and the right amount of data in order to produce strategies that can make alpha. Of course, that’s just how I analyze the situation. But most retail traders should definitely not use basic algo strategies like SMA 50 crossing the SMA 100
I am currently living off of my Algo trading gains. Took close to a year and around $27,000 in losses before I figured out how to become profitable. It's not as easy as it seems, but it's not entirely impossible
Thank you you're giving me hope I'm currently looking forward to learn python probabilities and finance to get an algorithm working. Can I ask about your studies or how much time did it took to be successful ?
You absolutely can find alpha as retail. Especially true for liquidity constrained strategies. Large funds are not going to bother making 200-500k annually from a strategy, it's way too small for them. For single trader retail it's worth it.
you are 100% correct I am a small retail trader and I only trade alpha, this guy doesn't understand direct access brokerages as well it seems, I have only watched a few minutes but its enough, changing the channel after this post
So, in other words, if you go into business for yourself and learn the business, to use the analogy from the book this person references, you can metaphorically mine a small portion of gold dust but, for a one person shop, that profit is worth it? (That is a genuine question, not a back-handed rebuttal)
He literally talks about how UA-cam videos about trading strategies are bullshit and then in the next breath offers trading strategies, without even missing a beat! 😂
The gold analogy is very good. And yes, nowdays alphas can't be found with a seive, they need to be studied with academic high-level data science approach. Just the same way these new gold mining machinery is designed and developed
Great video. You should make a video or series about the history of alpha. What sort of alpha strategies have been used in the last 10 years compared to the last 50 years or something.
Congratulations for your work! Could you do a video diving on market making? I put a series of questions under your video "understanding market makers" that you could use to make another one diving into this subject. How can a market maker (MM) make money with the bid-ask spread when you have many market makers acting in the market? How can the information of the order book be used to make money for MM? Why should they buy order books from other brokerage firms if they have already access to the order book of the stock exchange? This is still unfortunately a big black box! Thanks
@@mknight3488 no! 1. the publishes could publish without making money - like a community where people share knowledge so everybody wins 2. the publisher could make money and still publish good stuff - like when u buy a math book or whatever 3. its doesn't have to be "too risky" - nobody said u have to follow blindly ... u can still run backtests and judge the results on u're own
@@lennard4454 Super naive take.. Publishing costs money. Who incurs costs without expecting profit? There's a fundament difference in market psychology that you are missing. People that engage in the market are greedy as fuck - they like money, hence they enter the market where they can *hopefully* make money without working a 9-5 for some corporation and losing your soul. It's the exact same allure as gambling. Do you go up to professional gambler and expect them to tell you how they beat all the casinos? No, because the casino can see all the data and easily see what you are doing and then change their model to take advantage of the new trend, thereby making your winning strategy a losing one. If only a handful of people are using said strategy and no one knows, its not enough incursion on their current profitable strategy to motivate them to change their model. So, this greedy nature is mutually exclusive to sharing your profitable ideas with others that are going to exploit them to the point that they aren't usable any more and just moving on. I do algo trading myself but it's all custom built and does not use a standard static ruleset like most algo videos show. It's not good yet but its not losing money now and gets better over time (when I started it was losing badly in paper trading but its learning.) In a couple years working on it, I'll probably feel comfortable live trading it. But I'll NEVER share the algorithms with anyone. I'd just be throwing away nearly 10 years of work.
Strategy 1: Fee-based financial services (banks, hedge funds, retirement funds) Strategy 2: Bid-Ask spread, market making activities, provide liquidity and gain the spread between bid-ask Strategy 3: Guarantee commissions with every transaction clients make
I had some time and tested out several HUNDRED financial theories, and not one of them worked as advertised, which should be expected. Why would anyone release an effective algorithm? Ironically my only working bot was the first project I worked on when I knew nothing. I saw a potential pattern while watching some chargers, and it turned out to be surprisingly effective.
@@chillbackground4935😂😂 I’m sure everyone has the same thought as you… and I’m sure he won’t. Reason one, he spent all the time and money to test the algos, he deserves to be rich. Reason two, once it’s public it won’t work any more. But he already gave you plenty of information, right? From his brief description, you can reduce your search for a working algo by almost a HUNDRED fold. All we need to do is to figure out his hidden message and do one-tenth of his work.
Hey I won't obviously ask you for the algorithm but I'm looking to use python for trading and wanted to know how much time and/or what study did you do to get where you are. Have a great day
@@dawei6697 what I will say is that you have to check out the failures to see why they fail. And always always always use a benchmark. It’s near impossible to develop a working boy without a benchmark.
Interesting video. I've been trading 3 years, and I find it interesting that you and others think it's impossible to find reliable alpha. Nothing is absolute, but direction is still a 50/50 break, which is better odds than many places. Plus, there are many different areas in the market, all of which follow patterns. However, what is scary is the ability of market makers to swill in the info of retail buyers before essentially going against the majority of them. That does seem to possibly be a bridge too far.
I got tangentially interested in algo trading through a random video suggestion a few weeks ago. I watched a bunch of videos and I came to the realisation that the only guarantee is that the house always wins, and this video confirms that. Sure you *can* make money on the markets, but it's not a get rich quick scheme unless you're a) very lucky (and then it seems people try to ride the luck and lose it all), or b) a very talented risk-aware person.
Thank you for the great video. This is one of the clearest summary about the business models of the large institutions. I’m subscribing because I want to look at your older videos on python and ML. But I agree with Sarahvandistel though, the difference in target niche between institutional and retail traders means different decision-making strategies, hence computational models, should be used. I still think that algo trading for retail traders is a viable method. We just need to find the right strategy. Once we get rich we remain quiet about how we get rich 😂, like those who already figured it out
You can’t tell that hedge funds are juste interested by managements fees If they manage people money that because their performances and alpha are positive, that what bring more customers to trust them. So anyway, they have to trade with people money and have a great trading strategies to make return. What you can say, that those companies used others technics rather then juste predicting stock price. Some example are : hedging, statical arbitrages, means reversions, factor based models (using fundamentals).. and all of this drived by risk management So yes even big companies have strategies and trade on market and make money with that
Well algo trading and alpha discovery are two different things in my opinion. The first can be as simple as, buy at price x and sell at price y. The latter indeed is not as trivial and has high barriers to entry. Good video, really enjoyed it!
True, Interactive Brokers will let you as a retail trader use about six different ‘algo’ methods to buy/sell, but they really have nothing to do with alpha, only with different ways to enter/exit the market, e.g. not showing your full order size (‘iceberg’), attempting to buy below VWAP, etc.
@@ScottHz How would IB limit the kind of algos a trader uses? You are confusing some entry methods IB calls algo and not understanding what the word means in the context of typical algo trading.
@@cyberfunk3793who said anything about 'limit'? By 'let you', I mean IB provides them as part of their trading platform. That's why I put 'algo' in quotes, I know they're not the same ;)
Your information is very comprehensive, and I have learned a lot. I am in the retail trading business, but I know very little about investment banking. Thank you for sharing, I'm starting to understand a bit more.
This is exactly true…..I find it funny that people want to open trading academies to “teach everyone” thinking their edge will still maintain. The painful truth is not everyone CAN be successful….there needs to be losers for there to be winners.
Great video, kudos! I totally agree with you. If you are trying to use algorithmic trading tools and techniques to get alpha, you are probably wasting your time (and money). These tools and techniques seem to be much more useful for 1) monitoring the market (think TradingView alerts, e.g.) 2) managing risky situations (think stop losses) and 3) automating certain processes (such as re-balancing portfolios).
Curious what you think of guys talking about support/resistance, breakouts, scalping, etc. A lot of it seems harder to condense down to a fixed set of rules (and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to backtest), but you hear a lot of the same ideas coming from different people.
firstly thank you very much for your tutorials. Can you indicate a book or training focused in technical analisys? I'm a beginner and I need to learn more about it to be a good operator on this market. Thank you!
If you find a high beta stock (3>) and buy in a bull market or sell in a bear market (according to federal spending), surely you will find a significant annualised alpha since you are essentially playing 3x whatever the according market is.
You didn't really talk about algorithmic trading but rather on the business modell of the two different groups (directional vs non-directional). Thanks
Agree. Very misleading title. One doesn't have to know python. There is software out there that allows you to create your own algo and test it, which is far better than manual trading.
I would like to see maybe how these python ML products work? Just a simple demonstration. Can you find the ‘alpha’ with python? It is a curious question - can statistic modelling produce the desired outcome? Carlo
Any business is set up to make money by offering services. Financial services offering opportunities to make money same as a corner shop. It's a buyer's responsibility to be educated and knowledgeable in order to make money. Algo trading key benefit is to take away human emissions in decision making and follow trading rules.
"Let’s aim to be pessimistic when people online promise that someone/anyone with a novice level of python experience can create an algo trading strategy that consistently makes money. I will endeavour to never give in to this fallacy and aim to point it out to my viewers on this channel. " As someone who wrote their own python trading script I can agree with that, while it doesn't lose money it often misses good trades because conditions were not met, I certainly wouldn't pay for an algo bot even if I didn't know how to code.
I started backtesting some strategies with years of data on a 5m ohlcv timeframe. Got some strategies which make me around 800% ROI each year. And like each month almost the same amount of winning percentage. Still developing as a side project a real stable live trading bot to take these strategies into the practical world but I am very curious what you think about it? Would there be a high chance of this being over fitted for historical data or could it actually work and make profit because I backtested it with lots of data?
SO you can make 8X every year? I will wait until your Net worth be a Million dollar & you open A Hedge Fund Firm. Iff you can do that I will give you 1 grand for your Bullshit 😂😂😂
Hey I'm happy to hear that for you I want to get into algorithm trading and wanted to know what study did you do and how long did it took you to get where you are
Thank you for this video. There so many brokers out there - only selling crap! I’ve seen so many trading academies selling some of special platform (only theres) are able to make money. There business model are just selling a "crap education packages" starting at around $2k to $15k. Carlo
Got it - don't bother chasing alpha. Is there a way as a retail investor that we can reduce beta with minimal impact to our 0 alpha? Or are there no good, easily accessible beta-reduction strategies either?
To be fair, following the S&P 500 or buying ETFs are the best method at reducing beta. They're simply the easiest and less risky methods, but of course this will reduce your potential income. There is no such a thing as low-risk high reward investment, especially not in the short term. Long term investments are an another good example of reducing average volatility. But of course if you're not careful long term investments can be even riskier. Most big corporation's price will go up eventually... but there are a lot that may never go up, especially if they the corp uses the wrong strategy.
Wow, your strategy really worked wonders for me! I got 8 out of 9 and it's the best result I've had in a long time. Your advice has been invaluable in helping me improve my trading skills.
Most indicators are trend following and fail in flat markets. They also not work consistently throughout all assets. I am searching for price patterns with a high win rate.
So you should identify the trend: long/short/flat and use the corresponding bots. For example, for a flat trend you can use a grid bot between resistance and support. For trending bots there are plenty of strategies using moving averages, lucid SAR, DCA etc. Once you identify the trend it's easy to make steady money just don't be scared to use stop losses: The trend is your friend until the end of the trend 😉
Wow very good video, POV I didn't think of. So far from trading, I see that there a strategies that can help get that edge, but the best strategies are the ones that keep you in the trade longer while managing low risk. So for me (and this can change after writing this) that would be Supply and Demand, why? because that is literally what moves markets! Thank you for the video
The video is hard truth I guess for retail traders. But then in your view, do Retail traders have no hope? I have seen successful retail traders making good wealth? how to reconcile it? Thanks
Thank you for being the voice of reason. I only wandered down this rabbit hole because I work in the sector and the implications of algorithm and api programming calls is an interesting subject.
@@dataanalystbynight4375 Because no one who actually works "in the sector" (i.e developer) talks like this, since "Application Programming Interface Programming" doesn't make the slightest of sense
Just wondering, if an algo that is backtested that seems to work, is there a good chance it'll make money live ? Anybody have any experience with that ?
Only one way to find out I guess, try putting small amounts at first (I never did algorithm trading but I know sometimes you need to take a leap forward)
If your algo works (10 years or more) backtesing , you need to try it first on demo accounts live. If win in demo account then try with small amount real account. If it wins again its up to you :) I dont think algo will not work , when writing it you need to calculate all risks not profit. And it need be SIMPLE. Not complex , to work in different conditions. Algos in videos definetely not work even with backtesting ones :D Not copy paste them. But big benefit of algo is you can test your startegy.
I especially like trainers who talk about their crazy earnings and... encourage you to pay for their courses. It looks strange: usually those people who have money are not particularly interested in attracting all sorts of beggars and teaching them something.
Don't you like the UA-cam crypto or investments scam bot thread? Oh the markets are really hard and growth but I'm really glad I'm still able to make $xxxx a week. Then some one asks how and they name drop some unicorn guru with an email id or Whatsapp number in a funny format.
@@tonycallender7670 he claims to say that market works based on time which is false. And claims 100% win rate which is ridiculous. You just have to ask every ict trader for myfxbook and they usually dont have stats to back it up
What do you mean that you can't create a strategy that spits out a sharpe ratio of 10 in 3 lines of code? But...what about my moving average crossover idea???
Day Trade with AI: Theoretical Foundations for Discretionary, Algorithmic, and Diversified Trading with AI is a must read. The book explains exactly why you can't make money based on random short articles or videos you find online. Instead, traders must understand the finance principles and employ those principles as the basis of coding. Remember, market is efficient most of the time and historical stock prices contain no predictive information!
your strategies do work but it would be very nice of you if you make videos on how you study the candles and the market volatility/movement. Love from India.
Stop looking at the markets the same way everyone else does while expecting anything other than the same results as everybody else that fails. Find your own thing...
Why would anyone publish a money printing machine. Just motive alone is enough for me not to believe. Also there is no libraries that do time series forecasting with random forests (not a quant) maybe you guys know of some in python.
Anyone can go and buy a top 500 etf on the stock market and make 10-20% per year, not even watching the market with almost zero minimum capital requirements. Therefore it is reasonable that someone who puts in effort to learn and apply a trading strategy can make significantly more like 100-200% per year. It is not necessary to have any fancy equipment and programming works just as well as machine learning
@@seadotocancerdoto1565 the education that they give us is just for working for them.Nothing more or less. So you have to educate yourself by practicing.That knowledge is priceless and can't be found in any book.
Does the Black-Scholes equation ever come up in quantitative finance? I don't know too much about the equation but its supposed to be the scariest equation in modeling time evolution of markets/risk.
@@albertociampini6473 I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing. :D "simplistic" is a pretty nice euphemism for a formula that assumes and requires a constant value that can't be known in advance.
@Starvling k TLDR Blaming Black-Scholes as being "scary" is a scapegoat for human primal stupidity. I liken Black-Scholes to learning high school physics -- you're taught to calculate examples like the acceleration of a frictionless, spherical chicken with a uniformly distributed mass of 2 kg, sliding down a ramp in a vacuum. You're taught this grossly simplified abstraction b/c you don't yet have the capacity to factor real-life variables into the equation: air resistance, flapping wings, shedding feathers, chicken pooping, running around headless, etc. If you use that level of physics to build a rocket that subsequently blows up during launch, then out of ignorance blamed physics for being "scary", it'd be equivalent. The limitations of both Black-Scholes and that simplistic physics model were known and criticized by experts for decades prior, but you as the aspiring rocket scientist and hedge fund manager were too busy to listen. And then, what a terrible, tragic surprise. I think the news media latched onto Black-Scholes as "scary" because some academic sound bites pointed to it as the cause of the 1987 crash and the 2008 GFC. Or it may be a case of upset people looking for a causal factor to blame after the fact of the crisis event. TLDR they blame the use of Black-Scholes for contributing to systemic financial industry shortsightedness in not detecting and robustly protecting/hedging against outlier long tail risk. This is partly true -- Black-Scholes doesn't account well for long tail statistical outliers. Black-Scholes assumes constant volatility known in advance, which is not realistic. The volatility smile of options pricing shows that actual options pricing fudges the process with variable volatility -- implying high volatility for farther OTM options. The "smile" can also be skewed depending on situational bias to the upside or downside. A long tail event (market crash, whatever) is that one-in-a-million time when you pull that extremely high volatility lottery number. More crudely and regardless of whether the Black-Scholes equation was directly responsible, I think the majority of finance types are possessed by basic human risk-aversion and the impacts of risk/uncertainty on their paychecks, to the point of blindness. Most people pursue the holy grail of eliminating or fully knowing all risk. If they can quantify it, they can price it into their revenue models. But they get sloppy and conflate 98%, 99.9%, etc known risk with "effectively 100% known risk". And that works for a few years at a time, until a 0.01% outlier event number gets rolled on the dice of fate, and then everyone panics b/c their revenue models failed to account for it. Increasingly interconnected electronic global markets since the 90s have made it more likely for local outliers to be felt on a global level b/c someone somewhere decided at some point it was a good idea to chuck some investment funds into a high-risk developing market to chase lesser known, marginally higher returns. Thus during those years where the outlier event hasn't happened YET, week by week and quarter by quarter, every market participant is chasing down tiny percentage gains over their competitors, wherever an advantage can be found. That's what led banks to take on increasingly worse credit risks, then packaging those hot potato toxic assets up and shoveling them out the door for resale before the music stopped, leaving them holding the hot potato. "Everyone else is doing it profitably too, and the house of cards seems to be holding up just fine so far..." Because everyone thought their models effectively accounted for ALL risk, they pushed and abused the limits of the system, repealed various market safety mechanisms that were originally established after the Great Depression, and ultimately volunteered to become an industry case study in the Peltzmann effect (people are demonstrated to take on greater risks when they perceive they are protected adequately by safety equipment like seatbelts. Tragedies ensue when their PERCEPTION of safety overestimates the ACTUAL effectiveness of the safety equipment.).
@@dakaodo If the equation wasn't scary then everyone will be solving it. The only reliable solutions are stochastic (or monte carloish) based at best; those methods then end up proprietary.
Every trading educator ever:
-"Every other Strategies out there do not work. Read my book/take my course instead"
TLDR; He doesn't talk about winning strategies. He talks about fees and bid-ask spread.
So is it not that impossible to make money algo trading as this guy has us believe.
@@omairtech6711 its 100% possible. Banks dont trade manually. they trade our money with bots.
That’s why he gave you the warning why UA-camr Traders are fakes.
Bad info, bad analogy. Maybe learn more about both before you make a video giving bad info on stuff like this. It almost amounts to a red herring.
His secret Alpha was to entice us to see the video from start to finish to avail UA-cam monitization.
This reminds me of the old story about how selling shovels and mining tools to the gold miners in the 1800s offered more guaranteed success than to actually mine for gold. I suppose the same could be said for many industries: Publishing companies earn more money than authors, youtube as a media platform probably makes more money and has a more sure thing business model than an individual who starts a youtube channel.
brokerage firms earn more money than most successful traders
So your advise is for all of us to either open brokerage firms or quit trading and starve the brokerage firms into insolvency
@@nwoksh It's an insight, not a call to action
UA-cam has always lost money actually.
How The Bible led me to Islam ua-cam.com/video/aFMHH9Hp-OM/v-deo.html
Thank you for the video. It's always good to remember that the financial market does not generate the money, it redistributes it. And if you don't see the one who is going to lose their money in the deal, it's probably you.
An interesting rabbit hole is the channels financial incentive is UA-cam Ad revenue. If a video including "algo trading is fake" gets more views than an algo trading strategy video, you have to wonder are the strategy videos fake, or does calling them fake get you more views therefore more ad revenue?
Thats a pretty good fucking question. After watching half-way through this video I realised that I shouldn't be listening to people talks so much. I should spend more time working on my trading. Only experience and time will tell you what is the reality of trading algos. I will continue to develop my algo no matter what shit head on youtube says and see what happens for myself. I'm taking this video with a single grain of salt.
@@buyhighselllow8398 Seems like you're taking it with a whole mouthful of salt lol. Why so mad?
@@RyeBreadSucks I'm not mad, just frustrated that I haven't progressed with my trading because I'm always in the search for answers on UA-cam and end up wasting my time watching videos like these that discourage me to do my own due diligence. The main message I got from this video is that algo trading is extremely hard and that there is almost zero chance of making a decent algo that gives you consistent returns unless you're an institution with big pockets.
I hear you it takes alot of time trying to figure out and decide what to do and what to believe is a true way to make money and not a scam kind of scheme to get money from you
It is possible it's just really hard it took me 3 years of learning reading coding testing and retesting to create a reliable system that makes decent money in the long run. There is just too many factors and most people give up early and overwhelmed pretty fast.
Man I love this video man! you are truly good at explaining what a lot of people think is complex.
An additional benefit to “quant” trading that has nothing to do with Alpha is the elimination of emotion: as long as you can truly follow your systems. Having a system can be as simple as never going long when the asset you are looking at is below it’s 200 day moving average. This sounds almost idiotic in it’s simplicity, but I would say that 90% of all people I have shared this technique with have been unable to follow it, let alone anything else that is more complex. Following a simple 200 day rule could be the first step in reducing volatility and drawdown in your portfolio, thus making it more emotionally easy to actually stay invested. I’ve used this technique (along with a lot of more complex ones) as part of my toolbox for over 30 years and it has helped me out significantly.
Significantly in trading = ££££. 30 years , wow. You should be in millions , at least.Or managing tenth of millions.Yes , the 200 is a known thing and actually 300 seems to be more accurate. But there is also let's say market structure, that can offer you opportunities. Trading is a complex thing and people are different so there's no universal solutin .As about algo trading , I think a statistic several years ago showed how ''human'' traders had better results. Also saw a docu about an algo firm with some very bright guys that somehow went bust .
That's funny because I'd say buying below the 200 day moving average means that you're buying at a fire sale.
@@cooltrades7469 A couple different studies I've seen found that most technical indicators slightly improve performance when using longer period inputs.
Market regime changes are what mess up most traders when they try to apply a single tool or toolkit to all situations.
Re: algo firms going bust, there are plenty of them in the past two decades b/c most of them create and test a methodology that works at inception, but that market edge is perishable and erodes over time if they cannot sufficiently adapt and update their methodology to follow market conditions over longer timeframes. It's the same tool limitation problem, writ large with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.
@@bubbleboy821 Depends on whether the slope and concavity of the MA are positive or negative.
If your MA is sloping upward, and especially if concavity is positive (showing upward acceleration), then yes, buying the dip is great.
Downward slope and especially negative concavity would mean buying below the MA into an accelerating downtrend -- better to sell. John Maynard Keynes himself said the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. :P (I take issue with that quote though, since the main part of the fault lies with us for irrationally pitting our ego against the market's direction in the first place)
@@marekan1410 Over any large sample size of price data, I've found this to be true.
But in my experience price data sets constantly see localized inefficiencies that demonstrate significant kurtosis in distribution. That is, price data is "streaky" and has both disproportionately larger and longer outlier tails AND narrower and more concentrated middle peaks. That kurtotic distribution represents an opportunity that is surprisingly easy to capture. Understanding time-volatility also helps, but is secondary.
It may not be a viable model for you, but it has definitely been viable for me.
There are a number of both traders and investment firms that have used this to build long term edges. Doesn't affect what I do, but it's a bit reaffirming to know that I'm using an established concept.
But hey, I'll only have the final score in at the end of my life, and there'll still be a non-zero chance that it was just luck of the draw on my life's random walk.
Love your work. This is the first video that prospective traders should be watching.
Really good and instructive video on financial services as a whole. That being said, I think the algorithmic trading tutorials you're referencing are still useful for getting from 0 to 1. That is, how can one get to a point where you're actually analyzing data and coding primitive trading strategies. Once you get from 0 to 1, then you have the tools you need to research deeper and more complex machine learning strategies.
What most retails traders think that Alpha is just the excess return over the benchmark, whereas you have to consider risk adjusted return to compare it to benchmark.
It is not alpha, if you beat the benchmark with over exposed and leveraging into riskier positions. And yes, it is not consistent as well.
Very much agreed! So many algo-Tubers never show the MAE of their trades, nor show e.g. Sharpe Ratios.
Estimating Alpha is an ML problem.
If you look at the most successful hedge fund manager, Jim Simon, who has outperformed the market with an annual return of 66,1% before fees for his medallion fund from 1988 - 2018, it clearly shows that it requires the brightest minds in the world of mathematics, computer science and physics. The point is that most retail traders don’t have the necessary skills to analyze the right data and the right amount of data in order to produce strategies that can make alpha. Of course, that’s just how I analyze the situation. But most retail traders should definitely not use basic algo strategies like SMA 50 crossing the SMA 100
Thanks for keeping it real bro and not trying to sell me anything!
you are the product being sold
I am currently living off of my Algo trading gains. Took close to a year and around $27,000 in losses before I figured out how to become profitable. It's not as easy as it seems, but it's not entirely impossible
Thank you you're giving me hope I'm currently looking forward to learn python probabilities and finance to get an algorithm working. Can I ask about your studies or how much time did it took to be successful ?
@@C-ly-demathematical when person claims he is profitable in reality means he is not.
@@paulnyagini yeah ig sooo...
Are you using MetraTrader 5 to trade or is it some other software?
@@C-ly-dehi I am also in the process of program an algo trading system I think we could do it together
Your videos are like a rocket ship to success! Thank you for guiding us on this journey.😄
You absolutely can find alpha as retail. Especially true for liquidity constrained strategies. Large funds are not going to bother making 200-500k annually from a strategy, it's way too small for them. For single trader retail it's worth it.
you are 100% correct I am a small retail trader and I only trade alpha, this guy doesn't understand direct access brokerages as well it seems, I have only watched a few minutes but its enough, changing the channel after this post
So, in other words, if you go into business for yourself and learn the business, to use the analogy from the book this person references, you can metaphorically mine a small portion of gold dust but, for a one person shop, that profit is worth it? (That is a genuine question, not a back-handed rebuttal)
@@jerryc5743 Exactly. Not everyone in the marketplace is in direct competition with everyone else.
@@incremental_failure thanks 😀
Are you speaking from personal experience?
He literally talks about how UA-cam videos about trading strategies are bullshit and then in the next breath offers trading strategies, without even missing a beat! 😂
That my friend is manipulation at it’s finest and the first sign of a scammer.
My biggest alpha has been finding your channel.
I am a huge fan of your channel, Mr. QuantPy. Concise explanations and a great accent!
The gold analogy is very good. And yes, nowdays alphas can't be found with a seive, they need to be studied with academic high-level data science approach. Just the same way these new gold mining machinery is designed and developed
Title is misleading. The 3 strategies proposed to make money have nothing to do with alpha. But OK to know.
Great video. You should make a video or series about the history of alpha. What sort of alpha strategies have been used in the last 10 years compared to the last 50 years or something.
Great suggestion, I will try and work this in soon!
@@QuantPy thanks you for your great work 🙏
@@QuantPywhere is the video? Have you made it?
Yet another guys saying "everybody else is lying, but, come buy my stuff, 'cause I'm the only one who's telling the truth"
@LinuxIsBetter43Except iman. I hope 😂
those were not profitable trading strategies those were profitable business models..misleading title
Congratulations for your work! Could you do a video diving on market making? I put a series of questions under your video "understanding market makers" that you could use to make another one diving into this subject.
How can a market maker (MM) make money with the bid-ask spread when you have many market makers acting in the market?
How can the information of the order book be used to make money for MM?
Why should they buy order books from other brokerage firms if they have already access to the order book of the stock exchange?
This is still unfortunately a big black box! Thanks
Yes, I’ll make a video on all things market markers at some point
Love this video, I was searching for SOR and algorithmic trading on internet, thanks for sharing reality.
I can only disagree. It's possible, it's not easy, but it's definitely possible.
copying others algorithimics and standard code is too risky
its mentioned in step 1 at conflict of interest
@@mknight3488 no! 1. the publishes could publish without making money - like a community where people share knowledge so everybody wins 2. the publisher could make money and still publish good stuff - like when u buy a math book or whatever 3. its doesn't have to be "too risky" - nobody said u have to follow blindly ... u can still run backtests and judge the results on u're own
@@lennard4454 Super naive take.. Publishing costs money. Who incurs costs without expecting profit? There's a fundament difference in market psychology that you are missing. People that engage in the market are greedy as fuck - they like money, hence they enter the market where they can *hopefully* make money without working a 9-5 for some corporation and losing your soul. It's the exact same allure as gambling. Do you go up to professional gambler and expect them to tell you how they beat all the casinos? No, because the casino can see all the data and easily see what you are doing and then change their model to take advantage of the new trend, thereby making your winning strategy a losing one. If only a handful of people are using said strategy and no one knows, its not enough incursion on their current profitable strategy to motivate them to change their model. So, this greedy nature is mutually exclusive to sharing your profitable ideas with others that are going to exploit them to the point that they aren't usable any more and just moving on.
I do algo trading myself but it's all custom built and does not use a standard static ruleset like most algo videos show. It's not good yet but its not losing money now and gets better over time (when I started it was losing badly in paper trading but its learning.) In a couple years working on it, I'll probably feel comfortable live trading it. But I'll NEVER share the algorithms with anyone. I'd just be throwing away nearly 10 years of work.
19:44 he explicitely states that it is possible.
Strategy 1: Fee-based financial services (banks, hedge funds, retirement funds)
Strategy 2: Bid-Ask spread, market making activities, provide liquidity and gain the spread between bid-ask
Strategy 3: Guarantee commissions with every transaction clients make
I had some time and tested out several HUNDRED financial theories, and not one of them worked as advertised, which should be expected. Why would anyone release an effective algorithm? Ironically my only working bot was the first project I worked on when I knew nothing. I saw a potential pattern while watching some chargers, and it turned out to be surprisingly effective.
So basically your bot is an algo that works.
can you share with us your pattern
@@chillbackground4935😂😂 I’m sure everyone has the same thought as you… and I’m sure he won’t. Reason one, he spent all the time and money to test the algos, he deserves to be rich. Reason two, once it’s public it won’t work any more. But he already gave you plenty of information, right? From his brief description, you can reduce your search for a working algo by almost a HUNDRED fold. All we need to do is to figure out his hidden message and do one-tenth of his work.
Hey I won't obviously ask you for the algorithm but I'm looking to use python for trading and wanted to know how much time and/or what study did you do to get where you are.
Have a great day
@@dawei6697 what I will say is that you have to check out the failures to see why they fail. And always always always use a benchmark. It’s near impossible to develop a working boy without a benchmark.
Your trading strategies have helped me make consistent profits. Thank you for sharing them with us!
Love your video! Much appreciated.
I also love that book.
BT overfitting and ML.
Backtesting is like cash
Interesting video. I've been trading 3 years, and I find it interesting that you and others think it's impossible to find reliable alpha. Nothing is absolute, but direction is still a 50/50 break, which is better odds than many places. Plus, there are many different areas in the market, all of which follow patterns. However, what is scary is the ability of market makers to swill in the info of retail buyers before essentially going against the majority of them. That does seem to possibly be a bridge too far.
I got tangentially interested in algo trading through a random video suggestion a few weeks ago. I watched a bunch of videos and I came to the realisation that the only guarantee is that the house always wins, and this video confirms that. Sure you *can* make money on the markets, but it's not a get rich quick scheme unless you're a) very lucky (and then it seems people try to ride the luck and lose it all), or b) a very talented risk-aware person.
Thank you for the great video. This is one of the clearest summary about the business models of the large institutions. I’m subscribing because I want to look at your older videos on python and ML. But I agree with Sarahvandistel though, the difference in target niche between institutional and retail traders means different decision-making strategies, hence computational models, should be used. I still think that algo trading for retail traders is a viable method. We just need to find the right strategy. Once we get rich we remain quiet about how we get rich 😂, like those who already figured it out
Good work. Pretty much agree with you. Finding alpha is hard but not impossible. Technically speaking retail can do market making in the crypto.
How do you get initial liquidity for the AMM and compete against other big players such as uniswap?
@Xunning Liu I was talking about market making in centralized exchanges like binance. Making AMMs are not retail friendly.
If you’re paying ‘gas’, you’re not market making😂
You can’t tell that hedge funds are juste interested by managements fees
If they manage people money that because their performances and alpha are positive, that what bring more customers to trust them.
So anyway, they have to trade with people money and have a great trading strategies to make return.
What you can say, that those companies used others technics rather then juste predicting stock price. Some example are : hedging, statical arbitrages, means reversions, factor based models (using fundamentals).. and all of this drived by risk management
So yes even big companies have strategies and trade on market and make money with that
Well algo trading and alpha discovery are two different things in my opinion. The first can be as simple as, buy at price x and sell at price y. The latter indeed is not as trivial and has high barriers to entry. Good video, really enjoyed it!
no...
True, Interactive Brokers will let you as a retail trader use about six different ‘algo’ methods to buy/sell, but they really have nothing to do with alpha, only with different ways to enter/exit the market, e.g. not showing your full order size (‘iceberg’), attempting to buy below VWAP, etc.
@@ScottHz How would IB limit the kind of algos a trader uses? You are confusing some entry methods IB calls algo and not understanding what the word means in the context of typical algo trading.
@@cyberfunk3793who said anything about 'limit'? By 'let you', I mean IB provides them as part of their trading platform. That's why I put 'algo' in quotes, I know they're not the same ;)
Goodness this is a refreshing island of sanity in the ocean of madness that is financial youtube
Your information is very comprehensive, and I have learned a lot. I am in the retail trading business, but I know very little about investment banking. Thank you for sharing, I'm starting to understand a bit more.
The big question is, why would anyone share alpha? If alpha is shared , the participants would use it and it probably would not be alpha anymore.
People are dumb. They don’t ask big questions. These programs are to make herds of dumb investors for the financial companies to use to move markets.
Would it become beta then?
@@don_huzan It becomes Pi. Pi for the financial companies to eat.
@@tvviewer4500 haha good one
This is exactly true…..I find it funny that people want to open trading academies to “teach everyone” thinking their edge will still maintain. The painful truth is not everyone CAN be successful….there needs to be losers for there to be winners.
It's easier to show how hard finding alpha is by looking at hedge funds and which ones actually make money in the end. They are primarily after alpha.
And they are all Quant based on massive super computers.
@@HermanWillems not all, there are many 'stupid' hedge funds too ;)
Great video, kudos! I totally agree with you. If you are trying to use algorithmic trading tools and techniques to get alpha, you are probably wasting your time (and money). These tools and techniques seem to be much more useful for 1) monitoring the market (think TradingView alerts, e.g.) 2) managing risky situations (think stop losses) and 3) automating certain processes (such as re-balancing portfolios).
What's the basis for your opinion?
@@incremental_failureThis video (he says he agrees with the video). 😉
Good vid. Nice to see another Aussie. Subscribed.
Curious what you think of guys talking about support/resistance, breakouts, scalping, etc. A lot of it seems harder to condense down to a fixed set of rules (and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to backtest), but you hear a lot of the same ideas coming from different people.
thanks man, finally someone said that all straight:)
firstly thank you very much for your tutorials. Can you indicate a book or training focused in technical analisys? I'm a beginner and I need to learn more about it to be a good operator on this market. Thank you!
a bloke with his head screwed on! and he's an aussie too! awesome stuff mate
If you find a high beta stock (3>) and buy in a bull market or sell in a bear market (according to federal spending), surely you will find a significant annualised alpha since you are essentially playing 3x whatever the according market is.
- “Just time the market bro”
The best model is to simply control the market prices. That takes out all the guess work, Show them your stop loss so they can wipe out your trade.
You didn't really talk about algorithmic trading but rather on the business modell of the two different groups (directional vs non-directional). Thanks
He has to seek the alpha of the UA-cam algorithm somehow haha.
Agree. Very misleading title. One doesn't have to know python. There is software out there that allows you to create your own algo and test it, which is far better than manual trading.
New Subscriber - great video - a fellow fan of Dr, Prado
Thanks for sharing 😀👍 greetings from Colombia.
I would like to see maybe how these python ML products work? Just a simple demonstration. Can you find the ‘alpha’ with python? It is a curious question - can statistic modelling produce the desired outcome? Carlo
Any business is set up to make money by offering services. Financial services offering opportunities to make money same as a corner shop. It's a buyer's responsibility to be educated and knowledgeable in order to make money. Algo trading key benefit is to take away human emissions in decision making and follow trading rules.
"Let’s aim to be pessimistic when people online promise that someone/anyone with a novice level of python experience can create an algo trading strategy that consistently makes money. I will endeavour to never give in to this fallacy and aim to point it out to my viewers on this channel. "
As someone who wrote their own python trading script I can agree with that, while it doesn't lose money it often misses good trades because conditions were not met, I certainly wouldn't pay for an algo bot even if I didn't know how to code.
Fascinating video...
Thank you for sharing...
Always good to share knowledge and bring light to a topic...
brother I need your corner desk!!! Where did you get it?
Thank you for the thoughtful content! Very refreshing. I was beginning to think nobody but gurus and quacks created videos in this niche
I started backtesting some strategies with years of data on a 5m ohlcv timeframe. Got some strategies which make me around 800% ROI each year. And like each month almost the same amount of winning percentage.
Still developing as a side project a real stable live trading bot to take these strategies into the practical world but I am very curious what you think about it? Would there be a high chance of this being over fitted for historical data or could it actually work and make profit because I backtested it with lots of data?
SO you can make 8X every year? I will wait until your Net worth be a Million dollar & you open A Hedge Fund Firm.
Iff you can do that I will give you 1 grand for your Bullshit 😂😂😂
Hey I'm happy to hear that for you I want to get into algorithm trading and wanted to know what study did you do and how long did it took you to get where you are
800% ROI with consistent win rates each month? what's your sharpe ratio? 8? lol of course it is massively overfit.
Thank you for this video. There so many brokers out there - only selling crap! I’ve seen so many trading academies selling some of special platform (only theres) are able to make money. There business model are just selling a "crap education packages" starting at around $2k to $15k. Carlo
Got it - don't bother chasing alpha. Is there a way as a retail investor that we can reduce beta with minimal impact to our 0 alpha? Or are there no good, easily accessible beta-reduction strategies either?
To be fair, following the S&P 500 or buying ETFs are the best method at reducing beta. They're simply the easiest and less risky methods, but of course this will reduce your potential income. There is no such a thing as low-risk high reward investment, especially not in the short term. Long term investments are an another good example of reducing average volatility. But of course if you're not careful long term investments can be even riskier. Most big corporation's price will go up eventually... but there are a lot that may never go up, especially if they the corp uses the wrong strategy.
19:44 he says it’s not impossible to find alpha.
as jack boogle phrased it: the only free lunch in the stock market is diversification
Dont be a beta, be a omega chad
Another exemplary channel in UA-cam. Subscribed
I like him. He simply says he don't know.
Good analysis-Bring it back to reality a product! Well explained- know amount of resources on earth 🌎 for profit-Alpha is my new knowledge thanks
Wow, your strategy really worked wonders for me! I got 8 out of 9 and it's the best result I've had in a long time. Your advice has been invaluable in helping me improve my trading skills.
lol
good stuff, keep it up!
looking forward to more of this high-quality content
Most indicators are trend following and fail in flat markets. They also not work consistently throughout all assets. I am searching for price patterns with a high win rate.
So you should identify the trend: long/short/flat and use the corresponding bots. For example, for a flat trend you can use a grid bot between resistance and support. For trending bots there are plenty of strategies using moving averages, lucid SAR, DCA etc. Once you identify the trend it's easy to make steady money just don't be scared to use stop losses: The trend is your friend until the end of the trend 😉
I love your videos. It's something the internet needs.
Very informative. Really tired of all the fakes. Keep up!
Wow very good video, POV I didn't think of. So far from trading, I see that there a strategies that can help get that edge, but the best strategies are the ones that keep you in the trade longer while managing low risk. So for me (and this can change after writing this) that would be Supply and Demand, why? because that is literally what moves markets! Thank you for the video
The video is hard truth I guess for retail traders. But then in your view, do Retail traders have no hope? I have seen successful retail traders making good wealth? how to reconcile it? Thanks
So you saying is that brokers take retail traders data and provide that information to the market makers.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. I only wandered down this rabbit hole because I work in the sector and the implications of algorithm and api programming calls is an interesting subject.
API programming calls? First time I hear someone talk like that lol
@@dima6488what surprises you about him saying that, I guess it is not technically correct?
@@dataanalystbynight4375 Because no one who actually works "in the sector" (i.e developer) talks like this, since "Application Programming Interface Programming" doesn't make the slightest of sense
How The Bible led me to Islam ua-cam.com/video/aFMHH9Hp-OM/v-deo.html
Just wondering, if an algo that is backtested that seems to work, is there a good chance it'll make money live ? Anybody have any experience with that ?
Only one way to find out I guess, try putting small amounts at first
(I never did algorithm trading but I know sometimes you need to take a leap forward)
If your algo works (10 years or more) backtesing , you need to try it first on demo accounts live. If win in demo account then try with small amount real account. If it wins again its up to you :) I dont think algo will not work , when writing it you need to calculate all risks not profit. And it need be SIMPLE. Not complex , to work in different conditions. Algos in videos definetely not work even with backtesting ones :D Not copy paste them. But big benefit of algo is you can test your startegy.
I especially like trainers who talk about their crazy earnings and... encourage you to pay for their courses. It looks strange: usually those people who have money are not particularly interested in attracting all sorts of beggars and teaching them something.
Don't you like the UA-cam crypto or investments scam bot thread?
Oh the markets are really hard and growth but I'm really glad I'm still able to make $xxxx a week.
Then some one asks how and they name drop some unicorn guru with an email id or Whatsapp number in a funny format.
Any thoughts on ICT trading?
fraud
@@kabuki4103 Really? Care to elaborate?
@@tonycallender7670 he claims to say that market works based on time which is false. And claims 100% win rate which is ridiculous. You just have to ask every ict trader for myfxbook and they usually dont have stats to back it up
@@tonycallender7670 market doesnt move based on ict concepts
Advances in Financial Machine Learning seems like a great book thanks,.
What do you mean that you can't create a strategy that spits out a sharpe ratio of 10 in 3 lines of code? But...what about my moving average crossover idea???
So, guaranted IS not reachable by retails.
Guaranted IS also u tube, as far as WE Can use infos. Tks.
Day Trade with AI: Theoretical Foundations for Discretionary, Algorithmic, and Diversified Trading with AI is a must read. The book explains exactly why you can't make money based on random short articles or videos you find online. Instead, traders must understand the finance principles and employ those principles as the basis of coding. Remember, market is efficient most of the time and historical stock prices contain no predictive information!
Too good to be true? I'm pushing 4.3% a week with my current implementation. Aiming for 5.
I'm doing 15 morbiliion % a day with my current implementation
hi is there any room to develop winning strategies for trading using GPT by developing AI bots?
so few cuts in the video! respect ♥
your strategies do work but it would be very nice of you if you make videos on how you study the candles and the market volatility/movement. Love from India.
Stop looking at the markets the same way everyone else does while expecting anything other than the same results as everybody else that fails. Find your own thing...
Excellent video, and thank you so much for your great channel.
Why would anyone publish a money printing machine. Just motive alone is enough for me not to believe. Also there is no libraries that do time series forecasting with random forests (not a quant) maybe you guys know of some in python.
So what does the H stand for?
Anyone can go and buy a top 500 etf on the stock market and make 10-20% per year, not even watching the market with almost zero minimum capital requirements. Therefore it is reasonable that someone who puts in effort to learn and apply a trading strategy can make significantly more like 100-200% per year. It is not necessary to have any fancy equipment and programming works just as well as machine learning
I love how there're many bot-liked comments getting pushed to the top in here
this is a good video because most of other youtuber's videos are not helpful.
Couldn't have said it better myself, this video will be an excellent resource
Why strategy #1 and #3 are not the same? They are the exact same thing for me: fee for a service.
Is there a big advantage of knowing mathematical finance for an individual trader? Also, is mathematical finance only for derivatives trading?
I would say no. I know plenty financial math from college and it doesnt help much for trading.
@@JuanDeDios24 thanks
@@seadotocancerdoto1565 the education that they give us is just for working for them.Nothing more or less. So you have to educate yourself by practicing.That knowledge is priceless and can't be found in any book.
This guy said “People telling you how to make money online are lying”, “let me tell you how to make money online”
I trade a manual algorithm the NNFX way and that works for me
i left when you claimed you have guaranteed strategies to make mony
Indeed, selling onwards live retail-position information would be lucrative, "easy money" , however why is that not "insider trading" ?
So only, big players can make money in the market?
I don't understand how can you completely ignore the buy-side.
Does the Black-Scholes equation ever come up in quantitative finance? I don't know too much about the equation but its supposed to be the scariest equation in modeling time evolution of markets/risk.
Definitely, this has become the most well known simplistic model used for European option pricing.
@@QuantPy "simplistic" lol
@@albertociampini6473 I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing. :D "simplistic" is a pretty nice euphemism for a formula that assumes and requires a constant value that can't be known in advance.
@Starvling k TLDR Blaming Black-Scholes as being "scary" is a scapegoat for human primal stupidity.
I liken Black-Scholes to learning high school physics -- you're taught to calculate examples like the acceleration of a frictionless, spherical chicken with a uniformly distributed mass of 2 kg, sliding down a ramp in a vacuum. You're taught this grossly simplified abstraction b/c you don't yet have the capacity to factor real-life variables into the equation: air resistance, flapping wings, shedding feathers, chicken pooping, running around headless, etc.
If you use that level of physics to build a rocket that subsequently blows up during launch, then out of ignorance blamed physics for being "scary", it'd be equivalent. The limitations of both Black-Scholes and that simplistic physics model were known and criticized by experts for decades prior, but you as the aspiring rocket scientist and hedge fund manager were too busy to listen. And then, what a terrible, tragic surprise.
I think the news media latched onto Black-Scholes as "scary" because some academic sound bites pointed to it as the cause of the 1987 crash and the 2008 GFC. Or it may be a case of upset people looking for a causal factor to blame after the fact of the crisis event. TLDR they blame the use of Black-Scholes for contributing to systemic financial industry shortsightedness in not detecting and robustly protecting/hedging against outlier long tail risk.
This is partly true -- Black-Scholes doesn't account well for long tail statistical outliers. Black-Scholes assumes constant volatility known in advance, which is not realistic. The volatility smile of options pricing shows that actual options pricing fudges the process with variable volatility -- implying high volatility for farther OTM options. The "smile" can also be skewed depending on situational bias to the upside or downside. A long tail event (market crash, whatever) is that one-in-a-million time when you pull that extremely high volatility lottery number.
More crudely and regardless of whether the Black-Scholes equation was directly responsible, I think the majority of finance types are possessed by basic human risk-aversion and the impacts of risk/uncertainty on their paychecks, to the point of blindness. Most people pursue the holy grail of eliminating or fully knowing all risk. If they can quantify it, they can price it into their revenue models. But they get sloppy and conflate 98%, 99.9%, etc known risk with "effectively 100% known risk". And that works for a few years at a time, until a 0.01% outlier event number gets rolled on the dice of fate, and then everyone panics b/c their revenue models failed to account for it. Increasingly interconnected electronic global markets since the 90s have made it more likely for local outliers to be felt on a global level b/c someone somewhere decided at some point it was a good idea to chuck some investment funds into a high-risk developing market to chase lesser known, marginally higher returns.
Thus during those years where the outlier event hasn't happened YET, week by week and quarter by quarter, every market participant is chasing down tiny percentage gains over their competitors, wherever an advantage can be found. That's what led banks to take on increasingly worse credit risks, then packaging those hot potato toxic assets up and shoveling them out the door for resale before the music stopped, leaving them holding the hot potato. "Everyone else is doing it profitably too, and the house of cards seems to be holding up just fine so far..." Because everyone thought their models effectively accounted for ALL risk, they pushed and abused the limits of the system, repealed various market safety mechanisms that were originally established after the Great Depression, and ultimately volunteered to become an industry case study in the Peltzmann effect (people are demonstrated to take on greater risks when they perceive they are protected adequately by safety equipment like seatbelts. Tragedies ensue when their PERCEPTION of safety overestimates the ACTUAL effectiveness of the safety equipment.).
@@dakaodo If the equation wasn't scary then everyone will be solving it. The only reliable solutions are stochastic (or monte carloish) based at best; those methods then end up proprietary.