More stock-trading crap
Oct. 1st, 2014 04:44 pmHi again! I realize that this stock-market crap is of no interest whatsoever to my furiends, but I recently had a rare win so I thought I'd crow about it. Please do not read this entry if doing so would have offended you.
You've heard of a company called "Yahoo!", right? Well, here is a chart of that company's stock-price over the last year. My trading bot jumped in and out of the stock nine times, as shown by the blue arrows. Historically this algorithm should have produced gains about 40% of the time, but of these nine trades only 22% were winners. What a drag, eh? Makes you feel like giving up on the stock market and just hiding under a rock for a while? Oh, but look! The last trade was such a big winner that it wiped out all previous losses and then some.
My bot looks only at price; it does not read a news feed and has no idea that Yahoo owns 25% of a Chinese company called "Alibaba", which went public on Sept. 15th (the peak on this chart). It does not know the traders' rule "buy the rumour, sell the news" — but that's what it did! I wish it had sold a couple of days earlier, but them's the breaks.

My bot looks only at price; it does not read a news feed and has no idea that Yahoo owns 25% of a Chinese company called "Alibaba", which went public on Sept. 15th (the peak on this chart). It does not know the traders' rule "buy the rumour, sell the news" — but that's what it did! I wish it had sold a couple of days earlier, but them's the breaks.