
Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby? - somebodyaround
I enjoy doing this stuff but it&#x27;s tough to find others with similar interests since I moved to the boondocks many years ago although it&#x27;s super easy to find people looking for financial engineering jobs.
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mattz0rt
A bit different from what most financial engineers are interested in, but I'm
in the process of developing a linear programming model for the US tax code so
you can do long term tax optimizations based on your financial profile and
goals. It was a lot harder than I anticipated but got a PoC working recently.
Ugly landing page at [https://smarterpath.co](https://smarterpath.co)

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metahikari
Signed up! Your site doesn't look that bad - I actually like the layout. If
you don't mind sharing, what did you use to create the landing page?

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mattz0rt
Yup good ol' wordpress with the Contact Form 7 addon for the early access
sign-up. Would like to do a redesign at some point to make the value prop more
obvious, but getting a public beta out has been the priority recently.

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lefstathiou
We created a tool used in niche fixed income asset-backed securities (which
are heavily engineered). We crawl EDGAR for ABS-EE filings which are posted in
XML, clean and standardize them, drop them into a data base and then allow
users to create instant stratifications of the portfolio (rather than having
to download the 80k row loan file and run pivot tables).

This allows someone buying the B tranche of FORDO 2017-B to see how many
people in Florida are 30-60 days delinquent, what model car they drive, the
LTV, etc.

100% free:
[https://finsight.com/product/us/abs/ee](https://finsight.com/product/us/abs/ee)

Note: this is not exactly a "hobby" but we offer all of these services 100%
for free without restriction so thought I would share regardless.

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mlevental
which tool are you using to parse the xml? a long time ago i used arelle but
it didn't work really well.

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proverbialbunny
I'm the odd one out. I've been writing automated trading software since 2007
as a hobby. However, I'm not looking for a job doing that. 1) It's profitable
enough to do it on my own. 2) I have a gig right now doing time series
analysis for a company that isn't financial, which imho is just as fun (if not
more), but has a bit more potential to benefit the world. 3) When I get a job
doing a hobby it has the potential to burn that hobby out. It's not about
making money, but enjoying life, and being a bit competitive is fun.

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ununoctium87
PhD in signal processing, amateur algo trader & economist and software
engineer by day (not in the finance field unfortunately). I want to live your
life!

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proverbialbunny
Then go do it!

For me, I like doing the impossible. If no one has done it before, I don't
need to get bogged down by books or stackoverflow. (And, you don't need a
degree.) I have to figure out new ways to solve a problem. That's what makes
programming fun and that is what makes this sort of stuff fun.

Like just the other day I figured out how to compress arm movement down to, so
far, 4 variables (all floats atm), for every reasonably large change of
movement. (Though, for small tremors while walking and other kinds of
movements I'll need to output some more data.) My goal is to increase the
accuracy of the signal beyond the initial noisy accelerometer data. The pain
is going to be proving it through a high speed video camera or something else
(Got any ideas? lol) because I'm designing this to be accurate to real life
arm movement, not accurate to initial data. (If you're curious, an ellipsoid,
plus an axis for like looking at a watch, and possibly a magic number or a
large radius for a straight line.)

Does HN do PMs? If you want to hang out we probably have a lot in common.
Though, I'm untrained and just kind of unusual.

Oh btw, I'm not sure if it is obvious, and not like I've read a book on the
subject, but as far as economics goes I would think meta macro economics would
help day trading. But what do I know? I'm just a rabbit.

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trials
Could you list your email address in the "About" section of your profile? I'd
like to contact you. Thanks!

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creo
I made some resource management tools that helped me in MMORPG's (ex EVE, WOW)
and they had potential for real-life usage. There was also a episode in my
life where i tried to predict random using simple neural nets in roulette,
lottery and some stock markets. Fun thing to do but time-consuming.

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blackbrokkoli
Both of these sound incredible cool, is there a Git repo to check out or
something?

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creo
Actually You made me think about going back to it. Thanks!

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blackbrokkoli
Well, you motivated me to actually get started with something like this -
doesn't mean I can actually beat my procrastination, but if, you definetely
played a big part in it. So thank you!

And if you go back and modernise it, I'm still interested in Github links :D

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jerry40
At one on the previous jobs I wrote a tool which takes a list of
bonds/equities trades and ties buys and sells in order to count PnL. The idea
was any sell should be connected with one or several buys/repos. Like, I sell
100 bonds , so I should take them from 5 buys in correct order (FIFO).

It seems easy to do this but there are tricky operations like REPOs when you
have to 'borrow' papers from a reversal REPO to perform a sell or REPO
operation. Then you should close this hole with a next papers arrival. I
wanted to attach some web interface to visualize these crazy buys-sells-repos
chains but at some moment I left that company.

I want to rewrite that tool as a side project but not sure if it would be
helpful for anybody.

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tacostakohashi
I also had a previous job doing exactly that... but it was an billing /
accounting system at a print company.

Certain large customers (a bank, an airline) had contracts where they would
order large batches of printed forms, luggage tickets, sick bags, etc, at some
negotiated quantity / price (taking into account the size of the print run,
our capacity at the time, etc.). We (the print company) would then print it
and warehouse it, and ship it directly to their individual locations in
smaller batches as they ordered it.

The billing was done on some cost + shipping basis, so at the end of the month
you'd have to look at everything that was shipped, work out which original
batches going into inventory that came from on a FIFO basis, and then use that
as a basis for the cost plus billing.

It was a horrible messy old codebase, and it was sometimes difficult to
explain the results.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share this as an example use-case for a
sufficiently generic / flexible / reliable implementation of your potential
side project.

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jerry40
It is the interesting idea to make this tool as generic as possible! Like a
framework for matching different types of events based on some rules + a
visual explanation for any chain of matched events. Perhaps I should think
about this idea. Thanks!

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tacostakohashi
Yeah, and the visual explaination part is actually just as important as
getting the right results. For any complex system with financial impact there
will always be people claiming that the output is wrong, so you need to be
able to quickly and easily justify everything.

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jerry40
Yes, I agree. Sometimes there were so tricky cases that it was impossible to
explain why that tool matched those deals.

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kiril-me
I am developing Crypto analytic tool. It's like the fund, analyze your
portfolio, show potential gaps and currency there you can invest. So you need
to make an investment decision, the platform only shows information and
analytics.

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dgranda
I am not sure if it matches what you are looking for, but backtrader [1] is a
nice tool for trading strategies, worth a try.

[1] [https://www.backtrader.com/](https://www.backtrader.com/)

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dmichulke
It's more a portfolio tracker than a financial engineering tool but I have
been thinking about adding some correlation / variance measurement to optimize
portfolios, see the blog:

[https://www.cryptoport.net](https://www.cryptoport.net)

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backtestingmofo
I’ve been writing algorithmic trading software and back testers as a hobby for
a couple years now, and what surprises me most is how it is possible to have
decent profits without mad financial skills. The trick is good quality data
and a couple spare hours a week! A rooky mistake I have made is losing too
many days trying to hack myself a good source of data, so I can only recommend
paying a few bucks for a reliable one. You can definitely have a good time
(while making money) with basic swing trading algorithms and a bunch of
historical end of day data like
[https://www.gourgane.io](https://www.gourgane.io)

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nasir
I've had a similar problem to find proper data for cryptocurrencies while I
was writing my trading tool. It was quite some work to set up a proper
infrastructure to get the data. Though eventually I turned that into a full
service. You can check it out on
[https://coinograph.io](https://coinograph.io)

~~~
backtestingmofo
Oh nice! I will give this a try

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AndHeiberg
I don't generally, but I've been hacking away at the infrastructure for high
frequency trading crypto currencies for a while.

I originally just wanted to do arbitrage trading, so I built a simple tool to
find opportunities using pre-existing services.

But as I slowly learned more about it, I had to expand it into monitoring the
exchanges in real time with orderbooks and past trades to get around annoying
false positives in my original system.

It's pretty interesting, but I haven't had the time to work on it recently.
Plus the increased efficiency of the markets has made arbitrage trading a lot
less desirable in 2018.

I would be happy to discuss it with like minded people.

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_spoonman
Count me in, would love to get on a discord server or IRC channel.

edit: sorry, should point out I've been doing the same for a while and have
hit some challenges I'd love to discuss.

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isseu
Me too! I would like to chat

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_spoonman
Reach out to me. Contact info in profile.

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catchmeifyoucan
I just made a visualization tool recently.

scatterstocks.com

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davidhyde
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Firefox on windows 7 IE does not work either

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catchmeifyoucan
Clearly, I didn't test on Firefox :( thanks for bringing that to my attention.

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danielecook
I'm currently developing a python wrapper for the IEX API:

[https://github.com/danielecook/iex-api-
python](https://github.com/danielecook/iex-api-python)

(work in progress)

I plan to integrate it into a larger project.

I'm coming from a biology/bioinformatics background - so I don't know too much
about finance but this is my effort to learn about it.

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DutchKevv
[https://coinpush.app](https://coinpush.app)

[https://github.com/DutchKevv/TradeJS](https://github.com/DutchKevv/TradeJS)

Under heavy development and simplified. Removed the trading bots part and
focusing on realising 'social overview + price alarms' for now.

Only check on chrome svp

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adius
I'm working on a (h)ledger replacement and have already a working version.
Hope to release it in a few weeks.

~~~
loxs
Interesting, doing the same in OCaml right now

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bra-ket
Quantlib api as a hobby: [https://quantra.io](https://quantra.io)

Backtester by author of quantstart:
[https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader](https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader)

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andysinclair
Looks good. If you don't mind me asking, what did you use to build you web
application (at [https://terminal.quantra.io/](https://terminal.quantra.io/))?

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isaiahg
I guess it's a hobby right now but I hope it's not eventually.

Can i just say that I wish there was some kind of repository of information
for drawing charts. And there are so many different kinds of financial charts
that's it's a bit intimidating.

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illwrks
As someone completely oblivious to this world, is it possible to get an
outline of what strategies are being refined by the tools mentioned in this
thread?

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Jian-Yang
This sounds interesting, do you have any examples of your projects?

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nasmatic
I develop some algo-arb tools for trading

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tpeo
No, but I appreciate people who do.

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epx
I used to.

