

How to turn $100,000 into $6 Billion+ on inspectd.com - ca98am79
http://www.uglychart.com/2008/03/22/how-to-turn-100000-into-6-billion-on-inspectdcom/

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mkn
The real questions are, "How long does this take in real time?" and, "How much
like real life is this scenario?"

The default setting has trades of 20-day duration. 18 trades take one year,
and to get to ten years takes ~183 trades. At 3.5% inflation, $141 large turns
into $100 large in ten years. What the site really needs, in addition to the
glamorous dollar amount, is an effective annual percentage rate
(Instantaneous/Cumulative/Moving average would all be nice to see) of your
investing strategy. That way, you could see the unglamorous effects of trying
to beat inflation while crawling out of the hole you just dug yourself.

For example, I picked only apparent winners that had climbing moving averages
for the last six months, climbing value for at least the last three, no major
price shocks in the last six, and I held for 20 days. After 43 months I had
$187,000. The value of this money was a little over $160,000 after discounting
for inflation (%3.5 annually, as a guess). Approximately 14% per annum after
inflation (and before taxes). This same strategy, unmonitored for time,
yielded $15,000,000 earlier. Fiddling with logarithms gives me just under 17
years to attain this value (not adjusted for inflation, and you have to defer
your taxes).

If it really is this easy, we should all be eating Ramen and working for
Microsoft for $100,000 per year. After two years, you'd have your seed money,
and could go work fast food to pay the rent while you pay attention to the
stock market once every 20 days.

Am I the only one to whom this sounds a little odd? Could this just be that
the data are taken "at random" from a bull market? Is it just that you can't
find the proper 17 years in which to do this? Are all my wins coming from the
bull markets? That is, am I (by choosing stocks that look great) actually
choosing stocks from a bull market? Wouldn't this imply something about the
feasibility of actually earning a living this way?

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mkn
I reached the amount indicated above in 43 20-day cycles, not 43 months. This
ups the returns considerably.

I wish inspectd.com had a logging feature. I'd like to see trades output as a
cdf or similar. I'd love to more closely analyze the trades I made.

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tlrobinson
Here's some bookmarklets to automate the very simplest strategies.
Unfortunately I don't think there's an easy way to automate this guy's
strategy though.

Buy only:

    
    
        javascript: window.setInterval(function() { document.getElementsByTagName("button")[0].onclick(); }, 1000);
    

Sell only:

    
    
        javascript: window.setInterval(function() { document.getElementsByTagName("button")[2].onclick(); }, 1000);
    

Random:

    
    
        javascript: window.setInterval(function() { document.getElementsByTagName("button")[Math.floor(Math.random()*3)].onclick(); }, 1000);
    

Of course, these are all pretty awful strategies...

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ca98am79
I then turned the $6 billion into $2 trillion, which broke the site:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143644>

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xlnt
why not hit sell on the ones trending down?

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ca98am79
I tried that for a while but I just lost money - shorting seems to be a
suckers game but maybe I just can't do it right.

~~~
aston
Probably related to the infinite downside possibility when you're shorting.
It's easier to lose a ton of your money when you're wrong.

