
Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1 - dman
Would love to hear from folks who build automated trading systems based on Semantic analysis about how they handle the goofy stories on April 1.
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datasink
<http://www.advancedtrading.com/infrastructure/229301185>

Serious HFT players are either relying solely on news feeds that won't include
April Fools stories or are factor in the date for sources that might report
them (like CNN). All of the April Fools stories from legitimate news providers
have also clearly explained these were jokes and didn't focus a piece
primarily on one company.

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danielamitay
A shame that there aren't any responses (yet) from people with relevant
projects.

Is it possible that those programmers merely take the easy (although not
completely fool proof) route and exclude all data from April 1, and all data
that refers to April Fools Day?

------
jonah
Somewhat Related:

Does Anne Hathaway News Drive Berkshire Hathaway's Stock?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341008>

~~~
yoblin
Valid. If everyone else is using the same news, doesn't matter if it makes
sense or not.

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upgrayedd
Related: are there any good sites/communities/blogs to discuss HFT that anyone
can point to?

Am really interested in this field, anything like a crash course in what it
involves would be nice by anyone familiar.

How much cash do you generally start with, and how liquid are you?

~~~
nicelios
<http://howtohft.wordpress.com/>

~~~
upgrayedd
Thanks, good links in the blogroll as well, appreciated.

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sebg
The thing about building automated trading systems (related or not to Semantic
analysis) is that the things you tend to track are compared to other things
you are tracking. After all, if there is an issue with a data stream you
wouldn't want to bet the farm on it. You check with other streams. So goofy
stories on april first wouldn't affect the algorithms too much unless they
were reported the same way in disparate news/feed sources.

------
minimax
How many goofy stories have you seen today that affect publicly traded
companies? I don't think I have seen any yet.

~~~
dman
Google launching a new product. Atlassian entering into gaming. TSA mandating
self pat down system. Oracles Ellison accused of running Executive fighting
ring. Facebook and Zynga team up to merge Romance and gaming. Toshiba develops
3-D monocle. Nvidia to unlock SLI on AMD 990 series motherboards. NOTE: the
Nvidia and Ellison stories might not be April fools jokes, theres no way to
tell until the silliness subsides. Edit: Google hiring auto-completers. Could
affect employment related numbers.

------
nivertech

      date = today();
      if (date.month() == APRIL && date.day() == 1) {
        robot_trader.take_day_off(today());
      }

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TheSwede75
Read as "Automated Trolling."

~~~
WalterGR
"Trading" is discussed on Hacker News at about a 1.5-to-1 ratio with
"trolling". FYI, Google Fight accepts the same "site:" specifier that Google
Search does. For example:

[http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=si...](http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+trading&word2=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+trolling)

If you have reading problems, you could use that technique to determine which
of 2 words you're more likely to be reading here.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Cool to see that the second time you submitted the question you got some
answers.

~~~
dman
It wasnt the second time. Since it was an Ask HN, people continued voting for
it from what I guess is the ask tab on the main page. At some point it picked
up ~15 votes and broke on through to the main page. Also, if you look at the
posts so far, none of them answers the question.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes

      > It wasn't the second time. Since it was an Ask HN,
      > people continued voting for it from what I guess is
      > the ask tab on the main page. 
    

Ah - nice to know that happens sometimes. I guess you must have deleted your
rather wistful comment lamenting that no one had replied.

    
    
      > Also, if you look at the posts so far, none of them
      > answers the question.
    

I wonder if there's no one here who uses semantic analysis in automated
trading systems. Maybe the semantic analysis people who are here felt excluded
by your question.

Who knows. Perhaps there's a better question to ask, or a better way of
hooking the people you want into answering.

But I'm pleased you got traction, even if you haven't actually got answers.

~~~
dman
Indeed I did delete my comment :). I have been interested in the white spy /
black spy aspect of semantic trading for sometime and the trust related
issues. However I have no expertise in the area and no one in my network works
in the area. Folks doing technology in finance usually document their work
much lesser than other fields, perhaps because of the financial incentives to
keep secrets. So I thought tapping the wisdom of HN was my best bet to scratch
my curiosity scratch.

