
HODLometer – was it better to HODL or trade? - mkrn
https://hodlometer.com
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crazygringo
Sure it shows the algorithm beats a hold strategy in 8/10 instances...

...but the "hodlometer.com" domain was registered 3 days ago.

It's trivial to develop an algorithm by cherry-picking parameters that will
give any desired results for historical data.

But there's vast research on how it's impossible to predict/beat the market
like this in reality [1], and this site is obviously designed to prey on the
uneducated and naive.

[1] For a good intro, see chapter 5 of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" which
talks about "technical analysis", which is exactly what HODLometer is doing --
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393352242](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393352242)

~~~
Analemma_
People who know a thing or two about finance are having the time of their
lives watching Bitcoin evangelists genuinely believe in technical analysis and
not understand that it's on the level of astrology and tarot cards as far as
usefulness in predicting prices. (And that's in a fair market. On Bitcoin
exchanges, where it's certain that the exchanges are using every trick in the
book-- frontrunning, painting the tape, wash trading etc.-- to stack the deck
and extract extra value from your trades, technical analysis is even more
useless)

~~~
Lerc
There is a basic pattern (bubble/pop/settle) but for any advantage you have to
know better than someone else. There's been a number of images showing graphs
scaled and overlaid over other graphs. There's quite possibly good reasons for
the correlation in shapes, but it is also quite useless for investment. You
might know something will probably happen but you don't know when or at what
speed.

Once you go past the patterns that everyone can plainly see, you are looking
for patterns in what appears to be noise to everyone else. Accurate future
predictions is really the only way to tell if it is anything other than
staring at tea leaves.

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davidmurdoch
I don't understand. I know what [hf]odl mean. Can anyone tell me what these
charts and conclusions are trying to communicate here?

edit: I mistakenly assumed the HN would the understand the regex of "[hf]odl"
was just a clever way of saying hodl/fodl. No need for more comments
explaining those terms.

~~~
eindiran
I think its comparing how the algorithm did versus just blindly HODLing your
coins. So HODLmeter:XX% is the percentage the algorithm increased the value of
its holdings over the described period. The HODLing is the percentage the
market increase by over the same period. Thus, if you had HODLed for the same
period for ETH, you'd have lost a significant amount in the value of your
holdings, but the algorithm made money.

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fanzhang
The philosophy behind HODL is that you need to hold for 5-10 years plus in
order for the strategy to work. The 1-year timespan in the graphs on the site
are way too short.

If you want to cherry pick a point to "disprove" HODL, just look at the fact
that in November 2013 Bitcoin traded at an eye-watering $950+, and then for
2.5 years beat a steady retreat to $400.

At this point, bitcoin can taper down to $3K in value till 2020 and we would
not have seen anything new in terms of relative price movement over a fix
timespan.

For those who have watched bitcoin for a while, 2018 is just 2014 all over
again, except this time a lot more people are paying attention.

~~~
hangonhn
What's the reasoning behind the philosophy?

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nostrademons
Bitcoin's a deflating currency; there's a fixed number that will ever be
mined, and a number are lost to forgotten private keys etc, and so the supply
will only ever go downwards.

Meanwhile, if its boosters can actually keep it in the news, build things with
it, and use it as a currency, demand for it in the long run will continue
going up. This is the other unspoken assumption of HODLing, unspoken because
most people don't want it explicitly known that they're hyping &
propagandizing, but pretty apparent in their actions. This is also not true in
the short run; hype cycles like what we saw in Dec 2017 are impossible to
sustain forever, which is why the price today is significantly lower than it
was then, which is why HODLing only works on long (5-10 year) timespans rather
than short ones.

Reduced supply + increased demand = higher price.

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paulsutter
Taxes would kill any benefits of trading. Plus, never believe random
backtesting you see on the Internet.

~~~
mkrn
Not necessarily, depending where you are geographically and what counts as
taxable event. Also it's not a lot of trades for a year, after all, so not a
lot in commissions either.

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thisisit
> FODL is selling your Bitcoin for a _stablecoin such as USDT (Tether) or
> TUSD_

USDT? I don't think that is a good advice. Maybe a better one will be to sell
BTC in exchange for a HODL coin instead?

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dannyw
Would love more details on how the algorithm works, and your thought process
behind it (e.g. what other indicators you've looked at, why). You don't have
to disclose your secret sauce, but it would give me a lot more trust.

Backtested returns are not reliable.

~~~
mkrn
Here you go,
[https://github.com/mkrn/hodlometer](https://github.com/mkrn/hodlometer)

Algorithm have been found on TradingView, and tested among many.

Cryptocurrencies are especially volatile that's why I thought I would need to
use ATR. I have also been playing with trailing stop and take profits, so
found this algorithm to combine the two.

The parameters have been manually tested, but it would make sense to make run
a simulation to get the best parameters for a coin.

The whole site was created in about 6 hours, so don't judge too hard.

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foldable
IOTA is too unpredictable for this algorithm

