
Ask HN: What are some good sites or blogs about the mechanics behind trading? - _Understated_
I&#x27;m looking for stuff about the technical side of things (I don&#x27;t mean the tech they employ, but more about HOW they do it).<p>Things like in-depth analysis of methods, quants, maths involved and such.<p>I hope I&#x27;m not being too ambiguous but I&#x27;m not looking to find the latest stocks to make money from or anything, more about the mechanics and maths of trading... I suppose I&#x27;m not sure exactly what I want, just that I don&#x27;t want to get stock tips or any of that.<p>Does that make sense?
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gas9S9zw3P9c
I used to work as a professional trader. I see this question so often, but
it's just a strange question to ask. You are asking something like "I want to
learn programming, you know, to make stuff like Apple or Google" \- If you ask
a dozen developers they will give you a dozen different answers depending on
what their background is. Some will tell you to learn Javascript and React,
some will tell you to understand infrastructure and Go, some will tell you to
look at REST and Ruby on Rails, and some will tell you to look at Flutter for
making mobile apps, and so on. None of them is wrong, but you're getting all
these wildly different answers because you're asking an imprecise question.

Trading is the same. There are dozens of different types of "trading" and
everyone you talk to will have a slightly different take, depending on their
background. They may talk about portfolio management, directional trading,
market making, HFT, arbitrage, options trading, exotics, long-term investing,
all of this over different time horizons, technical analysis, fundamental
analysis, and so on. None of them are wrong and all of these things are
related (just like REST and JS may be related), but you need to be more
precise in what you are asking. Someone trying to manage a diverse portfolio
and trying to get a low-risk return over several years is using a completely
different set of technologies and methods than someone working in HFT. It's
like comparing someone writing low-level C++ driver code to someone iterating
on HTML and CSS. It's just different, but both are programming.

As a side note: 99% of what you find online are gurus trying to sell you
something. They are making a living selling and re-purposing educational
content, but have never built anything profitable themselves. And even if they
have, what worked 10-20 years ago is no longer relevant today. Books that
teach fundamentals are generally of higher quality. [0] and [1] are a good
starting point, but again, they are quite specific to certain types of
trading.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Microstructure-
Prac...](https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Microstructure-
Practitioners-Association-ebook/dp/B003ZSHIPE/)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Practice-Mathematical-
Financ...](https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Practice-Mathematical-Finance-
Mathematics/dp/0521514088/)

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logicslave
All the money in quant investing is currently coming from analyzing data sets
that are not publicly available. Things like credit card data, mobile phone
locations, receipt data, etc. When those are crossed with traditional economic
indicators and equities prices, a fuller picture emerges.

When a data set is updated, i.e. credit card transactions come out for last
week, retail stocks will move accordingly. Modeling this as an outsider
without access to that data is like trying to predict a black box.

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throwaway9987
Have you tried [https://blog.quantinsti.com/](https://blog.quantinsti.com/)

Your question got me thinking too and I found that on page 3 of DDG.

It's something I'd quite like to know abit more about too.

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daleholborow
Google Ernie Chan trading. I don't agree with the trading (I am pro investing)
but Ernie explains as a practitioner

