
Ask HN: HFT Trading Software Worth Its Weight? - cdvonstinkpot
When I try to google on the subject, it seems that everything that comes up is a paid advert for software &#x27;foo&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;d prefer to trade stocks than Bitcoin&#x2F;Altcoin. I have a trading bot for that &amp; it used to work well with some market volatility, but it&#x27;s a waste when the market&#x27;s sideways.
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qCOVET
The good thing w/ HFT trading software is that with small sums of money you
can hop on momentum movements and make pennies here and there. In the grand
scheme of things, these pennies can lead to a few hundred dollars a day.

I have used Sterling trading software and I was able to 'gap trade', or
capture market swings with simple (Ctrl + B, or Ctrl + S), which you can't if
you are using a brokerage account with your bank.

If you are going to use HFT trading, you must consider a superb internet
connection (what if you get locked in a trade and your home internet dies) and
never Short sell, or else it would wipe out your account.

For level2 activity you can also use : freestockcharts.com and they are
amazing.

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RogerL
At the risk of stating the obvious: the real HFT firms have run perfectly
straight fiber between the exchanges (and/or use microwaves), and pay large
amounts of money to have their cage closest to the order machines. They've
rewritten operating systems to shave more time. They know everything you are
doing - they see every order before it executes. They will see your orders,
and change the prices before yours go through. You can watch this happen in
real time.

You may be able to pry a few pennies from them while they are dealing with
larger orders, but you ain't going to beat that set up.

Anecdotes to the contrary (I made money doing it!) are meaningless without an
accompanying risk analysis. You can sometimes gamble a winning a penny vs
losing a dime and win. That doesn't mean the expected value is positive,
regardless of the results of some short term run.

If I had software that could beat the HFT firms I wouldn't be selling it to
low-level consumers, I'd be either beating them at their own game or selling
it to them for the hundreds of millions to billions that it was worth.

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akg_67
Are your interested in High-Frequency Trading (HFT) or Algorithmic Trading?

As /u/RogerL mentioned, the infrastructure speed and access time are critical
factors in succeeding with HFT. It is a costly endeavor outside the reach of
majority of traders.

Algorithmic Trading can be done by anyone who can research and identify
inefficiencies and implement strategies to exploit such inefficiencies.
Typical such opportunities are short-term so you have to constantly develop
new ones and refine old ones and know when the old ones are no longer working.

> I have a trading bot for that & it used to work well with some market
> volatility, but it's a waste when the market's sideways.

Rising tide raises all boats. Even a monkey throwing darts on a list of stocks
can do well in rising markets. No one strategy works across all phases of
market.

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vaughngh
I've been pondering making a bot of my own as fun project—at least until I
feel I have a chance of not wiping out all of my starting funds within
minutes. Do you have any recommendations of where to begin and eventually
devising trading algorithms? I'll take any resource I can get. Thank you

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
There's a guy on the 'butter-bot' Bitcoin Forum who might be able to help you
get started. I don't remember the name, but I imagine if you subscribe to the
thread, maybe with a greeting explaining what you want to do, might help
considerably.

