I work for a quantitative hedge fund. I program computers to trade securities for a living. On any given day, code that I have written trades hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock, futures and options.
I feel very confident in saying that for 99.9% of people, using this service will be a terrible, terrible idea that will only cost them money in the long run.
If you want to get into the stock market, buy a low-cost index fund and hold it for the next twenty years. That's the best advice I can give you.
This service is purposefully targeting people who know next to nothing about the stock market, and making them feel like they have some sort of clever control of the outcome of their investments.
I have criticised this idea elsewhere in the thread so this will be my last post on it. I hope all HN folk reading this thread will look into it and discover how parasitical this sort of venture is.
it's a free country and people are free to trade however they want (with restrictions haha).
they just need to be aware that retail traders are not going to get the same kind of competitive advantages that the big boys like Citadel or GETCO have.
it's not a "rigged" game in the same way Walmart being able to buy wholesale apples cheap and flip it to us richer is not a "rigged" game.
You are correct, if people want to risk their money then that is their right (providing they have been supplied all the legal warnings designed to protect people from losing money in a game they don't understand).
This service is the equivalent of putting an amateur chess player in front of Kasparov and suggesting they bet real money on winning because you taught them a basic opening move.
i don't think this company is suggesting anything of that kind, because this myth has been perpetuated since the start of retail financial markets, and possibly both the brokerages and other retail investors are to blame for this.
everyone in this thread here seems to have the common sense to say "don't try to compete in the same strategies as the HFT specialists". that's absolutely true.
but then this idea that financial markets cannot be anything else other than a HFT's playground doesn't seem to go away, even in this thread. that's not a fair assessment.
if you are a retail investor, if you pick a portfolio allocation appropriate to your risk appetite, if you pick a reallocation and reinvestment policy that you can get a good handle on, and you stick to it without fail, then you are half of the way to what pensions/insurances/savings plans implement for you, except now you don't pay fees, and you don't have to wait 20 years for the investment to "mature". in fact, because retail fees are so high, retail investors are better off using a minimal rebalancing policy: trading less, tweaking less, getting less fidgety about their trades - and that is a good thing. trading less and getting better returns usually comes together.
if you are happy with more risk, and you take controlled bets with options structures going out several weeks or a few months, you can get away with some good wins and a hopefully fewer losses and may still come out ok even after spreads/fees.
if you try to compete with HFTs on the sub second horizon without any of the equipment/services that the HFTs pay for, then you will lose. don't do that, that space is not for you.
I agree. How can joe average compete with the resources of hedge funds which are doing the same thing at a much lower latency using more sophisticated mathematical methods, at a higher volume (so lower relative fees).
I am sure the idea is well intentioned but really it is just suckering people out of money in a similar way to forex robots etc.
It's not about outperforming those hedge funds, I think that is out of scope. They're not competing.
It's that average people (or anyone) can't time the market etc. so nevermind any advantages a quant firm might have, the rules that average person sets up with their IFTTT will be horrifically unwise.
I was thinking the same thing. Traders already play games with amature's stop-loss orders, etc... This just looks like a tool that unsavy investors will get themselves taken to the cleaners by professional traders.
There are many people who trade the market based on charts. Because the charts are well known, traders know what the sell signal is for a specific security. So, they will sell that security below the trigger so that all the suckers ... um ... people using IFTTT for the stock market will automatically sell the security. This will tank the stock presenting the pro trade with a buying opportunity.
I've actually made a couple of small killings in the last few years. I had one bomb (lost 20%) and even though I'm still up really well, I'm moving everything to index funds because that one loss eats at me.
Hey everyone! I’m co-founder and CEO of Trigger Finance, which I’m thrilled to share with you today :)
Trigger is simplifying the world of stock investing by reducing everything to an “IF THIS, THEN THAT” statement, called a ‘trigger’. You can create triggers to track all sorts of things happening in the market -- for example, if a stock drops suddenly, or if Apple announces earnings at a certain level, or if the Fed is raising interest rates. You can use Trigger to be notified (in real-time) when important events affecting your portfolio occur, and in the future, can execute automated trades through our platform.
We currently integrate with 8 different brokerages (including eTrade, Fidelity, and TDAmeritrade) for account read-access. We hope to expand this list in the future (looking at you, Robinhood!).
Our mission is to help the individual investor take a more disciplined, rules-based approach to managing their portfolio. Please help us deliver on that promise by giving us your feedback!
Please let us know if you have any questions - we’re here to answer them,
Rachel
I really like the idea of the app. Unfortunately, the "Get Trigger on your phone" link takes you to the App Store, and my phone runs Android. I suspect an Android client is in the works? How about a web client too?
In the mean time, I'd recommend interested non-iOS users to check out Quantopian [1], which is not nearly as simple and accessible, but gives you the power to do real algorithmic trading.
Quantopian is awesome! We plan to release an API this summer for those who want to play with triggers and their brokerage accounts programmatically. Thanks!
Hi there! I'm the founder of Pavlok, a wearable haptic device for changing behavior. We are on IFTTT, and are able to vibrate, beep, and release patterns of electric stimuli.
I had built a chrome extension integration for vibration / beeps / zaps at variable stock prices, and it was quite useful for a few traders I knew.
I am really interested in knowing more about your API, do you have any more info? Also, will you be on Android -- and do you need to have the app installed to use your IFTTT channel?
My first thought was that once trigger has enough users, some people might pay to get access to the rule database. That way you could predict what trigger is going to do under certain circumstances, or maybe what needs to happen for certain outcomes.
That's an interesting question because, IMHO, by formalizing my rules and externalizing them, I'm sharing critically important strategy information. If ever I'm protective of my data, this would rank highly, I think. EVEN if anonymized or aggregated.
Hello! Co-founder here. Thanks for the kind words!
Bummer that you're noticing bugs though. If you feel up to it, we'd love to hear what they are - you can email support@triggerfinance.com or live-chat with us through the app (press the logo on your icon).
We'd love to integrate Robinhood in the future but have nothing that we can announce right now, unfortunately.
Sent at 5:23 PM on Thursday
Adrian: Hello! Co-founder here.
We currently access a Nasdaq last sale feed through a distributor (Xignite) for our real-time feed. We make no guarantees around latency per se, though in reality it ends up being on the order of < 1 minute (at worst) from exchange to a trigger being evaluated on our backend, and a bit more than that (highly dependent on many other factors) to being displayed on a user's phone.
Hope that this helps though I realize I wasn't very specific!
> Hope that this helps though I realize I wasn't very specific!
It does, thank you.
The idea and execution thereof seems very slick, but I can't help shake how much of a disadvantage regular stock traders are when put up against all the ultra-high speed trading done by algorithms.
Wall-street Rant Aside, from my previous life building an algorithm based hedgefund, one option would be to put your trigger-execution engine as close to the stock-exchanges as possible, to reduce the latency between market events surfaced in your feed & trigger execution. Softreal time actions, such as any User interactions with the mobile app being persisted to backends, could be done at cloud/dc's, then propagated to your backend in NYC. You could provide a simple SLA saying that trigger updates will have 1-minute lag time for effect, but actual Event->Trigger->Execution would be completely based on the time to evaluate the trigger.
hey thanks for your question!
a) this is real time data (not free!) provided by Nasdaq's consolidated feed.
b) At the moment, we are mobile first however we plan to offer an API where you can set your triggers programmatically if you are so inclined, and monitor them on your phone.
I'm not terribly well-versed in stocks and trading, so forgive me if this is an obvious question, but:
My broker (Fidelity) charges me something like $7/day/stock to keep a stop order open. Presumably I could accomplish the same thing for free with Trigger. Is there some major difference between a "sell if below X" Trigger and a stop order, or is Fidelity just bilking me?
Per day? That's a new one. Every brokerage I've ever used has fixed commissions for a trade, regardless of how long it takes to execute. The only edge case is a partial fill on a good till cancel limit order that causes the execution to spam multiple days. I think that might lead to multiple commissions but it's fairly u likely.
In no instance have I seen a fee for maintaining an open order. If anything they should pay you! You're essentially giving them a free option!
Yes, all conditions orders, like limit and stop loss etc at the end of day are triggers. Right now you can set a level for a trigger an issue a market order (which is a SL) or a limit order (stop limit order) with your existing brokerage for just the commission they would charge you. In the future, you can construct your own sophisticated stop loss orders, like IF GOOG trades below $500 AND it's outside of 1 hour of the close, THEN sell.
Interesting, I guess I just need a new broker. Amusingly, after I finished my comment I figured I'd log into my Fidelity account (which I hadn't done in a while), and I couldn't because it turns out they don't allow certain characters in their passwords and so the last time I changed my password it silently failed without telling me.
Still, Trigger sounds pretty neat even if you do have a non-crappy broker. As soon as HN picks it apart to make sure there are no obvious pitfalls, I'll definitely take a look.
There's a huge obvious pitfall with Trigger: information arrives several orders of magnitude too late vs. HFT. Investing in a style that mimics them but at hundreds (maybe thousands) of times slower is inherently flawed.
And if it helps inform your broker research, Robinhood is the exception to the rule when it comes to commission-free trades.
Cool app! my SO was asking me for something very simple to use, will ask her to give this a try. Is it required to be linked to an actual broker, or can you get limited messages from some other public data feed? For example, get alerts on price movements
Also, side note she uses Robinhood, not sure if there's plans to add that at some point
Absolutely, you don't need to have a brokerage account to use Trigger. You can just set alerts to get notifications on events and price movements you care about, but also track the performance of how you would have done if you sold or bought a stock at that time.
Re-robinhood, we are in line to get access to their API, and it will be the next broker we chose to integrate with. You can potentially have free algorithmic trading from your phone!
How are you planning to handle the user data though (who set what trigger when, etc.?) -- will you be selling it (even if anonymized) to third parties?
Cool! IB has an extensive API and they would be next on the list (hopefully Robinhood as well). At first it would not be automatic trading, but rather pull up an order form when the trigger fires. You can chose to set a market or limit order after the condition is met. Regarding selling the data, we have no plans to do sell it to third parties. If anything, we would like to offer insights back to the community of what we are seeing from the triggers, important levels and sell/buy interest.
We plan to offer a premium subscription to unlock premium triggers (like compound ones, if this AND that AND that) and also premium data types (like cryptocurrencies). In addition, we plan to offer an API that we can license to both developers and financial technologies businesses.
Mixed feelings on this. In some ways, I quite like it. Certainly adds some more automation to the process and makes it simple. Nice UI.
On the other hand, I am sure you are well aware of just how many amateurs lose money because they think they can actively manage and "play the stock market". My fear is that letting people make extremely, and these are extremely simple rules will make them feel even more in control and "smart" about their investments decisions.
Every rule examples presented are horrific simplifications that are somewhat intuitive (the dangerous kind!), giving confidence to the user, but would never pass for a sensible trading strategy. I think you are misleading users into thinking they are much more in control than they actually are.
From CEO in this comment thread
>"Trigger is trying to take the emotion out of investing, as the pros do."
>"As a former trader..."
As a former trader you must understand how complex trading and analysis is.
My first reaction with this was "seems fun". I'm aware that it's likely an index fund would probably still do better over time, but there is an appeal to me that maybe I could beat the market and if not it would still be fun trying.
Am I correct that assuming in the long run, the only difference between going long stocks/ETFs through this app vs just buy+holding an index fund would be:
If you can come up with a systematic strategy in a one-liner, that gives you consistent, good risk-adjusted returns, let me know as I quite fancy being a billionaire.
Saying that, "Buy Low, Sell High" isn't a bad strategy ;)
Remember, the stock market is just gambling. Fancy tools and triggers just let you kid yourself you know what you're doing. Unless you do it as a full time job, you probably should not ever directly trade individual stocks. What do you know that the pros do not?
That's quite a claim, where's the evidence to back it? There are funds[1] that have consistently beat the market every year for decades, their very existence disproves the gambling hypothesis.
> What do you know that the pros do not?
You're not playing the same game as the pro's so it doesn't really matter. Hedge fund/mutual fund managers are playing with millions/billions of dollars which requires massive liquidity and carefully planned entries and exits over a period of time in order to not move the price too much; that's a completely different game than what a retail investor plays and that means retail investors can chase profits in areas too small for the big guys to play in.
In other words, you don't have to beat the big guys, you're not fishing in the same pond nor playing the same game. Retail investors can enter and exit trades instantly without having to worry about liquidity or slippage, two concerns that dominate the big guys strategies. When you're small, you're nimble in a way the big guys can't be.
Every single trade you place has several costs associated with it. Things like the direct cost to the broker, and the implied cost of half the current spread. I do not believe that most people have the skill or discipline to understand the difference between happening to make money and properly making money long term.
As for it not being gambling - there's nothing stopping you beating bookmakers. It's doable, but you need to spend an awful lot of time researching sports (or whatever). It's the same with stocks - the vast majority of people are essentially just taking the spread and making expected losses on every trade, which the bookies (market makers in stock terms) soak up. A few people can spot outliers and take only those bets and make money long term.
I stand by my claim. If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
> I do not believe that most people have the skill or discipline to understand the difference between happening to make money and properly making money long term.
Sure, and I agree on that point.
> If it's so easy to make money on the stocks why isn't everyone doing it?
No one said it was easy. Merely that it's not gambling; gambling implies that's it's random and you can't find any edge, but people clearly do find edges and make money consistently so it's not gambling, it's just damn hard. However, it's a fallacy to conclude that you have to be better than the pros to make money for exactly the reason I specified, the pros are playing a harder game because the more money you have, the harder it is to find alpha.
It's vastly easier to get a 10% return on a few tens of thousands that it is on millions or billions because of liquidity and slippage. You can't exit a losing position in the billions instantly like you can when you have a few thousand, or enter quickly, it's an entirely different game.
Lots of people are making money on stocks. But your overly broad claim that investing in the stock market is gambling is indefensible: when you invest in broad total market funds you are essentially betting on entire economies, because you are assuring yourself a right to future income streams.
How is that gambling?
By choosing proper low-fee funds you can minimize the brokerage fees (and you can buy securities at net asset value) so that half of your critique of long-term profitability is untrue.
If you had read my original comment you'd see that I said most people should never directly trade individual stocks. I completely agree that putting money into low cost trackers for things like the FTSE250 or S&P500 is sensible. You're giving your money to a pro, who then keeps your bets balanced and trades cheaply.
> That's quite a claim, where's the evidence to back it? There are funds[1] that have consistently beat the market every year for decades, their very existence disproves the gambling hypothesis.
No it doesn't. I was a professional poker player, and professionals have existed for decades. Their existence doesn't mean there's no gambling in poker.
If you're taking offense to the wording of "just gambling," sure, I can see that. Like poker, it's gambling with an element of skill. Or perhaps more aptly put, it's a skill game with a gambling element.
What makes it gambling is that you have no influence over part of the process. You can control your decisions (bet/fold/buy/sell), but the rest (company performance, turn/river cards) is out of your hands.
It's a shame that we can't move past this attitude on HN. Sure, it might be a difficult problem, but we learn nothing from "be afraid unless you are willing to be a full-time gambler."
What made these academics think they could beat the pros?
They had concrete and plausible answers for "What do you know that the pros do not?", and were willing to test the correctness of their answers scientifically. And they have the resources to fund those tests without risking their personal financial health.
I'd give the same answer for someone who wanted to write crypto, and I'd expect much of HN to do the same. We absolutely need more people writing crypto, including crypto for fun. And the existing crypto written by "experts" is often ridiculously insecure. Please, do spend a weekend reading some book and putting together some crypto code to learn how things work. But do not proceed to encrypt your bank account credentials with them and stick the encrypted file on the public internet.
What's the ratio of amateurs who fail to the Simmons' of the world?
Not to mention the fact that there is a huge number of professionals in this space who can only afford to do what they do because it's their losing their customers money and not their own.
I'm sorry. We are simply trying to have an intelligent discussion about inventing in stock markets. No one said that you had to be as successful as Simmons or make it your full time job. The problem I'm addressing is the complete lack substance in the discussion. "Be afraid and leave all investing to the professionals. It's gambling, etc"
My response was to demonstrate that someone was making up his answer. Now you're digressing into the "well, most people fail" argument.
This might be a more intelligent discussion if you focus on the substance of the answer instead of the behavior of the participants. I admit that I was, technically, "making up" the answer, in that I did not have direct confirmation. It is rather like, if you asked me what the color of the sky is on a cloudless day in Barcelona, I'll "make up" the answer, having never been to Barcelona. But I know how skies work, and I know there's only one possible answer. And, as it turned out from the link you provided, I gave the correct answer.
If you dig into the answer in the link you provided, Simons says gained his initial funding (as well as his data) by what we could accurately call gambling. He had no strategy, no reason to believe he was successful, and no expectation of being successful. He was - through luck - successful. With that success, and having gained money he could then afford to lose, he noticed some structure in the data, and hired some mathematicians to evaluate his hypotheses. It was in fact more likely that he would have lost all his gambled money before even thinking about approaching the problem technically.
He was lucky, in the most straightforward sense. Anyone else, too, could be lucky. But the nature of probability is that the common case is not the lucky case. That's not a digression, that's the exact discussion at hand. If you want to insist that occasionally people are lucky -- sure, and occasionally a newcomer will invent a secure block cipher.
If you have enough money to test hypotheses, and you're okay with losing that money if your hypotheses are wrong, fantastic, go test them. That's exactly what Simons did. If you want to get rich by investing in the stock market without a strategy and hoping to get lucky, well, yes, some people get lucky. Simons happened to be one of them. But that's hardly evidence you should emulate that part of his behavior.
I've already watched the video. How do you think I knew where to quickly find the answer. You aren't lucky if you make those returns for 20 years. He charged 5 and 20 and people still invested.
Also, no one said the goal here wanted to get rich. Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting. Please don't tell us what's in the video again.
> You aren't lucky if you make those returns for 20 years.
That's not what I claimed. I claimed there were two steps. Step 1 is to acquire enough capital that you're okay losing it. Step 2 is to use that capital. Step 1 is what I claimed he was lucky. Step 2 is the one that lasted 20 years. Without step 1 (and there are many ways to do step 1 that don't involve luck, as well as many ways that don't involve investing), you can't proceed to step 2.
> Learning more about the math, etc would be interesting.
That is definitely interesting, and I agreed with that point upthread. You don't have to use actual money to learn about the math, though. If you want to learn stuff on simulations, everything I've been saying about capital you can afford to lose doesn't matter. However, the one and only thing simulations can't do is get you rich.
I can't watch the video right now, but assuming the transcript accurately transcribes what was said then:
JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models -- just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on.
That's basically what I said. I didn't claim that he had a brilliant and correct answer before he started. (Nor am I claiming that you need to have a brilliant and correct plan for a cryptosystem before you start.) I'm claiming that he had the resources to make experimentation not ruinous (the first part of that story is how he acquired those resources, namely, "pure luck" which "certainly wasn't mathematical modeling"), and he engaged in that experimentation and took the scientific method seriously (the second part of that story).
Do the pros actually know anything? If you averaged the returns all professional traders make, is it actually higher than the average of all non-professionals?
Besides everyone's always recommending low-cost index funds, the ones that would have given one a 31 basis point return over last year tracking the S&P500? With the gain in wealth over the last year for a 100k investment, one could almost buy a Nexus 6P on sale. Brilliant.
At the end of the day, most individual investors feel a relationship with the brands and companies they love, and often times they express their support by buying shares. For any individual investor who owns single stock or likes do it themselves, there are very little tools to help you invest responsibly. Trigger is trying to take the emotion out of investing, as the pros do. As a former trader, this is the most important lesson when investing, to set rules, levels and events ahead of time to make your actions more disciplined. We encourage investors to trade via triggers, instead of being driven by fear or greed.
>We encourage investors to trade via triggers, instead of being driven by fear or greed.
These triggers could be considered a proxy for fear ("IF JPM dividend decreases THEN SELL JPM") and greed ("IF Fed raises interest rates THEN BUY VXX"). These codify and act on what a user expects their emotions to be.
Maybe not us individuals, but I bet if trigger becomes really popular to the point where its rules actually have an impact on the market, then access to that rule database might be worth quite a lot.
As far as I can tell, Trigger is neither broker nor advisor. Why a company that is none of those wants to touch my securities, I can think of no charitable reason for that.
There exist a million reasons you do not want not-quite-stop-limit orders on SPY or GOOG in your personal account, you are up against trade execution systems that smoke your retail broker not to mention this outfit (who you now put between you & your broker).
Please do not bring a butter knife to a gun fight and lose your shirt.
Sure, but do they need to? Let's accept that HFT vampires steal a bit of the value I wanted to get. But my value is not in trying to be a HFT, it is in (ostensibly) calling that GOOG will go up or something. How does HFT screw me over in that regard?
It is possible for them to determine popular triggers and front run them. Since they are not a brokerage, I am not sure if they will be regulated/punished if they do front run trades.
we have plans to be become a registered investment advisor, which means we will have a responsibility to act as a fiduciary to our clients. We would never do such a thing as front running. In fact, what we would love to do is to offer back insights into the community, such that when you are placing triggers, we can tell you averages of where people are thinking of buying or selling for that stock as an indicator of key price points.
how do you deal with many clients having the same trigger then all executing the same order at the same time?
if 50000 identical triggers fire at the same time trying to buy the same stock with market orders they're going to get a bad deal, and people selling are going to clean up
It's certainly illegal for brokers, exchanges, and fiduciaries, sure.
It's certainly not illegal for me to do it, if you happen to tell me your stop loss orders over beers, or if I predict people's stop loss orders using public information and/or a sophisticated model.
So which side of the line is Trigger on? They don't seem to be a broker, exchange, or fiduciary, and they wouldn't be getting the relevant information from those sources.
"The User acknowledges and agrees that upon posting or transmitting information [...] on the APP, the User assigns to the Company [...] all rights, interest and title in and to such information"
If you want to manage your money through a tech startup, I suggest choosing one that is a broker and/or has a fiduciary responsibility to you!
We will let our users get a double look at the market first before sending the order automatically, for precisely this reason. Only those who are confident in their orders can chose to execute automically in the market.
Back in the web 1.0 days, a friend started a company named Xigo (sp? Think it was with an X) to do sort of similar stuff. There was a full domain specific language for automation. They suffered the fate of many otherwise good ideas in the ~2000 meltdown.
New Order - Blue Monday
Blue Monday was originally released in 1983 by the British Band New Order. It is the biggest selling 12'' of all time.
With 7 1/2 minutes it is one of the longest tracks ever to chart on the UK Singles Chart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYH8DsU2WCk
Right now we consume real time stock market data for ETFs and Stocks, as well as corporate fundamentals and real time economic events. As for when we enable trading from Trigger, whatever your broker allows you to trade we can support. First we will allow trading for stocks, and then options and currencies. We can introduce new securities quite easily into our platform.
yes! We are working to offer an API this summer with a webhook callback to get notifications on your triggers getting fired programmatically, should be a LOT of fun to play with.
At some point we'd love to. I have a Schwab account myself but can't use Trigger to trade on it unfortunately. Schwab is known to be one of the most closed environments in the investing space :/
I feel very confident in saying that for 99.9% of people, using this service will be a terrible, terrible idea that will only cost them money in the long run.
If you want to get into the stock market, buy a low-cost index fund and hold it for the next twenty years. That's the best advice I can give you.