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Read the Tape gives players the same 5 S&P500 stock charts per day to predict. You select low, medium or high confidence and then call the chart UP or DOWN. It's a 1d chart which then resolves over 5 days. Alpha is scored against the Monkey Index, a basket of 11 random coin flips at low confidence which provides a tangible win/lose condition.
We're two weeks in and some interesting data is being kicked up. Players like to call tops even though stonks go up- 60% of the 70 charts so far resolve higher, players' down calls have only been right 31% of the time. There's a full stats dive at https://readthetape.cc/notes/tape-report-1
Your feedback and thoughts is most welcome.
Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
That said, if it's possible to do better than random guessing, then does this reflect the fact that the five charts are presumably hand-selected to be "interesting"?
My naive guess, and I'd be very curious to learn if this were wrong, is that something very close to the efficient market hypothesis is true; that, if it were possible to beat the monkeys on randomly chosen stocks on random dates, then someone would have figured this out already and deployed bots to capture whatever profits are available.
Your instinct is pretty spot on. 6,000+ calls in: players state ~74% average confidence but hit ~54%, and accuracy is basically flat across confidence brackets. Up only strategy quietly beats the coin flipping monkeys but players call down 43% of the time.
Your description here and on the website is not clear to me about what I am predicting. Am I predicting whether the stock is going to continue to go up the same day? Is the chart of one day and I am predicting whether it will go up or down the next day? In my opinion, you need to get the explanation of what I'm looking at and the directions of what I am predicting down to one clear sentence.
- “up” and “down” was explained. If I bet “down” I’m betting my stock will underperform the monkey index? And if I am correct, I will make money (short the asset) or simply loose less than if I’d invested in monkey?
- loosing less money was green (win) when monkey is down even more.
So you can lose money on the trade and still go green because the monkeys lost more, or make money and go red because a monkey made more. The idea is it's your edge over random. Hope that makes sense and thanks for raising, will strive to make it clearer in-game.
“They have different goals”, I hear. Literally nobody’s investment strategy involves passing up above-average returns for low risk.
Holding overnight risk yields superior risk-adjusted returns. Buying end of month and dumping few days into new month. There are dozens of such effects
These have mechanical reasons for their outperformance - overnight risk has to do with how borrow interest rates for equity markets are calculated and firms unwilling to hold unhedged exposure overnight. Longing EOM has to do with people getting their paycheck EOM and auto buying index funds, and so on and so forth.
Systematic trading isn't magical, it's identifying these kinds of (often simple) effects and building a portfolio of them.
As an individual investor you actually have a huge advantage over large institutions in that your portfolio is nimble and easy to get out of.
As a relatively simple exercise - consider a hypothetical portfolio that's simply long SPY for the year. Could you identify _one_ day in which you'd rather be flat? The answer is probably yes, and the reason you can do this (and not a billion $ AUM fund) is that rotating in and out of positions is cheap for you.
When news about Iran hits the tape, who do you think can exit their positions faster? Joe Schmoe with $30k in his brokerage account, or Citadel with a $100bn position?
Maybe Volume would be useful though.