Building a $3,500/mo Neural Net for Trading as a Side Project

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I'm Sebastian Dobrincuand I'm a software engineer currently working as a freelancer. I'm also an avid product maker who loves building side businesses and crazy projects. I initially built Stock Trading Bot as a personal research project.

I was testing the waters to see if modern machine learning approaches can be used to predict and automate selling and buying of assets in today's stock market, at a much more efficient rate. Currently I am the sole user. I'm planning to continue working on it with the goal of scaling the bot as much as possible. The idea popped up pretty randomly. I was getting ready to board a flight to SFO and decided to download some podcasts. I felt like trying something new, so I picked a few of the most popular ones from the Finance category.

The host brought up the topic of liquidity, which boils down to new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders measures: Essentially when liquidity is high, investors can successfully trade a larger order close to the current price and within a short time span. Once they began debating whether or not high frequency trading was improving the market by providing liquidity, I switched to the Notes app on my phone and started furiously typing some of the main ideas.

Prior to this project, my experience with finance in general was pretty limited. I had a solid understanding of the fundamentals of trading but not much beyond that. The first one is probably the best piece on finance I've ever read. It literally answers all new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders questions any curious person who has ever made a trade might ask. On the other hand, John Hull's book gave me a fantastic introduction on mathematical finance from an applied point of view.

I highly recommend both if you are just getting started with trading. I believe we've reached a peak in the field of AI. We now have both powerful machines and enough data to process. With this in mind, my inner engineer got excited at the possibilities of tackling the market with today's advancement in technology. Besides that, I have an addiction for creating fascinating projects and this was no exception. The huge advantage is that you are not necessarily starting with a handicap against the big trading firms.

That's because when it comes to stock trading, even microseconds could make trades go wrong — such as your new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders falling victim of a faster bot's bait offer. And guess who owns the faster servers and bots? With cryptocurrencies however, these small time increments are not nearly as important. Although I believe it's the golden age to be in the Bitcoin market because it's imperfectI quickly abandoned the idea maybe too quickly?

Without boring you with technical details any longer, the solid trading APIs were mostly based on REST, which is not fast enough for what I was aiming for. For proprietary reasons I will abstain from publicly discussing a lot of details about the technical implementation. Although I get many requests to open-source the project, I believe that disclosing deep details of the models or prediction approach would hurt the advantages that this solutions has over the other existing bots.

However, for anyone willing to learn more about that, I would be more than happy to discuss in private, to some extent. Long story short, I ultimately ended up going for the stock market, but not into high frequency trading in its real meaning. My bot holds a single position from seconds to minutes sometimes even hourswhich makes it more of an automated trader than a high frequency trader.

The reason behind this is that being an individual trader makes it extremely hard to compete with the big guys, as you're lacking perks such as very powerful hardware, advance trained software, and great locations for your servers. The closer to the stock exchange you are, the faster you receive the information.

Large investment servers are literally paying millions to get their servers a few miles closer to the exchanges. Their limitation is 3 requests per second, and this was more than enough for my new strategy. Getting solid historical financial data isn't cheap, and with so many people hitting the providers to scrape and download data, I don't blame them for limiting the offered information.

Intrinio is a good provider for real-time stock quotes at very inexpensive prices. However, getting access to more in-depth data would always yield better results. I built the first prototype in a little under a month. I was working late hours, trying to find time around my daily job as a freelancer. At this point the bot wasn't very smart. It took me about 2 more weeks to feed it with data until my error rate was satisfactory, and another 2 weeks to test it before putting it in production.

Summed up, the technical implementation of the current version took about 4 months, with some more improvements along the way. Since I publicly announced itI've been receiving dozens of offers from trading companies. At the moment the system gives me an edge over other traders. If I sold it, I'd be giving this advantage to other traders and, subsequently, losing my lead. Although I do not exclude a future buyout, I am presently focusing on improving the product new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders trying to scale it.

One of the things that I plan on doing soon is increasing the capital and therefore putting the bot through more trading volume. There are tons of improvements I have in mind, especially on adjusting the position-holding time span, as well as solutions to make it more lightweight, facilitating larger volumes.

I wasted way too much time trying to apply high frequency trading in Bitcoin. At first the idea sounded great, but I was soon facing a lot of technical issues trying to scale the amount of requests. However, I am not yet convinced that it's impossible to achieve true HFT with cryptocurrencies, so it might be something I come back to in the future.

After drifting away from the idea of HFT due to the technical limitations, I looked into a more analytical approach in automated trading. Most of those concepts couldn't be applied in the Bitcoin market, as it's highly unpredictable, making it hard to shape the models around it.

That's when I decided to stick to the stock market. Another big mistake in the beginning was relying too heavily on models. Instead of trying different approaches in analyzing the data I had, I relied solely on the models for identifying profitable patterns without investing time into other more direct solutions.

Models are only simple real world abstractions, and my common sense has saved me more than once. Now this is not by any means a reliable metric, and new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders are many factors that affect it.

The bot has not been tested enough to guarantee that this isn't just a fluke it might as well be. Large investment management companies would do anything to achieve those statistics, and I'm sure I won't keep up that amount of success in upcoming trades.

The success so far was also greatly impacted by the favorable market conditions, chosen stocks, and the fact that the bot was running intermittently. I learned this the painful way. Not too long ago the market went pretty crazy, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't expecting some major crashes of the stocks I was trading. Although my stop-loss saved me from some brutal losses, had I not stepped in at the right time, the bot would've ruined all the profit from the past months.

That event really got me thinking, and I decided to stop it running for a few days until I fixed that loophole. This was also a great learning experience for new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders, and I believe that without going through those ups and downs, I would've never managed to get the algorithm to where it is today. I have no regrets losing time on Bitcoin, as it gave me a deeper understanding of how cryptocurrency trading works, which might prove useful some day.

Probably my biggest single advantage is being a starry-eyed young dreamer. To some extent, this allows me to believe enough to put effort into ideas in that others wouldn't.

That's what motivated me to persevere new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders finding those "backdoors" in the market. While many people believe individual traders don't stand much of a chance against the well-equipped companies, I am here to prove that with the right implementation there still is plenty of space in the market.

Another immensely helpful resource were the public new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders papers available online. In fact, I got tremendous help from papers published back in I often found that most of them are easily overlooked, although they contain super useful analyses. Being a workaholic has also contributed a fair amount to this success. I have no issue whatsoever working hours per day. With time, I developed a very productive and consistent lifestyle, managing to get rid of most distractions.

This allowed me time to invest in polishing and researching the different strategies for this project. If you've worked your butt off to build something and give up on launching it, no one will care about it. We live in a very capitalist society where people will judge you based on real results. No one cares about your initiative and new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders reasons why you didn't launch. As Sam Altman says, nothing will excuse you for not having a great product.

However, not having anything is certainly worse new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders that. Don't make it perfect from the first version. Test the market first, gather tons of feedback and constantly iterate over your idea. New automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders this is not necessarily a customer-focused product yet?

Side projects allow you to experiment on crazy ideas without being labeled as crazy. And definitely go for new automated trading bot icohitstakeamerican stock traders craziest idea you have in mind. That's how most of the successful companies started talk Facebook, Uber, AirBnb. Every problem has a solution. You just have to be creative enough to find it. I am currently available for freelance work.

You should join the Indie Hackers community! We're a few thousand founders helping each other build profitable businesses and side projects. Come share what you're working on and get feedback from your peers. Not ready to get started on your product yet?

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Ether is a necessary element — a fuel — for operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. It is a form of payment cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum by the clients of the platform to the machines executing the requested operations. To put it another way, ether is the incentive ensuring that developers write quality applications wasteful code costs moreand that the network remains healthy people are compensated for their contributed resources.

If you just want to cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum the technology, you probably don't need real ether. Download the latest Wallet app and switch to the Test Network. The total supply of ether and its rate of issuance was decided by the donations gathered cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum the presale.

The results were roughly:. Note that after the Byzantium update is implemented, the mining and uncle reward is reduced to 3 ethers and 0. This means that while the absolute issuance is fixed, the relative inflation is decreased every year. In theory, if this issuance was kept indefinitely then at some point the rate of new tokens created every year would reach the average amount lost yearly by misuse, accidental key lost, the death of holders etc and there would reach an equilibrium.

But the rate is not expected to be kept: The exact method of issuance and which function it will serve is an area of active research, but what can be guaranteed now is that 1 the current maximum is considered a ceiling and the new issuance under casper will not exceed it and is expected to be much less and 2 whatever method is ultimately picked to issue, it will be a decentralized smart contract that will not give preferential treatment to any particular group of people and whose purpose is to benefit the overall health and security of the network.

Developers who intend to build apps that will use the ethereum blockchain. Users who want to access and interact with smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum Wallet includes an easy presale import. Download it and it will offer that option automatically. This will prompt for your password and imports your ether presale account. It can be used non-interactively with the --password option taking a password file cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum argument containing the wallet password in cleartext.

If this does not work, please do not hesitate in contacting us on our cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereumreddit or at info at ethereum.

If you don't feel comfortable securing your ether right now but just want to check that your presale wallet is included in the blockchain, then use our online balance checker. The Ethereum network is kept running by computers all over the world. In order to reward the computational costs of both processing the contracts and securing the network, there is a reward that is given to the computer that cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum able to create the latest block on the chain.

Cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum 15 seconds, on average, a new block is added to the blockchain with the latest transactions processed by the cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum and the computer that generated this block will be awarded 3 ether.

Due to the nature of the algorithm for block generation, this process generating a proof of work is guaranteed to be random and rewards are given in proportion to the computational power of each machine. If you are on a private network and if you just want to test the technology for free, you should then any normal computer with a normal CPU will be able to run the network and earn test ether ether that is only redeemable on the test network where it was generated through mining.

This is the best choice for small-scale network or testing privately, as cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum less resource intensive. On the real or live test network a normal desktop or laptop computer might take a very long time to successfully mine a block and receive ether.

Before you do any mining, you need to cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum which address will receive your earnings called "etherbase". You only need to do this once. Here's how to cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum your etherbase and then start mining:.

Its goal is to protect miners like yourself so that you will only ever need your home computer to remain competitive. The DAG should take about 10 minutes to generate and as soon as it finishes, Geth will start mining automatically.

If cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum are serious about mining on the live ethereum network and getting real ether rewards, then you should use a dedicated computer with very powerful graphics cards in order to run the network. If you are using Eth then GPU mining comes out of the box. There are currently two options for GPU mining in Geth available.

You can read a more detailed description of how to install it on this mining post. Cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum is a version for the pro miners. Go experimental Cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum branch. It's experimental so you need to build go from source to get it. This version is focused on hobbyists and developers. To install it, cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum geth from source and then switch to the GPU Miner branch.

You can read all about the theory behind this and its design in the Ethereum gitBook, mining chapter. Note that for Serenity a future release, a major milestone on the Ethereum development roadmap we are planning to switch cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum Proof of Stake PoS. Mining prowess roughly scales proportionally to memory cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum.

Empirical evidence has already confirmed this, with R9 x regularly topping benchmarks. Don't expect to see them on the market, and if you do, proceed with extreme caution. Ethereum would never be possible without bitcoin—both the technology and the currency—and we see ourselves not as a competing cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum but as complementary within the digital ecosystem. Ether is to be treated as "crypto-fuel", a token whose purpose is to pay for computation, and is not intended to be used as or considered a currency, asset, share or anything else.

If so desired one could trade bitcoins for ether with the purpose of executing contracts and trade it back immediately in order to keep their value pegged and secured by the bitcoin network. The latest version of the wallet includes an automatic conversion between ether and bitcoin. Use a pegged derivative: Ethereum is a great tool for creating complex trading between multiple parties.

If you have a source for the price of Bitcoin that all parties trust, then it's possible cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum create an ethereum based currency whose value is pegged to the market value of Bitcoin. This means that you could trade bitcoins to a token that is guaranteed to always trade back to the same amount of bitcoins while still being fully compatible with other ethereum contracts.

Cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum a Bitcoin relay to convert a 2-way peg: This means that you can use Bitcoin's native limited scripting capability to lock a bitcoin into a contract that is directly connected to an ethereum contract, which can then issue an ethereum based token that is guaranteed to be backed by bitcoin. The relay is under development and as implementations are tested and proved to be secure, we will list them here.

Ethereum addresses don't have built-in checks on them yet. Cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum means that if you mistype an address, your ether will be lost forever, without a secondary confirmation window. If you are moving a significant amount, start with smaller quantities that you can afford to lose, cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum you feel comfortable enough.

There are two types of accounts in Ethereum: In this section, we focus on the former. The remainder of this guide will be dedicated to the latter. Similarly, your transactions are also of two types: Before you execute your first ether transfer you need a friend cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum send your ether to. Assuming you created a second account to send the ether to:. The first two lines set local variables with account numbers for easier access later. Change the sender and recipient addresses to whatever you like.

The third line converts the chosen amount to the network's base unit wei. Although there are many names for ether denominations, we will use only two: Wei is the atomic unit of ether, and is the one used on the system level. Most day-to-day transactions will be done with ether, which is equivalent to one quintillion wei, or a 1 followed by 18 zeros.

Waiting a few seconds, the transaction should be complete. To check the balance of an account, simply type:. If you are cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum Geth then you can just use eth instead of web3. Anytime you create a transaction in Ethereum, the string that is returned is the Transaction Hash.

You can use those to keep track of a transaction in progress, or the amount of gas spent in a past transaction using eth. Here's how to use it:. We've built easy to use graphical toolsbut if you are a developer you probably want to install the command line tools. Ether The crypto-fuel for the Ethereum network. Did you buy ether during the presale?

Check your ether presale balance safely here: FAQ How cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum ethers created? The results were roughly: Is the ether supply infinite? I bought ether during the presale. How do I access it? Then, if you are using Geth execute this: Read more cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum accounts. How do I mine ether? This process is usually called mining in the crypto-currency lingo. CPU MINING Using the command line If you are on a private network and if you just want to test the technology for free, you should then any normal computer with a normal CPU will be able to run the network and earn test ether ether that is only redeemable cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum the test network where it was generated through mining.

Here's how to set your etherbase and then start mining: If you have successfully mined a block you will see a message like this among the logs: What's the relationship between bitcoin and ether?

There are many ways in which you can use Bitcoins within the Ethereum ecosystem: How do I send ether using the command line? Assuming you created a second account to send the ether to: After having set the variables above, send the transaction with:.