edwardy20

Professional quant here. I have to say I strongly disagree with the conclusions of the OP.

> They were all found by using phrases like "predict stock market" or "predict forex" or "predict bitcoin" and terms related to those.

Yeah, searching for any finance papers with "predict" or "machine learning" is literally the lowest quality tier you can get. These papers are often written by grad students who can pump an easy paper out by "applying" some already known ML algorithm to financial markets. Of course it's not gonna work. It also kills me when I see ML models who need stationarity assumptions applied to non-stationary time series data. Yeah, good luck with that.

THAT being said, there is lots of high quality research which has been replicated over and over, showing that alpha does exist in the market (and which funds have made billions off of). I would like to see the OP try to replicate some of these instead. To give some simple examples:

1. Try searching for papers with the keywords "and the cross section of expected returns". For example, the momentum factor which can be tested and replicated with only linear regression. > There is substantial evidence that indicates that stocks that perform the best (worst) over a three- to 12-month period tend to continue to perform well (poorly) over the subsequent three to 12 months. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=299107

2. Statistical arbitrage strategies which were known to work well until the mid 2000s. Also been replicated many times, furthermore, you can see the gradual decline in profitability pointing to the theory that "alpha decay" in this case is real. https://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/avellane/AvellanedaLeeStatA...

3. High frequency strategies. No way OP or any retail trader can replicate this, but firms make billions of dollars per year consistently doing this.

In conclusion, to make a claim that there is no alpha in the market seems highly suspect, and perhaps just needs a more nuanced view of how trading firms make their profits.

Tags would be easiest to implement - but an universal search bar for all text would be helpful too.

Awesome work, have been looking for something like this for a while. I would love to see tags for people and a search bar. If I'm trying to organize a casual chess match or pickup soccer game, it would be super convenient to search all my friends with said interest.

> Because the "points" have no intrinsic value except in comparison to your classmates

This is where your logic is wrong. The professor is not saying the class is graded on a relative scale (for example, top 10% of the class gets As). If everyone gets two points, and it bumps up everyone's GPAs, then of course it will benefit them all, especially in comparison to people who are not in the class.

That is a weird pricing plan: what does 125 texts mean? After that, I just run out...permanently?

Around 50 people have those plans right now. Some recent items that have been shipped are: a solar powered cockroach, bacon candy canes, and a pedometer. I was planning on building a live stream of items being ordered, but I'm waiting on more users to sign up before implementing that feature.

I run https://rrandomize.com (it ships random items to you). It's currently earning about $150 a month or so. Most of the money comes in through one-time payments, since I pocket the change after purchasing an item for the user. The idea is simple, so it didn't take much work coding at all. I'm still pretty new to web development so this was a chance to practice execution and security.

I thought this was common knowledge. You could always use Word and Excel on Skydrive (now Onedrive).

It seems like that would be extremely easy to brute force.

None?

What is the pricing on the data plan?

This is an interesting concept. I suppose you could do similar things with USD as well. You could declare, "Anyone with a dollar bill with this specific serial number now has control of my company." I would argue that the dollar bill still has a value of $1 by itself, but you can assign arbitrary value to it by making it representative of another thing.

As opposed to your painstakingly thought out and intellectually engaging rebuttal?

Chrome works for me. (Version 31.0.1650.63 on Ubuntu 13.10)

Why would you want to pay for them? :)

Yes I am. I never physically handle the item-- Amazon ships it to you.

A little bit of both. The product database is populated with posts from several sites, including reddit.com/r/TheBestofAmazon and reddit.com/r/thecoolestofamazon. You receive a random gift from the product database.

OK, so why don't you borrow dollars, convert to bitcoins, and actually make money on the loan through deflation?

Why would anyone want to borrow money in a deflationary currency (Bitcoins) rather than an inflationary one (dollars)?

If you had half a billion dollars, it would be much more profitable for you to mine bitcoins.

I completely agree with you. And more to the point: does this hypersensitivity over gender issues ameliorate the problem, or only makes it worse?