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[return to "We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months"]
1. naet+97[view] [source] 2025-12-04 23:47:53
>>cheese+(OP)
I used to work for a brokerage API geared at algorithmic traders and in my experience anecdotal experience many strategies seem to work well when back-tested on paper but for various reasons can end up flopping when actually executed in the real market. Even testing a strategy in real time paper trading can end up differently than testing on the actual market where other parties are also viewing your trades and making their own responses. The post did list some potential disadvantages of backtesting, so they clearly aren't totally in the dark on it.

Deepseek did not sell anything, but did well with holding a lot of tech stocks. I think that can be a bit of a risky strategy with everything in one sector, but it has been a successful one recently so not surprising that it performed well. Seems like they only get to "trade" once per day, near the market close, so it's not really a real time ingesting of data and making decisions based on that.

What would really be interesting is if one of the LLMs switched their strategy to another sector at an appropriate time. Very hard to do but very impressive if done correctly. I didn't see that anywhere but I also didn't look deeply at every single trade.

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2. chroma+Uy[view] [source] 2025-12-05 03:45:59
>>naet+97
>but for various reasons can end up flopping when actually executed in the real market.

1. Your order can legally be “front run” by the lead or designated market maker who receives priority trade matching, bypassing the normal FIFO queue. Not all exchanges do this.

2. Market impact. Other participants will cancel their order, or increase their order size, based on your new order. And yes, the algos do care about your little 1 lot order.

Also if you improve the price (“fill the gap”), your single 1 qty order can cause 100 other people to follow you. This does not happen in paper trading.

Source: HFT quant

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3. this_u+TF1[view] [source] 2025-12-05 13:22:55
>>chroma+Uy
If you actually were in the industry, you would know that most retail traders don't fail, because they lose a tick here or there on execution, they fail, because their strategies have no edge in the first place.
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4. chroma+FZ1[view] [source] 2025-12-05 15:00:25
>>this_u+TF1
> If you actually were in the industry, you would know that most retail traders don't fail, because they lose a tick here or there on execution

Where did I say “retail trader”?

Because “institutional” low-latency market makers trade 1 lot all the time.

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5. this_u+hb2[view] [source] 2025-12-05 15:50:25
>>chroma+FZ1
The context from parent was obviously that. Instis don't trade on Alpaca.

> Because “institutional” low-latency market makers trade 1 lot all the time.

That sentence alone tells me that you're a LARPer.

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6. chroma+HB2[view] [source] 2025-12-05 17:38:12
>>this_u+hb2
> That sentence alone tells me that you're a LARPer

cope.

Equity options are sparse and have 1 order of 1 lot/qty per price. But usually empty. Too many prices and expiration dates.

US treasury bond cash futures (BrokerTec) are almost always 1 lot orders. Multiple orders per level though.

I could go on, but I’m busy as our team of 4’s algos are printing US$500k/hour today.

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