Trader who turned $5k to $80M in 10 years, ML trading systems, and more.
Learn the three setups this US equities trader traded to make $70m+ in 2020/21.
For this week, I have some interesting things to share with you.
Using Machine Learning in Trading - story of a Crypto trader
While browsing reddit, found this post about a guy who traded crypto market in 2019 and made decent $$$ using a machine learning based system.
This may not work in mature markets, but in a market like crypto space with lot of price, volume, and liquidity driven inefficiencies, this might be give you a rough idea on one of the machine learning driven approaches.
Although it doesn’t go deep on what he actually did, it’s helpful to give you a rough idea on how machine learning might be useful.
Access the article here → Lessons learned building an ML trading system that turned $5k to $200k
Trader who turned $5k to $80m+ in 10 years.
Discovered this guy named Kristjan Kullamagi through a friend who trades equity market in India.
We were discussing about Manas Arora (twitter.com/imanasarora) who we both admire for his trading in the equity markets. He’s a follower of Mark Minervini and has personalized Minervini’s style to trade in the Indian market.
He shares his setups regularly as he takes the trades, on twitter. One of the things that made me go into the rabbithole of these guys and how they trade, was something Manas had posted long back.
These two tweets have been on the top of my head for a long time now, since I am thinking along the same lines for my trading at my work too (in the energy markets).
It was while discussing this that this friend suggested I take a look at Pradeep Bonde. Pradeep is also an equities trader, and has been doing this for over 15 years.
I checked Pradeep’s website - stockbee.blogspot.com and the blog posts have some insane value per post, for free.
I highly suggest you take a look at his blog here → Stockbee Blog
Then, when I was scouring through the web, I come across this guy Kristjan Kullamagi.
He started with $5k in 2011. He trades US equities.
After blowing up his capital 3-4 times (each time around $5k), eventually his trading took off, and his account is now at over $100m.
Last he reported his account size was in 2021, when it had grown to $81m.
His setups are very simple, he doesn’t sell anything, he shares his setup and the logic behind those.
He trades only 3 setups in US equities. And he made most of his money (nearly $77m after 2020 January).
You will benefit a LOT by checking out his website, reading his blog posts, and watching his videos.
Check his website here: Home - Qullamaggie
Books to learn Poker from
I was talking to a couple of my colleagues who mentioned they have a poker night at home this weekend.
I don’t know how to play poker yet. But I asked people for recommendations and also mined reddit poker group for book suggestions.
Based on that I had done a thread previously. You might want to check it out here.
Different types of Quant
Found this interesting thread on reddit discussing different types of Quants. Check it out here → Overview on Quants
Learn CS for free from Top 10 University
A very good systematic trading related podcast everyone is missing out on
Top Traders Unplugged is a podcast I suggest to everyone interested in trading to not miss.
It’s run by the MD of Dunn Capital (a Systematic Trend Following CTA) and regularly has hosts who are among the very successful hedge fund managers, CTAs in the history of fund management.
It’s usually around trend following, macro, asset allocation, etc. But the discussions are really enlightening in how fund managers think, and how systematic traders approach the market.
If you listen carefully, there’s a lot of titbits and useful insights you can gather about the systematic approach to trading. So, definitely give it a listen.
You can probably start with all the episodes of Jerry Parker (one of the Turtle traders) and then listen to the others too.
Free Data Sources
If you did not know, I posted a thread on free but quality data sources yesterday.
Check it out here:
That’s a wrap for this week.
You can always reach out to me on Twitter DM and let me know what you think about the newsletter or any of these things I’m sharing.
If you want me to share anything with every other subscriber - something you found useful for financial markets, in your journey as a trader, feel free to ping me.
If you have any criticisms about the newsletter, definitely reach out to me. I’d be happy to hear from you.
Until next week,
Shravan.
Funny, I was just researching poker books today before your letter arrived. I found a new one highly graded through Goodreads. Check out "Exploitive Play in Live Poker". Sounds promising.
You need to be more critical of these traders. You said Qualmaggie turned $5,000 into $81 million in 10 years starting in 2011. But then you also note that he made $77 million of that starting in January 2020, which means he turned $5,000 into $4 million by the end of 2019.
Well what happened in 2020? The COVID-19 pandemic of course, when governments printed trillions of dollars, stocks markets took off like crazy, and many new people entered the markets. Some of those people did well; others may have done well for a while and then flamed out. People’s success in 2020, in other words, may have been less a result of their skills and more a result of being lucky.
That’s what appears to be the case with Qualmaggie. Turning $5K into $4 million is impressive, but it 9 years to do that, which means the other $77 million must have been less about skill and more about luck than you’re realizing.
This is why people need to always be careful when taking trading advice from anyone. Things aren’t always what they seem and people they look to for advice may not be as impressive as they seem at first glance.