Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day

by will_asouka • 2 days ago

68 44 2 days ago

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.

WoodenChair• 1 day ago

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.

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.

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

Yes I think you're right, it's unclear. I'm hopeful the first reveal explains the dynamic as the player goes. Maybe something like- each chart shows 60 daily candles of a real S&P 500 stock, a past window with the ticker and dates hidden, you call if the stock closes higher or lower 5 days later?

jt2190• 1 day ago

It would find it clearer if:

- “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.

sand500• 1 day ago

Needs a way to copy and paste text to share with friends. I feel like this is what made wordle viral

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

The config is currently if you're on desktop, you get text copied to the clipboard. On mobile, you get text + an image to share. Sharing points are 'Challenge a friend' and 'Share result' on the Performance Review, or you can share your career card from the Career Record. I added the image to the mobile shares as early users were screenshotting for x eg https://x.com/investingidiocy/status/2075471303809659212

lejeanvaljean• 1 day ago

To me the description was very clear, the game is fun to play. Would love to see the "prediction" of a LLM in the stats after playing

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

Nice idea, maybe when there's enough traction for weighted scoreboards I could enter some models

impendia• 1 day ago

This is fascinating.

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.

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

They're from a seeded random draw. Random S&P 500 stock, random 60-day window that's at least 12 months old, every player gets identical charts. Gemini writes the narrative vignette.

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.

mdemare• 1 day ago

The interesting answer by the author, will_asouka, has been marked 'dead' for some inscrutable reason.

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

Thanks for flagging, summary is: Charts are from a seeded random draw. And the instinct is pretty spot on players state ~74% average confidence but hit ~54%. Accuracy is basically flat across confidence brackets. Up only strategy quietly beats the coin flipping monkeys (stocks generally go up and to the right) but players call down 43% of the time.

spizder4• 22 hours ago

That said, if it's possible to do better than random guessing

Yes - by always picking Up.

Random stock on a random day has 53-55% chance of closing higher. Over 5 days, you will be right ~60%

1996–2016: 53.3% of days were positive. 2016–2021: 54.9% of days saw gains.

nightski• 21 hours ago

The baseline is the market average, not 0.

xnx• 1 day ago

Technical analysis is astrology for boys.

buredoranna• 1 day ago

I call it money-astrology.

stouset2• 1 day ago

Thinking there are straightforward, simple algorithmic strategies to beat the market requires one to also believe that the billions of dollars behind large investments for some reason doesn’t care about using these same strategies to make money.

“They have different goals”, I hear. Literally nobody’s investment strategy involves passing up above-average returns for low risk.

valkmit• 23 hours ago

There are plenty of known effects that are relatively simple to automate

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?

p1necone• 22 hours ago

If a big enough proportion of the market is also following the same technical analysis strategies as you, it will predict the market. There doesn't have to be anything actually correct about the analysis.

In reality I don't think a big enough proportion of investors are reading tea leaves for this to be true.

WarmWash• 1 day ago

Oh boy, I know more than a few guys who will get a kick out of this, hah

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

Appreciate you spreading the word, thanks

gizajob2• 1 day ago

It’s a fun game and it throws funny shade for getting the answers wrong, but who would have guessed and sized these answers right based on this sparse data without any additional context? There’s barely enough data in the charts to do TA properly.

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

If I was going to add 3 more indicators, what should they be? And/or more history?

gizajob2• 1 day ago

Well the map is not the territory. Just because there’s been a big gap down on a chart that wasn’t the chart doing that, the chart displays that as some kind of causal event like an earnings release or something the company has done to make the market react. So I don’t know what kind of Quant can look at that sparse TA data knowing nothing else about the company and make those calls accurately or know how to size the positions. One random money in a crowd will randomly do better than trying to sensibly do TA with this data.

Maybe Volume would be useful though.

spizder4• 21 hours ago

200 day, ATR, ATR extension from the 50

dionian• 1 day ago

would love to see Volume on the chart

will_asouka13• 1 day ago

On there as a toggle off by default, under the chart. You're the second to not notice it so design feedback duly noted

sitzkrieg• 1 day ago

you should probably rename it since reading the tape is the opposite of charts :p

tt_dev• 24 hours ago

you should include volume

will_asouka13• 24 hours ago

It's under the chart, toggled off by default. 3rd comment so very obviously needs to be made more prominent, on it.

carbonguy• 24 hours ago

I ended up generating alpha so this is clearly a great game and I'm a genius investor (compared to random monkeys). When I lose it all tomorrow, my opinion may of course change.

Seriously though, this is a clever idea and I'm interested to see if I can consistently beat the monkeys. Time will tell! Thank you for sharing!

intheitmines• 23 hours ago

From a very non altruistic point of view part of me wants to encourage this

spizder4• 22 hours ago

Love how you implement bet sizing, this is a signature of professional traders. How did you come up with the idea?

You mentioned stocks are "seeded random draw", but professionals don't trade random stocks - there is no edge there, price movements are mostly noise. You want stocks-in-play, stocks with heightened interest from investors on that day.

My suggestion is to manually pick interesting stocks each day and ask players what happens next. Don't hide names, so that players can asses market strength and group strength - 75% of success comes from these factors, and only 25% from individual stock selection.

will_asouka13• 22 hours ago

Thanks. My original idea was some kind of 'Duolingo for TA'. Your suggestion would definitely be very relevant to a less gamey, more serious product. great thought.

spizder4• 22 hours ago

Would love to use 'Duolingo for breakouts' for studying how stocks behaved just before they went on a 50%+ move. Successful traders spend thousands of hours studying these to build pattern recognition.

FajitaNachos• 21 hours ago

I 100% think you are going to harvest these decisions to train an ML model to do the inverse.

akutlay• 20 hours ago

I did 5/5, looking for quant jobs now

abuhl98• 20 hours ago

This is impressive and a tremendous concept.

fomoz• 19 hours ago

Thanks for posting. It's an interesting concept, but needs some work in my opinion.

First, that chart is super zoomed in. You can't zoom out or switch timeframes. You're not told how many bars you need to predict. You're not told the dates or what the stock is.

Not much you can see there other than a handful of candles, that's doesn't really tell you much.

If the stock and dates are a secret so people don't cheat, I don't see why. People can cheat on Wordle or Worldle, and they're still fun to play. But here you're basically just guessing, you have so little information it's basically a coin flip.

Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day

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