jspaulding

Marketing/BizDev Co-founder for Thinklab https://thinklab.com

I'm looking for a co-founder for Thinklab. I believe there is opportunity to dramatically accelerate academic research. Instead of working in silos and hoarding information, we'd like scientists to work together openly over the Internet.

The core idea of Thinklab is to partner with science funders (e.g. The Gates Foundation or the NIH) and help them distribute their money in a way that creates incentives for scientists to work more openly and collaboratively. This is where you come in. I need a people person to build our community of scientists, and build partnerships with funders.

About me: I've sold two companies, and previously made a bunch of money through high frequency trading. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessespaulding

I can offer you up to 40% equity. Please email me at jesse@thinklab.com.

What if there were a startup that partnered with science funders to help them distribute their money in a way that produced better models of doing science? That's the idea behind Thinklab: https://thinklab.com/d/38

Hey folks. Thinklab founder here. Would be happy to answer any questions you have.

The tricky part is that the current system may act as a filter where the best people will still try to hide their methods and get into the existing Journals because it's best for their career - so you'll get lower quality requests for funding.

Yes you could be right about that. It's possible that in the short term an individual funder could see a drop in the quality of applicants -- but I think this will be offset by massive increase in overall impact. I think science funders underestimate how much power they have to compel change.

Yes. I mean broken in the sense that the incentives of individual scientists are not aligned with what's in the best interests of science a as a whole. It's the reason scientists hoard knowledge and work in silos instead of sharing their work openly while collaborating over the internet. I've written more here: http://thinklab.com/blog/10-consequences-of-a-broken-scienti...

Great! I read your comments and have to admit I'm unfamiliar with what a "collaborative atlas" is or would be? But I certainly agree it's a big problem that scientists are only rewarded for publishing papers. There needs to be a way to reward scientists for sharing in smaller chunks -- even just an idea that might help out a peer.

I agree -- we're making great progress. Science IS working. My point is really just that since the advent of the internet, we've had the potential of making progress much faster.

Academic publishing is obsolete

To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we want it to reward anymore. However, there is a solution: science funders can distribute their money in a way that creates a very different set of incentives. Sadly, almost all science funders are very conservative organizations. YC Research can play a critical role in catalyzing a transition to an Internet-native model of research. My startup, Thinklab, wants to help. We're a service that helps science funders reward participation in a massively collaborative open online model of research.

My startup, Thinklab, is trying fix the incentives. The concept is to partner with science funders and help them distribute their money in a way that rewards scientists for openly sharing their work in real-time while collaborating with each other over the Internet. The first simple step is requiring researchers to openly post their proposals in order to get funding. A portion of funding is then set aside to reward valuable contributions from the scientific community. We would love to have the support and participation of YC Research.

Hey Lucas, I'd love to connect. I'm currently in Saigon bootstrapping http://thinklab.com

Regarding talent -- what do you think about the technical talent here? I find myself still working with guys from Eastern Europe. Would be awesome to find some talent locally though.

We're also working on this as part of ThinkLab http://thinklab.com/publications

Thanks for the comment. To answer your questions

- Funding availability by country will depend on who our funding partners are (right now we have none).

- Yes, we could support existing projects that want to become open. Right now the site assumes people start with a "proposal stage", but we could create an option for an existing project.

- ThinkLab does not enforce what should be shared. It's up to the project leaders to declare what they intend to share, and it's up to the collaborators to ultimately decide how much of a performance bonus the research team should receive. (Partly based on how open they are with their data)

Thanks again.

It takes data (last 4 weeks of market update data) and learns how to predict price movements and how to make profitable trades.

This is such an odd comment. What motivates you to write such a comment? And what makes my system amateur and noob in your eyes?

There are plenty of shops making tons of money with HFT who do not have deal flow at all - it's got nothing to do with luck.

Survivorship bias would mean I simply got lucky. If you're going to say that you're at least going to need to look at my P&L charts and say how I could possibly achieve that much success with luck alone.

Finally, machine learning has everything to do with my success. There were hundreds of variables in my algorithm that were ALL optimized using ML. If you read the article you would know that I built an accurate model for backtesting that I used to optimize variables as well as confirm that I was going to make money before I even started live trading.

I'm pretty confident that whatever you were doing in 2004 has nothing to do with what I was doing.

It's easy to fall into that mindset. And in fact, that mindset is right back where I am now. The only reason I had the gall to attempt this in the first place was the the simple fact that I was making money at the time (in 2008) 'manually' day trading the Russell 2000. I thought this 'should not be possible' so I figured there's no reason not to try an automated program.

I don't know the exact definition of HFT but I did run my algorithm from a server collocated with my broker close to the exchange. I modelled lag time in simulation and not having it collocated certainly would have hurt.

Thank you. You are right - I should clarify things by saying my program had no directional bias. It was a 50/50 split of longs/shorts. Are there other stats I'm missing?

Thank you. I'm looking back through my code and there are really a lot of indicators. It would get pretty technical to explain them. They are all explainable it's just that each one corresponds to slightly different market conditions and I just didn't want to get into it.

My automated program was much less stressful than trading manually. The best was going to Hawaii, waking up, and having the entire day done. I was making like 6k every day on that vacation. The best!! :)

1) Being connected to friends who taught me a scalping style of day trading 2) Being really good at designing algorithms. 3) I only wish I could have started automated trading back in 2001

oh right.. well in the very beginning it was.

yes. and yes.

Actually I believe when I switched from T4 to TT it was C++ I was using.

To be honest I'd given up and moved on to other stuff well before I actually shut down the program.

I basically just brute forced it. I came up with a cost function which would measure the difference between a possible curve and each data point. I think you're supposed to do the squared difference but I can't remember if I did that. With a cost function in place it's just a matter of zooming in on variables that minimize the cost function.

CourseTalk. CourseTalk! http://coursetalk.org .. You are right kind of :) But I've made a decision to start reaching out generally so I can attract cool people to work with on whatever projects I may be interested in in the future.

In my final month I lost $600. I didn't include this on the chart to keep things simpler visually. Since then I have not traded and the reason is that it was abundantly clear that my program was no longer working. That's why I shut it off.

With regard to tuning I may have lost $1000 or so but as I wrote in the article I was able to build a backtesting model that accurately simulated live trading. So once I had that I could basically use it to verify I had sufficient edge to make a profit after covering my commissions.

My risk exposure was very low. When I said large losing positions this meant like $600. But the bottom line is I had a daily stop loss of $3000 enforced at my broker. The most I ever lost was around $2000.

Anyway, there is not really some hidden thing that I am not telling people. It does bug me a bit that your comment is at the top given that it says I'm manipulating statistics and was actually one of the guys that the quants gleefully picked off. I think it's unlikely I traded much with other HFT systems but if I did they certainly lost money.

thanks for posting hadn't seen that

I'm probably showing my ignorance here but what do you mean by alpha? And how is it quantified?