You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours

[murtcepsxz]

1) No-one ever makes money by following others voodoo (technical trading) advice; the ones who make money can't explain what they're doing.
1.1) I wrote black-box voodoo FX trading software because my boss forced me to; and I said it wouldn't work
1.1.1) I quit; it went auto and lost 5% of VaR for five days in a row before they figured how to turn it off
1.1.1.1) I had been tempted to flip a minus sign as a fuck-you but didn't
1.2) I wrote black-box implied vol GARCH trading software
1.2.1) The traders liked it
1.3) I listened to the macro guy
1.4) I listened to the only guy in the office who didn't wear a suit
2) The only way you can make money from gambling is by running a book
2.1) This isn't true
2.2) Donald Trump is the only person I know of who owned a casino that went bust
2.2.1) Including the ones that Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon hit
2.3) The little Martingale strategy will fail even without the zero, because there are table limits
3) No quant ever beat the market because quant is based on Black-Scholes which assumes EMH, which assumes you can't beat the market, oxymoron
3.1) Unless you're able to calculate the true value quicker than anyone else (Red Queen), or
3.2) Your traders are always hungover on a Thursday morning and those dutch guys are pummeling them again
4) Having accepted that there is no quick win, you start dollar-cost-averaging
4.1) Since you don't give a shit any more you might as well do it with XBT
4.1.1) You consider LTC and ETH (and can't even find anyone you'd trust do Ripple)
4.2) It's a bit volatile isn't it?
4.2.1) Because your sorry mathematical mind can't help it, you calculate that if you dollar-cost-averaged XBT for 100 days then the expected P&L owing to the fluctuation in price between you deciding to buy, pressing the button, and the transaction going through its various malarkey at the other end is about 4.7%
4.2.1.1) You can't do anything about this because you don't have optical fibre running through a specially drilled pencil-tunnel through a mountain
4.2.1.1.1) Although you did once have a couple of holes drilled through the walls of the computer science department to put that gigabit ethernet cable through ...
4.3) Well, if I'm gonna do it, I'll just buy the day's XBT first time I look at my phone in the morning
4.3.1) I'm buying 1 XBT, 0.1 XBT, 0.01 BTC every day [Harry Yeh bought 1 XBT every day for three years; a moderate investor might consider 0.01 BTC for 100 days at the moment]
4.3.2) Refer to 4.2.1
4.3.3) You remember that book by Kolmogorov that you bought when you were presenting some rubbish about SVMs in Birmingham (that I had to email a lecturer in Canada about who was using it as course material because I'd noticed an error) for 16 GBP
4.3.3.1) You try to buy another copy but it's out of print and very expensive
4.3.3.2) You visit your brother and see your copy on his bookshelf (along with your copy of Options, futures, and Other Derivatives by John Hull; but he can keep that)
5) The marriage problem
5.1) A person (let's assume she's a woman or a man) from the age of 16 (depending on your jurisdiction) cops off with an electable (or delectable) fellow (zebra/dyke/fluid) only, and ineluctably, every birthday
5.1.1) Since she is not immortal and must settle down sometime (she is not Quentin Crisp or Don "Juan" Byron or Judy Bloom or Sappho) at which birthday does she decide to marry?
5.2) This problem, posed in a gentleman's club in London around 1935, was the beginning of formal probability as we know it
5.2.1) Geek factoid: The axioms of quantum probability theory were laid down a few years earlier
5.2.2) There is an optimal answer
6) Assume one has decided to dollar-cost-average at the rate of 0.01 XBT pd
6.1) In one hundred days one shall have 1 Bitcoin
6.2) At what point during the day does one buy that 0.01 XBT?
6.3) Our curious proto-bride and Kolmogorov have the answer.
6.3.1) One is not foolish who does not know. One is foolish who does not ask. [Azerbaijani proverb]
6.3.1.1) Test the water
6.3.1.2) Does anyone have 5min prices on XBT from 25/02/17 to 04/06/17?
6.3.2) First get your facts straight, then you can distort them at your leisure. --Mark Twain
7) We make pictures to ourselves.