alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
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.
Comments
> 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.
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.
Oh boy, I know more than a few guys who will get a kick out of this, hah
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
Needs a way to copy and paste text to share with friends. I feel like this is what made wordle viral
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.