Read the Tape - Daily blind S&P 500 chart prediction game
Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
Read the Tape transforms daytrading into a daily challenge, offering five blind S&P 500 charts for users to predict market direction. Players wager virtual funds based on their conviction, competing against the humorous Monkey Index benchmark. This gamified experience allows traders to test their technical analysis skills without financial risk, featuring streak tracking, friend challenges, and shareable results. It turns complex market data into an engaging, accessible daily habit for both seasoned traders and curious enthusiasts.
Blind chart. Make the call. Five daily charts. Call up or down. Conviction sets your paper wager.
- impendia
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.
- fomoz
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.
- WoodenChair
> 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.
- spizder
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.
- carbonguy
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!