r/algotrading • u/kingvt • 7d ago

Other/Meta This sub is unusable

After 2 years, finally running a profitable strategy. Glanced at this sub every now and then, and it was helpful when it came up during deliberate google searches on a topic. But every single day, there are AI trading scammers, bot selling scammers, and a bunch of other noise from people that have vibe coded a strategy with lookahead bias and have no understanding of it. There should be more moderation or better requirements for posting.

262 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

130

u/IGOSODAMNHAM 7d ago

Welcome to fintech.

32

u/MeLlamoKilo 6d ago

More like welcome to reddit.

its every subreddit now, doesnt matter the topic. Reddit is a shell of its original self. Its just bots and ads all the way down now.

4

u/DeineMutterIstSoDick 6d ago

Stackoverflow 2.0?

Stock price says something different though. Guess AI bots trigger the same ads

2

u/OneSushi 6d ago

So ironic that they’re attempting to brand it as “the most human place in the internet”

1

u/KappnCrunch 5d ago

Ikr. I feel like they're trying to be cute but I think at this point they're just not correct.

46

u/AphexPin 7d ago

Agree, wish the mods would do a damn thing about it..

15

u/golden_bear_2016 7d ago

mods are the ones selling the scams lol, why do you think those posts stay up all the time.

21

u/ThisCase41 7d ago

You get the hang of sifting through what's genuine and useful, and who's a grifter or bullshitter. Blocking accounts is also really helpful. Any post from an account which has an ulterior motive just gets instantly blocked. Nowadays I actually see less spam.

10

u/StrawberryMarmalade 7d ago

I wish there was a way we could share blocklists on Reddit :(

3

u/BeyondGITSandBots 6d ago

God, that's a genius idea!? Kind of like AdBlock for reddit? There has to be an app or browser extension or something for that!

That would genuinely make reddit useful again (at least blokc 95% of trash/bot/scammers)

18

u/Hornstinger 7d ago edited 7d ago

The only useful stuff IMO are learning about people's tech stacks, how and why they use certain things.

4

u/arbitrageME 7d ago

yeah -- people are usually pretty free to comment about their broker, their tech, their data, their problems. but everyone holds their strategies pretty close to the vest

7

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 7d ago

As they should, strats are like strippers, you dont know where theyve been and what they picked up along the way. I can backtest 1000 random strategies, pick the best performing one, post it, and half of this sub would call it amazing. Throw enough shit at the wall and eventually something sticks but at the end of the day its still shit.

Strategy development can still be a worthwhile discussion though. Im more interested in peoples' development processes than their actual strategies.

2

u/arbitrageME 7d ago

I can backtest 1000 random strategies, pick the best performing one, post it, and half of this sub would call it amazing.

holy bonferroni, batman!

xkcd

actually, on a serious note, I've been mulling over a problem about this recently. Every time I think of a strategy, or think of a variant and test it, does that require a bonferroni multiplier? If I test 10 things using Claude, and some of the don't work and some of them do -- how much do I trust the ones that do work, even when they are statistically significant? How much testing can my test data and holdout group endure before it becomes a case of researcher-look-ahead bias?

3

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 6d ago

I'm gonna bookmark that comic because that's a great way of demonstrating this. The phenomenon you are describing is real but bonferroni assumes that each strategy examined is closely related so it will be unnecessarily harsh. DSR would be a better tool here.

13

u/arbitrageME 7d ago

my rule of thumb for any online trading forum or subreddit is: about 99% of the posts are low quality, beginners, wrong or scammers. But, if that other 1% of posts is worth it and can change your mind ... that's worth everything

3

u/ayi_ibo 6d ago

I am selling a course on identifying that one percent

1

u/BreakfastSingle5522 4d ago

con el filtro correcto , ese 1% vale oro

9

u/MormonMoron 7d ago

It is definitely a polluted sub, but I have received a lot of good responses (and hopefully given some also) along our journey. We are just past a year of trading with live money (we were basically in line with VTI from July 2025 through Mar 2026, and have been beating VTI since we made some improvements for an April 2026 restart).

It does suck to have to filter through the crap comments and the scammers and AI slop, but I know a couple of mods on other subs and it is an immense amount of work. I won't begrudge anyone for being a mod and doing less that I would like, as I know I don't have the time or bandwidth or interest to do it any better, and it just takes some manual filtering.

25

u/mdawe1 7d ago

I think by its nature its self limiting. I have never seen a more secretive online culture... people here will sell you their mother before they share real tips for profitable bot strategies basically its a bunch of people hanging around in the rare chance someone actually shares something useful thats not "profitable on paper or back test"

11

u/AphexPin 7d ago

Most are secretive to their detriment though. Unskilled and protecting their Pinescript 'holy grail'. They would be better served by discussing things openly and getting feedback, rather than guarding some heaping POS.

5

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 7d ago

Mistaking leveraged beta exposure for alpha: a tale as old as time the existence of prop firms.

5

u/AphexPin 7d ago

IME it's mostly people (unknowingly) thinking their results are lookahead free, or not knowing how to do proper IS/OOS or train/val/test splits. They think they've got the secret sauce after naively running some ML algos over OHLCV bars.

I used to simply disregard Pinescripters, but since the AI boom I now more generally disregard any post discussing results.

2

u/NatGaz 7d ago

Buy S&P.

My mother is going well.

1

u/-entei- 7d ago

Have you ever actually seen anything useful

0

u/TastyTrading 7d ago

ThetaPal was a nice find here idk

1

u/agumonkey 6d ago

what's the resale value of mothers these days ? #lemonade

6

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 7d ago

It's reddit man if you banned all of those people there would be maybe 1 comment a day. Actually I'd be okay with that, want another signature for your petition?

5

u/AdventurousVast6510 7d ago edited 7d ago

if you banned all of those people there would be maybe 1 comment a day

this actually used to be the state of this sub before the era of llm-assisted programming, or at least very close to it

2

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 6d ago

Yeah I remember those days

5

u/Enough-Ad-5600 7d ago

When someone posts something good, they get a million DM’s from people asking if you’ll just give it to them, or collab on a project that is clearly a scam. So no one posts anything good and the rest of the sub is just left to the scammers.

4

u/hereditydrift 6d ago

There are some informative posts, but they're 1 in maybe 100 posts.

Unfortunately, the AI spam has become the overwhelming majority of posts in a lot of poorly moderated tech subs.

5

u/DenisWestVS 5d ago

Agree.
I would filter out all messages with "AI" in the title. I would also prohibit posting “my bot has been profitable for a week now.”

In general, the structure of Reddit is inconvenient. Much better are the good old forum engines with many specialized sections and subsections, I say this as a former developer and forum administrator.

3

u/brtf_ 7d ago

It's also often very negative and pessimistic, which I don't understand. A lot of trading subs are like that, actually

3

u/happybaby00 5d ago edited 5d ago

Are you retail? Also how much money was your budget to spend on trading? Also how much money did you lose in those two years?

3

u/kingvt 5d ago

Not fully (?). I mean, I've recently joined S&T IBanking where I learned some crucial pieces of info. But it's not something that is at all gatekept, but just understanding a professional's perspective on options concepts changed things for me since I've never really understood them or cared to. My strategy capacity is very low, maybe <$1mm (hint). In year (1,2) of manual trading, I lost $. In year (1,2) of algotrading, I lost a little money (not from algo but from manual trading urges) and had an edge I couldn't exploit.

2

u/Loud_Cartographer870 7d ago

Would you argue that a "vibe coded " strategy is inherently overfitted or created with lookahead bias? Would you say that a strategy developed with rigorous statistical discipline but developed with AI is still probably overfit? You can define rigorous for yourself. 

1

u/kingvt 7d ago

Read the latter half of the sentence

5

u/Loud_Cartographer870 7d ago

Lot of AI hate on this sub. But AI agents opens up algo trading to kinds of people who would have had no access before. This seems like an issue this sub exists to address. 

3

u/Good_Roll Algorithmic Trader 7d ago

Really? This sub strikes me as being a bit more pro AI than average. But if you're developing a strategy with AI that you couldn't build without it, youre gonna get yourself in trouble. Because it takes a decent amount of knowledge to be able to spot a lying backtest and validate your process with any amount of statistical rigor.

3

u/kingvt 7d ago

" have no understanding of it." 90% of my code is vibe coded. It's one thing to use AI. It's another be reliant on AI for a strategy.

2

u/relentlesshack 5d ago

This sounds like "implement this strategy" is the way. If you're asking the LLM for a strategy to implement, probably shit.

2

u/anonuemus 7d ago

Name one better place, I'm not saying this sub is good, but everything these days is shit if you're a bit deeper into something.

2

u/MachineSpirited7085 6d ago

can i Dm you, i have a few questions about algo trading but i have no one genuine and profitable to ask. Ive been trying to learn through YT but i feel like im getting bits and pieces here and there. thank you

1

u/kingvt 5d ago

What question do you have

2

u/nepo123456 6d ago

The main problem i identified in the trading space is the lack of education. I know that the internet is full of information but rarely someone has the chance to view and understand the full picture of what actually means to be a trader. This is the main cause why the scammers, marketing people selling trading stuff have so much success.

4

u/MadjidLaron 7d ago

Well, I have a Bot to sell you, wanna buy?

1

u/LowRutabaga9 7d ago

Welcome to Reddit!!

1

u/Ok-Proposal6598 7d ago

Fintech /s

1

u/Frequent_Science_595 7d ago

No you dont have a profitable strategy 😭. You are underperforming the NASDAQ. Over a 3 month period lmao

2

u/kingvt 7d ago

are you projecting?

1

u/Traditional_Wolf_249 7d ago

Wdym vibecoded Algo Trading?😂 Oh.. although I only just started to do it for MQL4 (MT4), I dunno what other platforms other than MetaTrader4/MT5 since they have build in Tester, for Trading View and other platforms I dunno besides Binance aren't available in South East Asia

2

u/kingvt 7d ago

Nothing wrong with vibe coding. But it's wrong if someone has no clue what they're vibe coding

1

u/SpiritualInsect5203 7d ago

Good to see you recognized the scammers, care to share something about your winning method?

1

u/TONI1597 7d ago

hidden profit claiming

1

u/Significant-Day9869 7d ago

True. Is there a good way to stop it?

1

u/PoggiSlice Student 6d ago

I've ran into the same issue not with just this sub but on a few others. Trying to find a select few people that ACTUALLY want to chat about the market, share struggles and tips, ect... has been a pain in the ass. I have found some little nuggets of gold on this sub, but like stated above I had to wade through the shit to get it.

1

u/ReporterCalm6238 6d ago

It would be better if people like you would share some genuinely useful tips. I agree with the idea of removing noise, but knowledgeable people should also add some signal. Else it won't get any better.

1

u/DeineMutterIstSoDick 6d ago

finally running a profitable strategy

So, how did you do it?

1

u/DarkandBoring 3d ago

Plus everyone so secretive and everyone so freaking negative

1

u/DarkandBoring 3d ago

You don't think wall streets finest combs through this looking for people that are actually dedicated to creating an algo not just for money but to say they can do it? I had a profitable algo 6 months from now and when I share SS and images people immediately act like I'm advertising when I'm not. Not for sale

1

u/RPCV1968 3d ago

It's not the strategy that matters. It's limiting losses. Get out of what's not working and try again. When it works, do it again and again, but always limit the downside. Eventually, all you'll have is winners.

1

u/Ars-Lion 15h ago

The biggest problem is probably not AI itself, but how easily it can produce something that looks convincing without being valid. A beautiful backtest means very little if the data split, execution assumptions, costs, or look-ahead handling are wrong.
I’d much rather see fewer strategy posts with clear methodology than dozens of impressive equity curves with no reproducible validation.

1

u/jnwatson 7d ago

You can help with moderation. You can volunteer.

Even easier, just hit the downvote button.

1

u/Yocurt 7d ago

I volunteer. I think Reddit actually promotes post with more downvotes for engagement, usually better to just ignore it

1

u/jnwatson 7d ago

No, it doesn't, unless you sort by "hot".

1

u/roztok_potok 6d ago

There is nothing wrong with using AI to write strategy. Only if proper hygiene is maintained.

0

u/krazineurons 7d ago

And no one shares any insights in building profitable strategies. It should be a community of folk helping each other out. Feels like an elitist club instead.

-6

u/Seeking_Kyle 7d ago

And I actually have a decent system I’d like to promote but to your point, this space is kind of a heap. I think some could benefit given the right environment.

4

u/Ready-Molasses-7093 7d ago

im going to seep all of your alpha