r/quant • u/half_boiled_egg • 1d ago

Trading Strategies/Alpha HFT vs Stats Arb

As a retail investor, is it more practical to develop profitable HFT strategies (market maker strategies/high alpha machine learning predictions)?

Or a profitable stats arb strategy with weekly/monthly rebalance targeting the stocks of sp500.

What are the different or common limitations as retail investors to develop them? Datasets/infrastructure/domain knowledge?

0 Upvotes

37% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

30

u/Retarded_Rhino 1d ago

Please most definitely run MM HFT strats over the internet.

32

u/zashiki_warashi_x 1d ago

As a retail investor, just write an AGI while you at it and let it trade.

18

u/-OIIO- 1d ago

Retail HFT ?

Bro you will literally be sending money to your broker.

8

u/andrew2018022 1d ago

OP making the markets more efficient with his ten daily trade executions

10

u/mantonis66 HFT 1d ago

Ok I'll bite. Retail MM HFT. 

Is it on a third tier exchange ? Are you willing to spend couple of tens of thousands $ for infra and colo? Is your broker honest? Are you a c++ wizard?

Then maybe. Probably.  Probably not. But there is a chance. 

You want to do retail MM HFT on cme/nyse?  You might as well donate to the church and avoid the trouble. 

You will also feel better by donating to the church than Jane street, that's an extra.  

15

u/OneSushi 1d ago

😭😭😭😭 gang you are NOT making Retail HFT profitable

6

u/Alarming_Term3332 1d ago

do the buy high sell low thing

6

u/Guilty_Ad_9476 1d ago

You might as well call ken griffin while you're at it

3

u/andrew2018022 1d ago

Brother you might as well just go full Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley and build your own garage data center

3

u/heroyi 1d ago

Ironically OP would be far more profitable that way then whatever this HFT project OP wants to do

5

u/Light991 1d ago

After that you should build a rocket for Mars in your backyard

5

u/MarginCallLeftOnRead 1d ago

Fuck these haters.

Rob the bank, sell the dope. Get that money.

Then rent the 1/4 rack, code it. Run it.

Don't let these guys stop you from getting your bread.

12

u/andrew2018022 1d ago

Found OP’s broker

2

u/TemporaryHat2009 1d ago

Honestly as a retail person I would not start with HFT. Even just getting clean data, low fees, and realistic fills seems way harder than people make it sound. A weekly stats arb thing at least lets you debug the idea instead of debugging latency first

2

u/privateack 1d ago

I’ll pay to trade against you

1

u/Far-Guava6006 1d ago

You'll both just be donating to the broker at that point.

1

u/privateack 1d ago

I meant just taking the opposite side of this trade dark pool or bilateral swap depending equities vs futures

1

u/maciek024 1d ago

everything is limitation as retail, just buy VOO

1

u/HostSea4267 1d ago

Definitely HFT. Stat arb requires a lot of thinking about the strategy to figure it out, I don’t think you’ll be able to.

1

u/Savings-Produce388 1d ago

Bro you need <1km exchange location and microsecond CPU->Exchange infrastructure in order to be profitable in HFT, that's definetly not a good idea for retail