Alright, this one is slightly painful. Sorry if it’s a disappointment to you. If you’re interested in taking the flag, send me an email.
As much as I wanted it to work out, and as much as it would have been really cool had it worked out, there’s a lot more negatives to running Quant Secrets than positives.
As someone who doesn’t like to let sunk cost fallacy get in the way of progress, I decided to stop working on Quant Secrets and focus my efforts elsewhere.
Is this a post-mortem? I’m not sure, the project didn’t really get anywhere meaningful.
Why
There’s a few reasons.
The first reason is that I couldn’t get an algorithm that beat a “buy / hold” strategy (in cryptocurrencies). By couldn’t, I mean that I wasn’t invested enough to go much farther than I did in exploring new math to generate algorithms.
That said - the returns on investment for my algorithms were somewhere around 50% to 100% annually.
Which, you might say to yourself, “That’s great!”. Sure - but if buying and holding is going to work out better in the end in every scenario, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Why would I spend all the time and effort in developing new algorithms if I could just buy and hold and make more money over the next few years?
Investing $1000 in some alt-coins now could yield 100x multiples in a few years without some fancy trading system.
The second reason is that I’m much more interested in building businesses.
I get so much more satisfaction out of life by helping other people with my skills. Not just helping myself.
Besides, the ROI of a business is far greater in the short term. With Closet Tools, I made $15k in the first year, $110k in the second year, and $350k in the third year. Those returns are multiples better than any managed investment portfolio (in the short term).
Regarding investing, I would much rather just buy assets and hold them than have an actively managed system so I could focus on building businesses.
Growing Closet Tools is where my focus should be primarily. It keeps growing whether I work on it or not, so why would I not work on it and grow it faster? It is obviously a good product, and there’s a lot more I can do to make it better.
That, and I want to build more businesses that the other people in my life could work on with me (like my wife, kids, and friends). None of them could contribute meaningfully to Closet Tools (or Quant Secrets for that matter) at the moment, so I want to build other businesses that they can work in to make a difference in other people’s lives.
I know, the major goal of Quant Secrets was to build another income stream, so I do need to allocate some effort at some point to something else in order to build another income stream.
The third (and main) reason is that Quant Secrets is taking my energy away from the projects and things I care about.
When doing livestreams for Quant Secrets, I didn’t feel like doing much else work-wise in a day. Spending an hour thinking and coding there took energy from other things like Closet Tools and helping other people with my skills.
I care much more that I am reading (the Bible and books), writing, and increasing wisdom than trying to build trading algorithms for my personal gain.
Those things require energy, and that energy was being allocated towards Quant Secrets.
What’s Next
I’m not going to stop working on other things, that’s for sure.
I am going to be rolling out some awesome changes and improvements for Closet Tools in the coming months. There’s a few low-hanging-fruits I’ve been sitting on for too long.
I will be building another project, but it’s not going to be primarily my project, it’s going to be my wife’s. Very excited about this one.
I will be writing more, since that’s the main way I can help other people.
Okay, back to the semi-regularly scheduled programming.