A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage

[h2odragon]

Just one?

The illicit participation in markets by the entire rodent kingdom probably deserves closer scrutiny. Not necessarily to curtail their efforts; but to identify which ones belong to what faction.

[MPSimmons]

Does the hamster have a fund I could get into, by chance?

[dqpb]

It would be interesting to give the hamster some level of observation of the market and reward based on performance.

[mbil]

That’s what I thought this might be before reading the article. Off the top of my head maybe you could signal market movement with a certain stimulus (e.g. a green or red light for up or down market, varying intensity). Of course it wouldn’t work, but if it did the results would be gruesome. Imagine a network of thousands of hamsters plugged into a trading interface to exploit their collective pattern-recognition: the strong traders allowed to feed and reproduce, the weak ones obviously culled. The price of hamster bedding increases 10,000%. Just awful.

[em3rgent0rdr]

I'd be curious in seeing like 30 hamsters doing this, and comparing the statistics on their portfolios, and comparing to a uniformly-weighted (according to same probabilities) fixed (not actively traded) portfolios of the coins. With just one hamster it can just be random fluke. And also pick a few different start and stop times (cause looking at the graph, sometimes bitcoin came out ahead).

[tomjuggler]

And to go even further, breeding the best performing hamsters together and letting evolution take its course

[strange_things]

3 words: risk adjusted returns. Crypto will outperform s&p 500 in any small period of time since the volatility is higher. still funny though

[billconan]

reminds me https://www.artmarcovici.com/rat-traders

[arcticbull]

Yes Mr. Goxx has been crushing it lol. Love the name.

[StephenAmar]

I'm not that confident I would be able to sell $1m worth of Bitcoin and use that money to buy hamster food.

[a9h74j]

"Intention Wheel" == proof of work

Embellishment: Food withheld for poor performance == proof of stake

[rkagerer]

Will he file a tax return?

[rastafang]

Returns are pretty close to just holding Bitcoin...

[aaron-santos]

My gut says that random trades have the same expected value as the underlying asset, but increased variance. I'm not a finperson, so learning why this could be wrong would be a learning opportunity.

[johnthescott]

my kind of scum.

[mbesto]

> and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500

And if the story was written in July last year the opposite would be true. This article is dumb and is no different than the "monkey throwing darts at stocks"

[seoaeu]

The very first sentence says:

> A hamster in Germany is redefining "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" author Burton Malkiel's belief that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a stock ticker list in the newspaper could do just as good as a human investment professional.

I know it's against the rules to question whether you read the article, but...

[bdcravens]

In other words, any crypto "investor" who thinks their success is a sign of insight and innovation is in reality no smarter than a random hamster.

[MPSimmons]

Pretty sure that's the joke

[mannykannot]

I wonder if they will give the hamster an opportunity to diversify?

[ausbah]

that's the whole point! if randomness can give returns higher than most "financial gurus", what do they really know about the market?