Can retail traders make money playing quantitative trading? Let's see if you're one of the 1% "Chosen Players".

There are always people who fantasize that by writing a few lines of code they can lie down and count the money, but the reality is - retail investors play quantitative trading, 99% people either lose all their capital or be cut leeks. But this does not mean that there is no chance at all, the key lies in whether you have recognized the rules of the game.

First, the retail "inherent defects": lack of money, lack of technology, lack of information

1. ​The amount of money is too small to carry even the commission fees​
   Let's say you play a high-frequency strategy with a $5,000 capitalization:
   • Each transaction fee of 0.1% → 100 transactions per day → daily fee of $50
   • That's a net loss of $18,000 a year, and the principal went straight to zero.
     Not to mention that high-frequency strategies are also monopolized by institutions with FPGA-specific chips, and retail investors' ordinary computers can't even spell latency.
2. ​Technological capabilities comparable to those of "Handyman".​
   The professional team's quantitative system looks like this:
   • Ultra-low latency engine written in C++/Rust
   • 5000/month for AWS cloud computing resources
   • Buy the historical 10-year dataset of 100 assets (~$200k)
     The retailer's "equipment" is often:
   • Web-based TradingView Strategy Backtesting
   • Open source code stripped from GitHub (90% is a spam strategy)
   • Cell phone receives exchange API notifications (delay ≥ 500ms)
3. ​A direct death sentence for poor information​
   Institutions get JPMorgan Chase position data 3 days in advance, retail investors can not even look at the day's Level2 quotes. Not to mention dark pool trading, large pending orders, these "cheat level" information.

Second, retail investors want to make money? First break through this triple barrier

▶︎ Level 1: Don't use free tactics, it's all a "kill tray".

• A treasure 9.9 yuan to sell the "MACD + RSI double average strategy", the actual test winning rate of 38%
• The "Grid Trading Method" of Knowledgeable Venturers, 100% in 2023 when LUNA crashes.
  ​correct posture: Write your own simplest double averaging strategy, backtest it with 2015-2018 data, then take 2019-2023 data to validate it, and if the annualized returns can stabilize at 15% or more then consider a live trading.

▶︎ Level 2: Paying the "IQ Tax" with Analog Disks

Simulated trading with JoinQuant is recommended:

• Forced slippage (at least 0.3%)
• Handling fee calculated at true rate x 2
• Add random delay (50-300ms)
  If you can still have 12 consecutive months of positive returns in such a hellish mode, then consider real money.

▶︎ Level 3: Always keep the "coffin money"

Divide the principal into thirds:

• 50% water test (up to loss of light)
• 30% Hedging (buying safe-haven assets like bitcoin/gold)
• 20% cash (picking up bloodied chips on a crash)

Third, the lesson of blood and tears: these "myths of riches" are harvesting retail investors

1. ​"Layaway" EA Scam​
   A team sells a "fully automated grid trading EA" that claims an annualized 30%, but in reality:
   • Intentionally set up very low win rate (40%) but high payout strategy
   • Earn a share of the commission by taking advantage of retail investors' frequent position increases
   • Data falsification: backtest curves fitted with future information
2. ​"Bricklaying Arbitrage" Slaughterhouse​
   A college student moving USDT across the chain and making 1% per day as a result:
   • Determined by the Exchange to be an unusual transaction to freeze funds
   • Cross-chain bridge private key leaked, assets liquidated by hackers
   • Gas fees eat up 80% profits
3. ​"Social quantization" piggy bank​
   WeChat group "quantitative master" with single:
   • Give 10% earnings bait first to attract additional funds
   • Mend the old leeks with the money from the new leeks.
   • Eventually rolled up the money and ran away (refer to FTX incident)

IV. The only wild way for ordinary people to go

1. ​"Woolgathering" strategy​
   • Monitor exchange newbie benefits (e.g. 5USDT for signing up)
   • Bugs to earn airdrops (requires a strong sense of technology)
   • Participation in liquidity mining (with attention to the risk of impermanent loss)
2. ​"Information Arbitrage" Deadlocked​
   • Place orders 0.5 seconds before CoinDesk news releases (requires crawler to monitor RSS feed)
   • Monitoring Vitalik's Tweets to Ambush ETH-Related Concept Coins in Advance
   • Mining for unpublished GitHub code updates (e.g. Uniswap V4 early layout)
3. ​"Pendulum Fixing."​
   Grid fixing with quantitative tools:
   • Buy 1% Position at $20,000 Bitcoin
   • Buy 3% at $15,000
   • Buy 5% at $10,000
     Automate with a program to avoid emotional distractions

V. The Ultimate Truth: Retail Quantification = "Legal Lottery"

The essence of quantitative trading is "risk for reward" for retail investors:

• The money you make ≈ someone else's tuition + the exchange's cut + the MEV bots' handouts
• While you're complaining about "strategy failure," organizations are iterating version 1024 of the model on military-grade servers!
• Retail investors who really make money in the long run either transition to strategy selling (cutting other retail investors) or become miners/node service providers

​give sb. a word of advice::
If you don't even have a basic knowledge of Python and you're not willing to spend 10 hours a day studying the markets, give up quantitative trading before it's too late. Otherwise the end that awaits you could be:

• Spend $30,000 on lessons → learn to draw lines with TradingView → continue to lose money
• Believe in "100 times the leverage to get rich" → overnight to zero
• Finally, post to a friend, "Quantization is p-bureau!"