My 'best' algo has been buy and hold

disarm · 2026-04-25T05:07:26+00:00

=== SUMMARY === - The author describes spending a year building an automated trading bot (LGBM) that barely covers subscription costs, while their simple buy-and-hold stock portfolio consistently outperforms all other strategies (bot, 401k, options, gambling). - The thesis is that active algorithmic trading is extremely difficult and often underperforms a passive buy-and-hold approach, especially for retail traders without deep resources. - This is more of a personal reflection than a research-driven recommendation; the author suggests their experience may be common but underreported. **Quality assessment:** Noise – anecdotal reflection with no specific data, backtests, or tradeable insights. === SENTIMENT === MIXED === TRADE IDEAS === No actionable trade ideas in this post.

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Summary

The author describes spending a year building an automated trading bot (LGBM) that barely covers subscription costs, while their simple buy-and-hold stock portfolio consistently outperforms all other strategies (bot, 401k, options, gambling).
The thesis is that active algorithmic trading is extremely difficult and often underperforms a passive buy-and-hold approach, especially for retail traders without deep resources.
This is more of a personal reflection than a research-driven recommendation; the author suggests their experience may be common but underreported.

Quality assessment: Noise – anecdotal reflection with no specific data, backtests, or tradeable insights.

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I spent the last year working on building a trading bot, it's been a long journey thanks to the AI and what I've learned is that making an antomated trader is extremely difficult because it is a very, very deep problem that you are trying to solve. 

From making sure your data pipelines are absolutely rock solid and not silently failing and causing your features to backfill, to trying to decide which features to try to add or what target to try to train for, there are just so many points at which you can fail in this problem that it truly is a pipedream if you aren't the best because trying to modify and add code to run everything smoothly and without issues is a lot easier said than done, and there's no undo button so it takes months of paper trading to work out the kinks for me so far, and I still feel like things are so far from being good that I'm ready to call it quits, but I can't put it down either 😂 

My best algorithm trader to date is a LGBM bot that barely pays for my monthly subscriptions.

My best performance has been my stock portfolio, reading the news and grabbing tiny bits of tickers I find promising every now and then, and just having a really large collection, I let the winners sit and add a bit now and again, then I eventually sell the losers off after some years have passed.

I've been trying to actively trade for years and been very unsuccessful to put it mildly; to date, my slow trading / buy and hold strategy has out performed everything, my bot, my 401k, my options trading (negative) , gambling (also negative) , and so on. 

I know not everyone will have the same story, but I think mine might be more common than we think but people generally don't want to talk much about it, it seems.

I am not sure whether I should continue in this journey, I think before the AI, I always believed it was possible and just required coding. Now that the coding is solved, I realize the problem isn't just the coding. There's so many other problems you need to solve after that and they all cost increasingly more money and time to commit.

It got me looking back over the last 10+ years and wonder if I should just stick to the simple strategy, it's literally destroying everything else I'm trying to do, so I should just focus my energy on augmenting that area and finding happiness outside instead of working so much on something that has yet to net any meaningful returns, but I keep trying anyway because I do love it even if I am not good at it.

Anyone else share similar thoughts to this and have any regrets about putting in so much time?

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