Full disclosure

• I am not a Fiduciary
• Please do not use this as financial advice
• Don't take financial advice from anyone who bought an airplane
• I own BlackBerry stock
• My company is partners with BB

WSB History

• Started in 2012
• Forum on Reddit
• Meant for Retail Investors
• Discord server, now defunct
• 2020 happened!

GameStonk

• Roaring Kitty (Keith Gill) believer in $GME
• Melvin Capital and other Hedge Funds shorted $GME
• $GME was shorted at 138%
• WSBs started a short-squeeze by buying $GME
• Some Hedge funds had to get bailed out 
• Billions of losses for the hedge funds
• GME went up to $483 in intraday trading
• Robinhood suspended trades of certain stocks
• GME down to $43 now

Information Technology

• 2007 Stock Market went digital
• Floor of NYSE is just for show
• High Frequency Traders or HFTs
• Trades occur through multiple exchanges and 'Dark Pools'
• Blockchain and Ethereum Network (Smart Contracts)

Michael Lewis

• Former Stock Broker
• Writes non-fiction books
• Wrote Money Ball, The Blind Side
• Flash Boys
• The Big Short

Dr. Michael Burry

The Big Short

• Burry is an MD turned Financial Wiz
• Started Scion Capitol 
• Burry analyzed mortgage CDOs
• Found that growing number of mortgages were defaulting
• Conventional wisdom was that home prices never fall 
• He purchased derivatives against mortgage backed securities and made $700 million for his investors
• He just looked to see if payments were being made

Flash Boys

• Book covers high frequency traders or HFTs
• Subjects include fiber optic line between Chicago and New Jersey
• Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian programmer who worked for Goldman Sachs, and was imprisoned.
• IEX, an exchange that figured out how to prevent HFTs from using bots to front load purchases.

Software Engineers Important for Finance

• Most data online and free
• Lots of open source tools
• Many providers have Python, Node and .NET SDKs
• Most boards have APIs that can be consumed
• Build automated trading bots (Algorithmic trading)
• Use Arbitrage to profit on trades 

Retail Investments

• Buy and Sell stocks
• Funds and ETFs
• Options trading
• Derivatives
• Flash loans
• Shorting
• Crypto currencies

Services and Tools

• Yahoo Finance
• Google Finance
• Robinhood (Unofficial)
• Alpaca
• binance (crypto-currency trading)
• Pushshift.io (Reddit Big Data)
• Twitter 🐦
• talib
• Sentiment Analysis

Pushshift.io

• BigData API for Reddit
• Reddit also has their own API
• Service is rate limited to 60 requests a minute
• Three main endpoints
• reddit/comment/search
• reddit/submission/search
• reddit/subreddit/search

🚀 💎🙌🏾 🚀

Demo

Future Topics

• Numer.ai Hedge Fund
• Blockchain
• Smart Contracts
• Ethereum
• Solidity Language

Links

• https://github.com/davidfekke/wallstreetbets
• Part Time Larry
• pushshift.io

Questions?

Next Meeting

• Blockchain
• Ethereum Network
• Solidity Programing Language
• Smart Contracts
• DeFi