Scientists Develop Financial Turing Test

KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the "financial Turing test." The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. "Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition."

Comments

Re:Not random and not predictable?

[jackhererUK]

It means it follows a recognisable pattern, that can be distinguished from random data after the fact but not predicted in advance.

Re:Economists ...

[Maxo-Texas]

The market is also inefficient when any participant with more resources uses some of those resources to change the rules of the market to favor that participant.

For example, the same movie sells in china for 2.49 and in america for 19.99 (often with an english soundtrack for both). In an efficient market, the movie would be purchased there for 2.49 and sold here for 4.99 making a 100% profit for someone. But artificial rules restrict this.

For example, drugs which are out of patent are sold in India and China for 10 cents a pill but for 33 cents a pill in the united states (example- metformin) and those in patent are sold for about 10 to 50 cents a pill in india and china and for 5.00 a pill in the united states. (and apparently viagra is much cheaper in canada than the u.s.). In an efficient market those pills would be purchased, imported, and resold. But artificial laws prevent this rational activity.

For example, Microsoft absolutely slaughtered many competitors through illegal monopolistic behaviors (for which it lost many court cases years after the competitors were dead or crippled). In an efficient market, there would have been other options.