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Quant AI Picks Stocks Better Than Humans

Mr_Blank writes with this excerpt from an article at MIT's Technology Review: "The ability to predict the stock market is, as any Wall Street quantitative trader (or quant) will tell you, a license to print money. So it should be of no small interest to anyone who likes money that a new system that works in a radically different way than previous automated trading schemes appears to be able to beat Wall Street's best quantitative mutual funds at their own game. It's called the Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, and it works by ingesting large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then using the former to figure out how to predict the latter. Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes — and it never holds a stock for longer."

5 of 446 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We need to fix our regulations. by Darkness404 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Standard oil wasn't too abusive, and one could even argue that because it kept the price of oil down it was a very good thing because it helped the other businesses. Plus, no one was banned from competing with them at all or anything.

    As for the the fire, the women should have simply refused to work there, but again, you can blame the government for not establishing legal rights for women at the time (the 19th amendment wouldn't be ratified for several years after the fire.

    As for the labor strikes, they should have simply quit or kept their job. If you look at them it was the government who increased violence by putting down the strikes. So they more or less reinforce my point.

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    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  2. Microtax on all stock sales. by DoctorNathaniel · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    There's already a better method, which doesn't kill liquidity (as some have suggested below)... simply put a microtax on all stock transactions of less than a percent.

    Even this super-AI is going to make mistakes - it's profit margin is not likely to be large on the _average_ transaction, to microtaxes like this will keep this sort of activity to a minimum. Lots of people have suggested such a tax.
    http://thehill.com/homenews/house/56789-afl-cio-dems-push-new-wall-street-tax

    Basically: this sort of transaction does NOTHING for the economy except leech money from the people that actually produce things. Wall Street, as a whole, has a purpose: allocation of capital to build the economy. But there's no reason that people working on Wall Street should make more money than other facilitators or utiilities of our system, like payroll accountants or garbage collectors. The only reason they do is because we let them.

  3. Re:We need to fix our regulations. by Shadow+of+Eternity · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    ... I can't even begin to argue with that post... because it is a decimal place away from being in it's entirety a work of fiction. There's no one thing that I can start with when your WHOLE POST is just factually wrong in nearly every possible way.

    The only two thing that you don't have factually wrong are the 19th amendment and that the national guard was involved, but even then you've somehow managed to twist that into sounding like support for your argument that if everyone can do anything everything will magically be perfect.

    Don't you get it, we had exactly that for several hundred years and those were the results. you can't just say "Well they did it wrong" and claim it will work if we try it again, that's no different than claiming communism didn't work because "Well they did it wrong".

    Go read a history textbook and come back when you actually have any sort of clue about what you're talking about, especially when you spout utterly made up nonsense like people just magically leaving their jobs with no consequences or standard oil "[keeping] the price of oil down" being a "very good thing because it helped the other businesses".

    Unless of course you think the vast majority of history textbooks are part of some kind of conspiracy in which case enjoy your tinfoil hat and have a nice day.

    --
    A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
  4. Re:We need to fix our regulations. by Darkness404 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Don't you get it, we had exactly that for several hundred years and those were the results. you can't just say "Well they did it wrong" and claim it will work if we try it again, that's no different than claiming communism didn't work because "Well they did it wrong".

    no we did not we had -some- free market economics but nowhere near enough, its a bit like trying to run Ubuntu on a 386 and 16 MB of RAM and claiming Ubuntu is broken, no you just didn't have the requirements. For a free economy to work there are a few requirements that the US does not have or did not have at some point in its history.

    A) Money based on some sort of standard. This is needed to keep down the rising costs associated with inflation and to allow for international trade. Paper money eventually goes back to its intrinsic value -- Zero.

    B) Equal protection for everyone under the law. This didn't happen until the end of the Jim Crow laws in the 1960s.

    C) Unrestricted trade with other countries. Private citizens along with corporations should be able to trade with people in other countries just like people in the country they currently reside in. Similarly travel between countries should not be restricted.

    D) A government that protects only against fraud and force as those are the only legitimate purposes of government.

    utterly made up nonsense like people just magically leaving their jobs with no consequences

    Of course there are consequences, you find a different job and work there. Heck, I've left a job or two because of low pay and bad work conditions, you become unemployed for a short while and find a different job. It isn't too difficult. You search the classifieds, find a short term job work there to survive and then set out on a plan to find a better job.

    standard oil "[keeping] the price of oil down" being a "very good thing because it helped the other businesses".

    Standard Oil needed to keep prices low to keep up its near monopoly, because of this it helped fuel things like the automobile revolution because oil was suddenly very affordable for the ordinary person. Imagine if Oil was just $10 or $5 a barrel, think of how low prices of goods would be, how affordable it would be to take vacations, etc.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  5. Re:We need to fix our regulations. by buswolley · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Religious nut.

    The free market is a motor, but the motor needs a driver to keep it on the road.

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    A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.