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."

Comments

This has already been happening

[Subliminalbits]

Ars Technica wrote an interesting article about this almost a year ago. What is happening now isn't anything all that new. As several people have already mentioned, yes this is dangerous because these tools trade in extremely large sums. Slashdot even covered United Airlines stock dropping from $12 to $3 when the news crawler for one of these tools thought an old story was new and the tool proceeded to dump its entire United holdings causing a massive sell off by other investors. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/-it-sounds-like-something.ars http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/09/10/203233.shtml

Re:Bullshit

[foobsr]

The free market is better than anything else ...

Exactly; especially when taxpayers worldwide are free to pay billions to revive banks and companies are free to take shortcuts every way they want (if things get really bad, there is always chapter 11).

CC.

Re:Bullshit

[Trepidity]

I don't think it does much for market irrationality. It does provide liquidity, though, which is good in reasonable amounts: means that if you want to buy or sell a stock right now, you don't have to wait for another long-term investor who wants to make the opposite transaction, but can buy from or sell to one of these people who are always churning their holdings.

It can be a problem if this sort of statistical-trading volume swamps the "real" trading, though. Ideally an exchange is supposed to send price signals that reflect some sort of external supply and demand, but if, say, only 5% of the market participants are normal market participants, and 95% are trading with 20-minute horizons based on statistical models, you've got a weird feedback-loop market that reacts mostly to itself.

Re:Bullshit

[maxwell demon]

Well, if the stock exchange is used as a casino, maybe they should use the same rule casinos use: If you win too much, you are not allowed to continue playing.