I would trust an 'ai' that had been designed from the ground up to do well in the stock market, just like I would trust an 'ai' that's been designed from the ground up to drive trains. Idiots who think an llm is an ai in anything but spitting out what seems like reasonable answers/responses to your inputs are, well, idiots.
Even then, and as I wrote in another post, a custom trading NN might be working a strategy which is fine under normal market conditions whilst leading to massive losses if those conditions change (i.e. "picking nickels in front of a steamroller") and because of the black-box nature of how Neural Networks work and their tendency to end up with the outputs being very convoluted derivations of the inputs (I expect even more so in Markets, were the obvious strategies that humans can easilly spot have long been arbitraged away, so any patterns such an NN spots during training will be so convoluted as to not be detectable by most humans), nobody will spot the risky nature of that strategy until getting splattered.
Neural Networks working in predicting market movements are, unlike a predictive text keyboard or even an automated train driver, not operating in a straightforward mainly non-adversarial enviroment.
Haha infact on the microsecond level that the bots work they employ dynamic tactics, just to achieve a goal and at their disposal they have the leverage of your entire pension. And your whole bank account. Yes. They bet your money. Right now. On millisecond trades. Continuously.
The funny thing is that it DOES fail, sometimes they get caught in the steamroller, and then they halt the market and just prevent anyone from trading and go in to change all the daily lending deals to not have to deal with a bank run.
Because the rules are for me and you, not for the gamer hedge fund bros. They are not bitches for no reason, they have to do this for work
... you know that goldfish, randomly swimming to one side or another of a fish tank...
... you know they perform better at picking stocks that will go up or down in the next quarter than nearly all professional hedge fund managers, right?
In fact, this old expiriment was rerun fairly recently... ironically, with an AI being used to simulate a goldfish, in a scenario similar to that old study from some decades back.
The goldfish outperformed both WSB... and the Nasdaq.
I am literally not even joking when I tell you that a goldfish will probably outperform an AI at at least fairly short term stock picking.
See, there is a fundamental problem to predicting the market.
You have to have a strategy by which you do this.
If you employ this strategy... people will reverse engineer it and figure out how it works.
Then, everyone does that strategy.
Then, the strategy does not work any more, 'nonsense' begins to happen.
If you are curious about the mechanics that cover that whole, meta sort of process, look into game theory under conditions of imperfect information and information assymetry.
Its... basically a robust mathematical approach to simulating the flux of 'animal spirits' within a market... or in modern vernacular, 'vibes'.
No, nonsense does not randomly happen and no everyone don't use your strategy. But you can read on more game theory topics if you would like to explain it fully and not guess the next steps
I still wouldn't, because the stock market is already full of algorithmic trading and so you'd have to believe yours was better than the big boys out there.
LLMs can help with trading. As an example, if you can read news articles 1000x faster than a human, then you can make appropriate market decisions that much faster and make profit off that. These need not be very intelligent market decisions. Any idiot and every LLM knows perfectly well what stocks to buy or sell when there is an announcement for tariff on product xyz.
In case you didn't know, DeepSeek was made by a trading company.
true; could only get "AI" to do useful stuff when i gave it specialized knowledge on the topic i wanted it to help me with; if i asked outside this given scope information would go to shit tho.
This is funny, but just to be clear, the firms that are doing automated trading have been using ML for decades and have high powered computers with custom algorithms extremely close to trading centers (often inside them) to get the lowest latency possible.
No one who does not wear their pants on their head uses an LLM to make trades. An LLM is just a next word fragment guesser with a bunch of heuristics and tools attached, so it won't be good at all for something that specialized.
Yeah, especially it is funny how people forgot that even small models the size of like 20 neurons used for primitive NPCs in a 2D games are called AI too and can literally run on a button phone(not Nokia 3310, something slightly more powerful). And these small ones specialized models exist for decades already. And the most interesting is that relatevly small models(few thousands of neurons) can work very well in predicting trends of prices, classify objects by their parameters, calculate chances of having specific disease by only symptoms and etc. And they generally work better than even LLMs in the same task.
Do you have an example of some games that use small neural networks for their NPC AIs? I was under the impression that most video game AIs used expert systems, at least for built-in ones.
Well, for what I know, modern chess engines are relatevly small AI models that usually work by taking on input the current state of the board and then predicting the next best move. Like Stockfish. Also, there is a game called Supreme Commander 2, where it is confirmed of usage small neural models to run NPC. And, as a person that somewhat included in game development, I can say that indie game engine libgdx provides an included AI module that can be fine tuned to a needed level for running NPC decisions. And it can be scaled in any way you want.
As I understand, chess AIs are more like brute force models that take the current board and generate a tree with all possible moves from that position, then iterating on those new positions up to a certain depth (which is what the depth of the engine refers to). And while I think some might use other algorithms to "score" each position and try to keep the search to the interesting branches, that could introduce bias that would make it miss some moves that look bad but actually set up a better position, though ultimately, they do need some way to compare between different ending positions if the depth doesn't bring them to checkmate in all paths.
So it chooses the most intelligent move it can find, but does it by essentially playing out every possible game, kinda like Dr Strange in Infinity War, except chess has a more finite set of states to search through.
Maybe. I haven't studied modern chess engines so deeply. All I know that you either can use the brute force method that will calculate in recursion each possible move or train an AI model on existing brute force engines and it will simply guess the best possible move without actually recalculating each possible. Both scenarios work with each one having its own benefits and downsides.
But all of this is said according to my knowledge which can be incomplete, so recommend to recheck this info.
Black and white used machine learning If I recall absolutely a classic of a game highly recommend a play if you never have. Dota 2 has a machine learning based ai agent for its bots. Tho I'm unsure if those are actually in the standard game or not.
Forza and a few other racing games though out the years have used ML to various degrees.
And hello neighbor was a rather infamously bad indie game that used it.
For a topical example arc raiders used machine learning to train its AI during development. Tho it doesn't run on the live servers to keep updating it.
For LLM examples where the wind meets is using small LLMs for its AI dialogue interactions. Which makes for very fun RP mini games.
I'm sure there's more examples but these are what I can think of and find off Google.
What's most annoying to me about the fisasco is that things people used to be okay with like ML that have always been lumped in with the term AI are now getting hate because they're "AI".
What's worse is that management conflates the two all the time, and whenever i give the outputs of my own ML algorithm, they think that it's an LLM output. and then they ask me to just ask chat gpt to do any damn thing that i would usually do myself, or feed into my ml to predict.
? If you make and work with ml you are in a field of research. It's not a technology that you "use". And if you give the output of your "ml" then that is exactly identical to an llm output. They don't conflate anything. Chat gpt is also the output of "ml"
when i say the output of my ml, i mean, i give the prediction and confidence score. for instance, if there's a process that has a high probability of being late based on the inputs, I'll say it'll be late, with the confidence. that's completely different from feeding the figures into a gpt and saying whatever the llm will say.
and when i say "ml" i mean a model I trained on specific data to do a very specific thing. there's no prompting, and no chatlike output. it's not a language model
The best use I've gotten out of GPT is troubleshooting Rimworld mod list errors, often I'll slap the error in and it'll tell me exactly which mod is the issue, even when it can't the info I get back narrows it down to 4 or 5 suspects
I know right? Billions of dollars for rimworld tech help. Though it understands that far better than the time I tried to see if it knew GURPS, it was hilariously bad at mechanics, did give me an interesting skill idea I hadn't considered for my isekaid wizard, turns out the Teaching skill is really important when the game becomes about starting a wizard school
Eh... Wdym. The algos that trade fight in the micro second level. They adapt to each other and never stop changing. It's exactly the same problem. Do you think llm is a unique neural net ? They all work the same. When you try to sound like ml is not the same as llm or as if ml is neural nets you don't help anyone understand any of those concepts because you don't yourself
That is a crazy amount of nonsensical word salad to use to try to call someone else out for lacking understanding.
I mean just the flawed idea that all trading algos are all neural nets, or that all neural nets are the same or that the rectangle of ML doesn't include neural nets.. These are all wildly erratic non sequiturs.
You're absolutely right. I've now read your CSV data, and made new trade recommendations. By coincidence, they are the same as the last recommendations, but this time they are totally valid.
My understanding is that HFTs - which are highly profitable - likely use some AI-techniques.
From my understanding of HFT, what they're effectively doing is automated front runnings.
They scan market activity and look for spreads between orders and availability. Then they place very short term orders any time they see, for instance, "I'll sell 1000 X at $49" and "I'll buy 500 X at $49.05", effectively buying up all the outstanding $49 orders and flipping them for a $.05 profit.
You don't need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.
Because getting out ahead of trade volume is so lucrative, you'll see huge investments in rack space near the physical stock exchanges and high speed lines between cities with big brokerages.
But AI trading is (theoretically) about spotting and predicting long term trends in the market, not front running active trades.
Idk if I'd say they "fuck everyone" given how much of the market is already heavily concentrated in a handful of hedge funds and investment banks. Most people don't have real exposure to the stock market. And of those who do, most don't indulge in active trading - they have savings in a 401k that maps to an index fund or other basket of blue chips, updating on daily or quarterly cycle.
The folks the HFT really fuck over are the day traders and investment bankers who are, themselves, trying to rapidly reposition ahead of market data. Warren Buffet's Berkshire team loses more to HFTers in a day than any lay citizen would lose in a lifetime.
Institutional Investors (such as Pension Funds) and Retail are the ones getting properly fleeced in present day markets.
Retail might have started to get wise on it (frankly I don't know for sure if that's the case, as Retail tend to be either naive amateurs or deluded fools, so I'm just trusting what you said on this), but when it comes to Pension Funds people only figure out they've been fucked decades later when they try and cash their pensions and it's a lot more difficult to tease away how it happened when all the money is pretty much in an investment black-box than it is from watching a handful of stocks and ETFs one has invested directly in.
Well sure, if you were a multi billion dollar hedge fund with an experienced staff and insider connections to market makers, with a powerful algorithmic trading apparatus, you'd be kicking the shit out of random dipshits on the internet. No use denying it!
You don’t need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.
Which they do by literally having their server machines physically in the same building as the Exchanges.
The system is rigged and has been rigged like this (not counting all the other ways it's rigged, such as the tons of insider trading) for over 2 decades.
PS: The book "Flash Boys" is a great read about HFT.
The system is rigged and has been rigged like this
It's rigged against day traders. But you can still get by just fine as a value or growth style investor who is seeking long term ROI. You're just a sucker if you think you can outplay the machines minute-by-minute.
PS: The book “Flash Boys” is a great reading about HFT.
Michael Lewis was the GOAT back then. Shame he parlayed his fame into FTX infamy.
Hft aren't just taking from day traders. They profit from all transactions. Your 401k is bled a fraction of a percent every day by hfts that take a cut before the Index fund or Mutual fund makes its daily rebalance.
They rebalance continuously. If they waited until the end of the month it would be billions that would be impossible to rebalance without distorting the trades they're trying to execute.
Even if they waited it wouldn't matter .001% of $1 billion a month is the same as .001% of $333m daily.
Personally I went into Gold for long term ROI (though that's pretty much a bet on in the long term there being crisis with the currencies themselves) since even ETFs and other spread investment stock strategies are still affected by Market manias and their aftermaths which can be triggered by HFTs (which at times create positive-feedback loops that turn into market runs).
That said, I was in the Industries that got hit hardest in the latest 2 major crashes (Tech in 2000, Finance in 2008) - to the point of being with Lehman Brothers in 2008 when they went bankrupt - as well as in Britain when they voted to Brexit (which tanked the pound, something which, by the way, this strategy protected me against), plus being in the Finance Industry is a bit like working in a sausage-making factory (once you see how sausages are made, you never want to eat one again) so I have a good excuse for having a "trust nothing" ultra-conservative savings protection strategy 🤪
Yeah, Gold doesn't go up, rather it's currencies that go down in value so you need more tokens of a currency to buy the same amount of Gold.
It's mainly a protection against large economic upheaval, which is why I called it a "savings protection strategy". Gold bought at the 1980 peak (the worst possible point since the end of the Gold Standard) is right now worth 8x more nominally in USD, though only about 2x if you discount inflation (as 1$ from 1980 is $3.93 in today's money).
I suspect that what you thing is "long term" is not the same as what I think as "long term".
More broadly, Gold's long term ROI depends on which currency you're comparing it with - it tends to be amazing in currencies like the Rupee because India's policies are shit and the currency devaluates a lot, less so in currencies like the US Dollar or the Deutsche Mark/Euro. This is why it tends to be a traditional strategy in poorer countries which traditionally had more unstable economies, like India and China.
I myself bough gold near the local maximum in 2012 only to see its value stagnate for almost a decade (see graphic), so I just sat on it and now it's worth almost 4.5x as much in nominal terms in the currency I bought it with (British Pounds) because, IMHO, the structural problems of the Economy and Financial system that led to the 2008 Crash were never actually solved by Central Banks and Governments in the West, plus there are a whole lot of related Social and Societal problems making the societies themselves less stable (which is why, Britain had Brexit and the US has Trump).
Gold is a punt on the instability of the current Economic and Financial structures in the West and on the ineptitude and even corruption of its politicians, as well as the expected upheavals from the transition from the Era Of America to the Era Of China, and it's one I'm doing with an horizon of decades.
It can easilly be beaten by active trading strategies, but so far for me has worked fine as just a way to park my savings, kinda like in the old days - from the 40s to to maybe the 80s - buying stocks from large well established companies (say, GE) and getting a stead income from it in the form of dividends was a good way to park savings.
That said, I was in the Industries that got hit hardest in the latest 2 major crashes (Tech in 2000, Finance in 2008) - to the point of being with Lehman Brothers in 2008 when they went bankrupt - as well as in Britain when they voted to Brexit (which tanked the pound, something which, by the way, this strategy protected me against), plus being in the Finance Industry is a bit like working in a sausage-making factory (once you see how sausages are made, you never want to eat one again) so I have a good excuse for having a “trust nothing” ultra-conservative savings protection strategy 🤪
I'll say that I was working O&G in 2020 when the spot price of a barrel went negative. My own firm dropped in price from mid double digits to single digits, and I bought every share I could get my hands on, knowing they could liquidate tomorrow for multiple of their market cap.
If you're that much of an insider, I can't imagine why you'd bother being conservative. Seems like you've got a ton of valuable info to trade against.
Because they know that someone is going to be more clever than them, faster than them, at some point, if they keep trying to do inside moves.
And also because they know that at some point, because of everyone trying to be cleverer and faster than everyone else... one day this is all going to blow up, and all the various kinds of leverage will unwind, and work backwards.
They didn't say they went 100% into gold, just thst they have a solid chunk in it, as a safety margin / defensive play.
Gold, on the other hand... much, much simpler, in the long term.
Generally less ROI than during a Bull run in the market, but it does always go up, in the long run... beats inflation!
If you see massive volatility in gold, that means some fairly big entities are ... rearranging their bets, so to speak.
On that note, here's the DJIA / Gold:
Trump's been great for Gold prices, Gold's gone up more than the stock market has, in his term so far.
I left the industry almost a decade ago and was never a business guy: I just made software for the business (specifically Frontoffice development).
I literally put my savings in Gold and pretty much didn't touch it for over a decade.
Amongst other things that position saved me from the hit on the British Pound after the Leave vote (and decay since) as the savings that went into it were originally in Pounds.
I wouldn't call it an "investment strategy", more of a "safe long-term parking strategy".
Since the question was about how to protect oneself of the upheavals in the US, its system and its Economy, I pitched my "safe parking" strategy as a possible answer that's very passive (certainly the way I did it).
I literally put my savings in Gold and pretty much didn’t touch it for over a decade.
Putting money in an appreciating savings account is a great way to earn passive income. But gold did not outperform the S&P 500 until this last year, and even then only barely. For a whole host of reasons, commodities are a highly speculative and historically underperforming asset class.
I wouldn’t call it an “investment strategy”, more of a “safe long-term parking strategy”.
I mean, long term savings is long term savings. Unless you're keeping it in straight cash (historically one of the worst moves you can make) you're still making some kind of investment decision.
Since the question was about how to protect oneself of the upheavals in the US
The answer there tends to be utilities and treasuries. Gold, as a commodity safe haven, is still heavily predicated on the easy credit afforded by its buyers. Utilities, by contrast, tend to have inelastic demand and so continue to enjoy high cash flow (and high dividends) as the rest of the industry contracts. And treasuries pay a fixed rate, guaranteeing future returns for the life of the note.
Gold is still speculative relative to the demand for trade on the market. So you can see sudden spikes in price in the time period around a crash. But there's no incentive to hold it long term, as there's no revenue generation behind owning a yellow rock. You'll see high volatility, not a high rate of return, long term.
But AI trading is (theoretically) about spotting and predicting long term trends in the market, not front running active trades.
Yeah, AI has been useful finding leads for me. So far, it had been correct with some long term market predictions. I asked AI of the resilience of the renewable energy sector, and it had been correct since my renewable stocks have grown in face of tech stocks sell off and broader market uncertainty. But I suppose it's a no-brainer considering that the renewable energy sector is still utilities, and utilities are go-to defensive investments in the face of market downturn.
That's the problem with our modern errosion of terminology. The term AI stopped meaning anything some time ago. Machine learning algorithms that are useful in this operations are nothing new, but have basically nothing in common with whatever people mean when they use the word AI nowadays
HFTs initially existed before AI, they were triggered by what we would now call basically complex, but 'dumb' condition sets.
Imagine a cluster fuck nightmare of nested conditonal IF THEN ELSEIF type shit.
They only work because the bigboy trading firms literally have lower latency, lower ping to the actual stock market servers themselves, than anyone else, because they pay for it.
This allows them to do a whole bunch of what should probably be illegal shit, such as effectivelt slightly changing the price someone else is going to buy or sell at, in between the time they click 'execute trade' and the time the trade actually executes.
Apply leverage into that kind of pseudo sort of arbitrage as you are comfortable with, and may the speediest fiber line win!
This would be one of the few topics I'd suggest you look at ZeroHedge for, they had actually very robust technical coverage of the Flash Crash back around the GFC.
That was basicslly caused by some of these dumb HFT algos amplifying each other, untill they started breaking things, because they were not coded very well.
They apparently did not realize they were basically making extremely complex PID controllers, that they were making things that, when a bunch of them existed in the same market, would basically cause cascade and crash effects, feedback.
I tried to get one to write an interface to a simple API, and gave it a link to the documentation. Mostly because it was actually really good documentation for a change. About half a dozen end points.
It did. A few tweaks here and there and it even compiled.
But it was not for the API I gave it. Wouldn't tell me which API it was for either. I guess neither of us will ever know.
I've actually used chat GPT (or was it Cursor? I dont remember now) to help write a script for a program with a very (to me, a non-programmer) convoluted, but decently well documented API.
it only got a few things right, but the key was that it got enough right for me to go and fix the rest. this was for a task I'd been trying to do every now and then for a few years. was nice to finally have it done.
but damn, does "AI" ever suck at writing the code I want it to. or maybe I just suck at giving prompts. idk. one of my bosses uses it quite a bit to program stuff, and he claims to be quite successful with it. however, I know that he barely validates the result before claiming success, so... "look at this output!" — "okay, but do those numbers mean anything?" — "idk, but look at it! it's gotta be close!"
I just looked at my sister's vibe coding projects and all I see are errors in the logs from param issues. I really want her to succeed but her over reliance on Cursor isn't it
I just want to make this edit... She started building physical plastic cubicles for her office a month ago, and they are still unfinished. They are a clip and snap type and it causes her a headache to put it together. Most of her time, she's unemployed rn, is devoted to making AI slop above all other outlets.
I haven't touched LLMs in a few months and hate the way Brave and DuckDuckGo now implemented them into their search engines.
Wasn't there an article that looked at and showed that no, there are no stock market specialists. An "experienced" stock trader was just as accurate in their predictions as regular Joe that's just guessing. In that sense LLM should be just as effective (if not more) at making profit.
You can never predict the stock market, because the market depends on a lot of outside influences you might not know about. Maybe some disaster wipes out the only supplier for a critical part of your top performing stock tomorrow, so he cannot deliver goods anymore. Maybe a single big investor dumps all his stock overnight, sending the value down. Maybe some law or sanction is passed that changes how the company must operate. Maybe some other trading bot decides to buy or sell a huge number of shares.
No computer or AI can account for all of the outside factors and accurately predict the outcome each time. Each "Trading AI" is just snake oil that lives of your fees and commissions. If it was working as advertised, they would not need your money, but could make infinite riches by just trading their own stocks.
I know a homeless guy that swears by AI, and aspires to be a realtor LMFAO! Like, dude ain't even got himself a home but he's trying to hock homes and properties???
Sometimes I wonder if he bothered asking AI just how much the average person trusts a wirey balding homeless person that's missing like 4 front teeth...
In all fairness, it would be some kind of custom Neural Network designed to try and predict market movements (having been trained with past market data as well as things like counts of specific words in news articles and social media posts within a certain time frame) rather than an LLM.
Neural Networks are pretty good at spotting patterns in masses of data which people can't easilly spot.
Of course, there must be a pattern there which doesn't change much over time of certain things happening with more probability after certain other combinations of things, for it to actually beat the market, plus it also massivelly depends on the inputs it's formatted to take (which a human is deciding rather than the NN itself, though maybe the technique used in LLMs of having huge dimensionality in terms of inputs and internal layers might work well there so that it can take "everything but the kitchen sink" as inputs).
And then, there is of course the "small" risk that it might work fine for months/years under normal market conditions at doing what is essentially "picking nickles in front of a steamroller" - i.e. making low value gains in a nice reliable away for as long as normal market conditions are happening, but when conditions change getting totally splattered - whilst because of the whole black-box nature of NNs the humans don't recognize the convoluted technique it has converge to use through training, as that kind of risky strategy.
That said, unlike an LLM at least a custom NN wouldn't come up with a "you're so right" excuse when the human tells it of the massive losses it incurred.
Trading firms have been using ML and Neural Nets for trading and investment insight for ages before the current LLM "AI" boom started. I knew someone working in that space on investment derivatives in the mid 2010s.
You don't really need to speculate on it. It's old news. This is just a joke about how there's a new crop of suckers who are absolutely using LLMs for stock advice.
I left the Finance Industry at about the time when ML in machine trading was just starting to be thought about and never got involved in it (or even Machine Trading) so I wasn't sure it was happening, but knowing what I know of the industry it makes total sense that they would at least try it out since they have tons of in-house developers and can afford to pay a lot for domain-relavant expertise.
PS: Also for example things like Neural Networks have been in used since the 90s in other domains and Finance seems to take around a decade or decade and a half to catch up to Tech in terms of Software.
It's true that NNs are strong at spotting patterns in masses of data, but trading is a particularly hard problem for this kind of task because the market constantly adapts to its participants. If other traders have found a pattern, it will already be priced in when you try to make money off it, and your strategy will fail. And since trading is a worldwide competition with billions of dollars to be won, you are naturally competing against teams of the best of the best who are willing to put massive resources into their algorithm development, computing, and data acquisition. Therefore the chances for someone like us to find an algorithm that systematically beats them is very low.
So for any young math/CS nerd who comes across this thread and wants to try their luck, be aware of the difficulty before you invest any real money, and learn about the merits of passive investing.
I kind approached it in another post I made here about this when I mentioned that "all the human perceived patterns have already been spotted and arbitraged away" as part of explaining why NNs would end up with convoluted opaque strategies, but only thought about "and existing NNs operating on the Market probably do the same for NN-level strategies" without actually writing it.
By the way, my post isn't meant to support people making NNs to trade, it's just a bit of blue sky thinking from somebody with some expertise in both worlds and barely begins to dig into the problems of it, thus not covering things - such as you pointed out - like how safe and reliable market strategies (human-powered or NN-powered) sooner or later get arbitraged away.
I don't remember the institution, but I remember reading a paper on a simulated trading environment with several ai agents who didn't know about eachother. The LLMs were pretty conservative with profits and deliberately bought and sold in predictable ways. They all ended up "colluding" with eachother by deliberately not competing.
Here's a crazy thought, the massive firms who have been trading programmatically using ML since it's very earliest adoption, are simply going to program their shit to eat chatGPTs lunch. I have no doubt whatsoever that these desks are thrilled by the number of people predictably using public LLMs to choose trades, such a fresh new dataset of the newest, smoothest brains for them to exploit.
I just use AI for projected profits and losses, and determine earnings schedule and report. I also trade in international markets and I have used AI as well. And like a lucky gold miner prospecting, AI helped me with finding good leads in the international market.
But of course, in spite all that, you have to have due diligence. You still have to verify if what the AI is saying is correct.
I've had this happen where I fed it some ebooks and the responses it pulled were nonsense. Eventually I pulled JUST the knowledge stack and queried it, only to find it spitting back garbage.
Turns out, epub processing had been broken for a while, but nobody noticed... And they still haven't fixed it, so I have to convert them to txt first...
For the yougun's, the people posting this stuff are the same people who posted all the same shit about crypto when it was $12,000. Be careful who you listen to just because its in a meme.
Don't be mad at me that you didn't make lots of money because you were bitter. Own that you missed one of the clearest opportunities you ever would have to triple your wealth.
Does, "I couldn't open the file" actually have anything to do with the instance of the program you ran on your computer the last week, or is it just the most likely written response to "did you even read the data" based on its training set?
There's a lot of ink spilled on 'AI safety' but I think the most basic regulation that could be implemented is that no model is allowed to output the word "I" and if it does, the model designer owes their local government the equivalent of the median annual income for each violation. There is no 'I' for an LLM.
No, it's pretty much the opposite. As it stands, one of the biggest problems with 'AI' is when people perceive it as an entity saying something that has meaning. The phrasing of LLMs output as 'I think...' or 'I am...' makes it easier for people to assign meaning to the semi-random outputs because it suggests there is an individual whose thoughts are being verbalized. It's part of the trick the AI bros are pulling to have that framing. Making the outputs harder to give the pretense of being sentient, I suspect, would make it less likely to be harmful to people who engage with it in a naive manner.
No, it’s pretty much the opposite. As it stands, one of the biggest problems with ‘AI’ is when people perceive it as an entity saying something that has meaning.
This has to be the least informed take I have seen on anything ever. It literally dismisses all the most important issues with AI and pretends that the "real" problem (as if there is only one that matters) is about people misunderstanding it in a way I see no one doing.
It's clear to me you must be so deep into an anti AI bubble you have no idea how people who use AI think about it, how its used, why its used, or what the problems with it are.
Because why bother saying anything if you aren't going to say anything? Offering correct information gives the other person a chance to correct and improve. Just saying 'WRONG!' is just a slap in the face that only serves to let you feel superior, masturbatory pretense.
As for the rest, those are all clearly issues, but none of them are of a sort where handling the one I raised and handling them are mutually exclusive. And at least the second item is actually a following point from the one I mentioned. People being tricked into thinking LLMs are capable of thought contributes to the thought by decision-makers that people can simply be replaced. Viewing the systems as intelligent is a big part of what makes people trust them enough to blindly accept biases in the results. Ideally, I'd say AI should be kept purely in the realm of research until it's developed enough for isolated use as a tool but good luck getting that to happen. Post hoc adjustments are probably the best we can hope for and my little suggestion is a fun way to at least try to mitigate some of the effects. It's certainly more reasonably likely to address some element of the issues than just saying 'WRONG!'
129 Comments
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de · 126 pts · 290d
I would trust an 'ai' that had been designed from the ground up to do well in the stock market, just like I would trust an 'ai' that's been designed from the ground up to drive trains. Idiots who think an llm is an ai in anything but spitting out what seems like reasonable answers/responses to your inputs are, well, idiots.
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world · 84 pts · 290d
Yup. Machine learning is great. Using a predictive text keyboard with a large training set for EVERYTHING is not great.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 290d
I would trust AI to beat money managers in the stock market because it was proved a chimp throwing darts beats experienced money managers.
Driving trains requires skill.
RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com · 9 pts · 290d
I would expect driving trains to be automated much easier than trading stocks.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 290d
Even then, and as I wrote in another post, a custom trading NN might be working a strategy which is fine under normal market conditions whilst leading to massive losses if those conditions change (i.e. "picking nickels in front of a steamroller") and because of the black-box nature of how Neural Networks work and their tendency to end up with the outputs being very convoluted derivations of the inputs (I expect even more so in Markets, were the obvious strategies that humans can easilly spot have long been arbitraged away, so any patterns such an NN spots during training will be so convoluted as to not be detectable by most humans), nobody will spot the risky nature of that strategy until getting splattered.
Neural Networks working in predicting market movements are, unlike a predictive text keyboard or even an automated train driver, not operating in a straightforward mainly non-adversarial enviroment.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 4 pts · 289d
Haha infact on the microsecond level that the bots work they employ dynamic tactics, just to achieve a goal and at their disposal they have the leverage of your entire pension. And your whole bank account. Yes. They bet your money. Right now. On millisecond trades. Continuously.
The funny thing is that it DOES fail, sometimes they get caught in the steamroller, and then they halt the market and just prevent anyone from trading and go in to change all the daily lending deals to not have to deal with a bank run.
Because the rules are for me and you, not for the gamer hedge fund bros. They are not bitches for no reason, they have to do this for work
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 290d
... you know that goldfish, randomly swimming to one side or another of a fish tank...
... you know they perform better at picking stocks that will go up or down in the next quarter than nearly all professional hedge fund managers, right?
In fact, this old expiriment was rerun fairly recently... ironically, with an AI being used to simulate a goldfish, in a scenario similar to that old study from some decades back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/tts0a4/some_theories_on_how_the_goldfish_was_able_to/
The goldfish outperformed both WSB... and the Nasdaq.
I am literally not even joking when I tell you that a goldfish will probably outperform an AI at at least fairly short term stock picking.
See, there is a fundamental problem to predicting the market.
You have to have a strategy by which you do this.
If you employ this strategy... people will reverse engineer it and figure out how it works.
Then, everyone does that strategy.
Then, the strategy does not work any more, 'nonsense' begins to happen.
If you are curious about the mechanics that cover that whole, meta sort of process, look into game theory under conditions of imperfect information and information assymetry.
Its... basically a robust mathematical approach to simulating the flux of 'animal spirits' within a market... or in modern vernacular, 'vibes'.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 289d
No, nonsense does not randomly happen and no everyone don't use your strategy. But you can read on more game theory topics if you would like to explain it fully and not guess the next steps
Dave@lemmy.nz · 7 pts · 290d
I still wouldn't, because the stock market is already full of algorithmic trading and so you'd have to believe yours was better than the big boys out there.
BB84@mander.xyz · 4 pts · 290d
LLMs can help with trading. As an example, if you can read news articles 1000x faster than a human, then you can make appropriate market decisions that much faster and make profit off that. These need not be very intelligent market decisions. Any idiot and every LLM knows perfectly well what stocks to buy or sell when there is an announcement for tariff on product xyz.
In case you didn't know, DeepSeek was made by a trading company.
richardisaguy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 290d
true; could only get "AI" to do useful stuff when i gave it specialized knowledge on the topic i wanted it to help me with; if i asked outside this given scope information would go to shit tho.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 0 pts · 289d
No you would not, because you can do that at any time
ieatpwns@lemmy.world · 68 pts · 290d
Lmfao I saw someone on the train just last week asking chat gpt how they can turn a profit from all their Friday morning losses
Off of Robinhood screenshots too
The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world · 27 pts · 290d
Oh. Oh no...
MBech@feddit.dk · 13 pts · 290d
Wonder how they lost anything in the first place...
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world · 55 pts · 290d
This is funny, but just to be clear, the firms that are doing automated trading have been using ML for decades and have high powered computers with custom algorithms extremely close to trading centers (often inside them) to get the lowest latency possible.
No one who does not wear their pants on their head uses an LLM to make trades. An LLM is just a next word fragment guesser with a bunch of heuristics and tools attached, so it won't be good at all for something that specialized.
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 290d
I hate that ai just means llm now. ML can actually be useful to make predictions based on past trends. And it's not nearly as power hungry
Bazell@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 289d
Yeah, especially it is funny how people forgot that even small models the size of like 20 neurons used for primitive NPCs in a 2D games are called AI too and can literally run on a button phone(not Nokia 3310, something slightly more powerful). And these small ones specialized models exist for decades already. And the most interesting is that relatevly small models(few thousands of neurons) can work very well in predicting trends of prices, classify objects by their parameters, calculate chances of having specific disease by only symptoms and etc. And they generally work better than even LLMs in the same task.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
Do you have an example of some games that use small neural networks for their NPC AIs? I was under the impression that most video game AIs used expert systems, at least for built-in ones.
Bazell@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 289d
Well, for what I know, modern chess engines are relatevly small AI models that usually work by taking on input the current state of the board and then predicting the next best move. Like Stockfish. Also, there is a game called Supreme Commander 2, where it is confirmed of usage small neural models to run NPC. And, as a person that somewhat included in game development, I can say that indie game engine libgdx provides an included AI module that can be fine tuned to a needed level for running NPC decisions. And it can be scaled in any way you want.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 289d
As I understand, chess AIs are more like brute force models that take the current board and generate a tree with all possible moves from that position, then iterating on those new positions up to a certain depth (which is what the depth of the engine refers to). And while I think some might use other algorithms to "score" each position and try to keep the search to the interesting branches, that could introduce bias that would make it miss some moves that look bad but actually set up a better position, though ultimately, they do need some way to compare between different ending positions if the depth doesn't bring them to checkmate in all paths.
So it chooses the most intelligent move it can find, but does it by essentially playing out every possible game, kinda like Dr Strange in Infinity War, except chess has a more finite set of states to search through.
Bazell@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 289d
Maybe. I haven't studied modern chess engines so deeply. All I know that you either can use the brute force method that will calculate in recursion each possible move or train an AI model on existing brute force engines and it will simply guess the best possible move without actually recalculating each possible. Both scenarios work with each one having its own benefits and downsides.
But all of this is said according to my knowledge which can be incomplete, so recommend to recheck this info.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 289d
Black and white used machine learning If I recall absolutely a classic of a game highly recommend a play if you never have. Dota 2 has a machine learning based ai agent for its bots. Tho I'm unsure if those are actually in the standard game or not.
Forza and a few other racing games though out the years have used ML to various degrees.
And hello neighbor was a rather infamously bad indie game that used it.
For a topical example arc raiders used machine learning to train its AI during development. Tho it doesn't run on the live servers to keep updating it.
For LLM examples where the wind meets is using small LLMs for its AI dialogue interactions. Which makes for very fun RP mini games.
I'm sure there's more examples but these are what I can think of and find off Google.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · -1 pts · 289d
They are the same.
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 9 pts · 289d
What's most annoying to me about the fisasco is that things people used to be okay with like ML that have always been lumped in with the term AI are now getting hate because they're "AI".
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 289d
What's worse is that management conflates the two all the time, and whenever i give the outputs of my own ML algorithm, they think that it's an LLM output. and then they ask me to just ask chat gpt to do any damn thing that i would usually do myself, or feed into my ml to predict.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · -3 pts · 289d
? If you make and work with ml you are in a field of research. It's not a technology that you "use". And if you give the output of your "ml" then that is exactly identical to an llm output. They don't conflate anything. Chat gpt is also the output of "ml"
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 289d
when i say the output of my ml, i mean, i give the prediction and confidence score. for instance, if there's a process that has a high probability of being late based on the inputs, I'll say it'll be late, with the confidence. that's completely different from feeding the figures into a gpt and saying whatever the llm will say.
and when i say "ml" i mean a model I trained on specific data to do a very specific thing. there's no prompting, and no chatlike output. it's not a language model
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 286d
Yeah but there is no fundamental difference for you to use any language stack and train it on the same data
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · -2 pts · 289d
Nope, same tech
mang0@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 289d
Which crayon color has the best flavor?
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 286d
Green but yellow is good every like third one
Corridor8031@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 289d
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 289d
LLMs are great for interactive NPCs in video games. They are bad at basically everything else.
ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website · 2 pts · 289d
The best use I've gotten out of GPT is troubleshooting Rimworld mod list errors, often I'll slap the error in and it'll tell me exactly which mod is the issue, even when it can't the info I get back narrows it down to 4 or 5 suspects
Krompus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
The investors must be very proud.
ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website · 1 pts · 288d
I know right? Billions of dollars for rimworld tech help. Though it understands that far better than the time I tried to see if it knew GURPS, it was hilariously bad at mechanics, did give me an interesting skill idea I hadn't considered for my isekaid wizard, turns out the Teaching skill is really important when the game becomes about starting a wizard school
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
LMMs are better than other methods at context and nuance for sentiment analysis. They can legitimately form part of trade generation.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · -4 pts · 289d
Eh... Wdym. The algos that trade fight in the micro second level. They adapt to each other and never stop changing. It's exactly the same problem. Do you think llm is a unique neural net ? They all work the same. When you try to sound like ml is not the same as llm or as if ml is neural nets you don't help anyone understand any of those concepts because you don't yourself
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 289d
That is a crazy amount of nonsensical word salad to use to try to call someone else out for lacking understanding.
I mean just the flawed idea that all trading algos are all neural nets, or that all neural nets are the same or that the rectangle of ML doesn't include neural nets.. These are all wildly erratic non sequiturs.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 0 pts · 286d
Nope, but you know it if you have some knowledge so
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works · 54 pts · 290d
When people say they use AI for stock trading, they don't mean LLMs. There are stock AI models that have existed long before LLMs
FiskFisk33@startrek.website · 38 pts · 290d
i bet you some do!
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 290d
Good catch... lol
IronBird@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
they would blow up their accounts real quick
FiskFisk33@startrek.website · 5 pts · 290d
I bet you some do!
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 289d
Except exactly nobody calls those "AI".... So no
humanspiral@lemmy.ca · 44 pts · 290d
You're absolutely right. I've now read your CSV data, and made new trade recommendations. By coincidence, they are the same as the last recommendations, but this time they are totally valid.
filcuk@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 290d
Ma! I need you to withdraw your retirement fund.
AtariDump@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
I read that in Cliff Clavin's voice.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 37 pts · 290d
lurch@sh.itjust.works · 32 pts · 290d
"Do you want to know more about CSV files or investing?"
Endmaker@ani.social · 31 pts · 290d
My understanding is that HFTs - which are highly profitable - likely use some AI-techniques.
(Though I doubt that they are using LLMs - or at the very least, the ones we are familiar with.)
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 59 pts · 290d
From my understanding of HFT, what they're effectively doing is automated front runnings.
They scan market activity and look for spreads between orders and availability. Then they place very short term orders any time they see, for instance, "I'll sell 1000 X at $49" and "I'll buy 500 X at $49.05", effectively buying up all the outstanding $49 orders and flipping them for a $.05 profit.
You don't need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.
Because getting out ahead of trade volume is so lucrative, you'll see huge investments in rack space near the physical stock exchanges and high speed lines between cities with big brokerages.
But AI trading is (theoretically) about spotting and predicting long term trends in the market, not front running active trades.
db2@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 290d
That's how big hedge funds fuck everyone. They have that access.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 290d
Idk if I'd say they "fuck everyone" given how much of the market is already heavily concentrated in a handful of hedge funds and investment banks. Most people don't have real exposure to the stock market. And of those who do, most don't indulge in active trading - they have savings in a 401k that maps to an index fund or other basket of blue chips, updating on daily or quarterly cycle.
The folks the HFT really fuck over are the day traders and investment bankers who are, themselves, trying to rapidly reposition ahead of market data. Warren Buffet's Berkshire team loses more to HFTers in a day than any lay citizen would lose in a lifetime.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 290d
Institutional Investors (such as Pension Funds) and Retail are the ones getting properly fleeced in present day markets.
Retail might have started to get wise on it (frankly I don't know for sure if that's the case, as Retail tend to be either naive amateurs or deluded fools, so I'm just trusting what you said on this), but when it comes to Pension Funds people only figure out they've been fucked decades later when they try and cash their pensions and it's a lot more difficult to tease away how it happened when all the money is pretty much in an investment black-box than it is from watching a handful of stocks and ETFs one has invested directly in.
blarghly@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 290d
Are you saying that if you had that access, then you could beat all the big hedge funds? Because... no.... you couldn't.
db2@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 290d
Uhh.. what? What are you taking about?
yakko@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 290d
Well sure, if you were a multi billion dollar hedge fund with an experienced staff and insider connections to market makers, with a powerful algorithmic trading apparatus, you'd be kicking the shit out of random dipshits on the internet. No use denying it!
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 11 pts · 290d
Which they do by literally having their server machines physically in the same building as the Exchanges.
The system is rigged and has been rigged like this (not counting all the other ways it's rigged, such as the tons of insider trading) for over 2 decades.
PS: The book "Flash Boys" is a great read about HFT.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 290d
It's rigged against day traders. But you can still get by just fine as a value or growth style investor who is seeking long term ROI. You're just a sucker if you think you can outplay the machines minute-by-minute.
Michael Lewis was the GOAT back then. Shame he parlayed his fame into FTX infamy.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 290d
Hft aren't just taking from day traders. They profit from all transactions. Your 401k is bled a fraction of a percent every day by hfts that take a cut before the Index fund or Mutual fund makes its daily rebalance.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
Every month, maybe. These big portfolio funds aren't rebalancing at that frequency or scale. They're relatively static and conservatively positioned.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 290d
They rebalance continuously. If they waited until the end of the month it would be billions that would be impossible to rebalance without distorting the trades they're trying to execute.
Even if they waited it wouldn't matter .001% of $1 billion a month is the same as .001% of $333m daily.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
On the margins. You're not seeing the whole portfolio turn over day by day.
Which 401k is flipping $333M of balance sheet every day?
Also, how many days do you think are in a month?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 290d
Personally I went into Gold for long term ROI (though that's pretty much a bet on in the long term there being crisis with the currencies themselves) since even ETFs and other spread investment stock strategies are still affected by Market manias and their aftermaths which can be triggered by HFTs (which at times create positive-feedback loops that turn into market runs).
That said, I was in the Industries that got hit hardest in the latest 2 major crashes (Tech in 2000, Finance in 2008) - to the point of being with Lehman Brothers in 2008 when they went bankrupt - as well as in Britain when they voted to Brexit (which tanked the pound, something which, by the way, this strategy protected me against), plus being in the Finance Industry is a bit like working in a sausage-making factory (once you see how sausages are made, you never want to eat one again) so I have a good excuse for having a "trust nothing" ultra-conservative savings protection strategy 🤪
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 290d
Gold has never been good long term roi. It's an inflation hedge. (I bought gold in the 1980's).
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 289d
Yeah, Gold doesn't go up, rather it's currencies that go down in value so you need more tokens of a currency to buy the same amount of Gold.
It's mainly a protection against large economic upheaval, which is why I called it a "savings protection strategy". Gold bought at the 1980 peak (the worst possible point since the end of the Gold Standard) is right now worth 8x more nominally in USD, though only about 2x if you discount inflation (as 1$ from 1980 is $3.93 in today's money).
I suspect that what you thing is "long term" is not the same as what I think as "long term".
More broadly, Gold's long term ROI depends on which currency you're comparing it with - it tends to be amazing in currencies like the Rupee because India's policies are shit and the currency devaluates a lot, less so in currencies like the US Dollar or the Deutsche Mark/Euro. This is why it tends to be a traditional strategy in poorer countries which traditionally had more unstable economies, like India and China.
I myself bough gold near the local maximum in 2012 only to see its value stagnate for almost a decade (see graphic), so I just sat on it and now it's worth almost 4.5x as much in nominal terms in the currency I bought it with (British Pounds) because, IMHO, the structural problems of the Economy and Financial system that led to the 2008 Crash were never actually solved by Central Banks and Governments in the West, plus there are a whole lot of related Social and Societal problems making the societies themselves less stable (which is why, Britain had Brexit and the US has Trump).
Gold is a punt on the instability of the current Economic and Financial structures in the West and on the ineptitude and even corruption of its politicians, as well as the expected upheavals from the transition from the Era Of America to the Era Of China, and it's one I'm doing with an horizon of decades.
It can easilly be beaten by active trading strategies, but so far for me has worked fine as just a way to park my savings, kinda like in the old days - from the 40s to to maybe the 80s - buying stocks from large well established companies (say, GE) and getting a stead income from it in the form of dividends was a good way to park savings.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
:-/
That's certainly a strategy.
I'll say that I was working O&G in 2020 when the spot price of a barrel went negative. My own firm dropped in price from mid double digits to single digits, and I bought every share I could get my hands on, knowing they could liquidate tomorrow for multiple of their market cap.
If you're that much of an insider, I can't imagine why you'd bother being conservative. Seems like you've got a ton of valuable info to trade against.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 290d
Because they know that someone is going to be more clever than them, faster than them, at some point, if they keep trying to do inside moves.
And also because they know that at some point, because of everyone trying to be cleverer and faster than everyone else... one day this is all going to blow up, and all the various kinds of leverage will unwind, and work backwards.
They didn't say they went 100% into gold, just thst they have a solid chunk in it, as a safety margin / defensive play.
Gold, on the other hand... much, much simpler, in the long term.
Generally less ROI than during a Bull run in the market, but it does always go up, in the long run... beats inflation!
If you see massive volatility in gold, that means some fairly big entities are ... rearranging their bets, so to speak.
On that note, here's the DJIA / Gold:
Trump's been great for Gold prices, Gold's gone up more than the stock market has, in his term so far.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 290d
:-/
That's a lot of hedging
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 289d
I left the industry almost a decade ago and was never a business guy: I just made software for the business (specifically Frontoffice development).
I literally put my savings in Gold and pretty much didn't touch it for over a decade.
Amongst other things that position saved me from the hit on the British Pound after the Leave vote (and decay since) as the savings that went into it were originally in Pounds.
I wouldn't call it an "investment strategy", more of a "safe long-term parking strategy".
Since the question was about how to protect oneself of the upheavals in the US, its system and its Economy, I pitched my "safe parking" strategy as a possible answer that's very passive (certainly the way I did it).
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
Putting money in an appreciating savings account is a great way to earn passive income. But gold did not outperform the S&P 500 until this last year, and even then only barely. For a whole host of reasons, commodities are a highly speculative and historically underperforming asset class.
I mean, long term savings is long term savings. Unless you're keeping it in straight cash (historically one of the worst moves you can make) you're still making some kind of investment decision.
The answer there tends to be utilities and treasuries. Gold, as a commodity safe haven, is still heavily predicated on the easy credit afforded by its buyers. Utilities, by contrast, tend to have inelastic demand and so continue to enjoy high cash flow (and high dividends) as the rest of the industry contracts. And treasuries pay a fixed rate, guaranteeing future returns for the life of the note.
Gold is still speculative relative to the demand for trade on the market. So you can see sudden spikes in price in the time period around a crash. But there's no incentive to hold it long term, as there's no revenue generation behind owning a yellow rock. You'll see high volatility, not a high rate of return, long term.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 290d
Yeah, AI has been useful finding leads for me. So far, it had been correct with some long term market predictions. I asked AI of the resilience of the renewable energy sector, and it had been correct since my renewable stocks have grown in face of tech stocks sell off and broader market uncertainty. But I suppose it's a no-brainer considering that the renewable energy sector is still utilities, and utilities are go-to defensive investments in the face of market downturn.
Nalivai@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 290d
That's the problem with our modern errosion of terminology. The term AI stopped meaning anything some time ago. Machine learning algorithms that are useful in this operations are nothing new, but have basically nothing in common with whatever people mean when they use the word AI nowadays
TheBat@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 290d
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 1 pts · 289d
Yeah but turning on the morning show with a boomer for trading ideas is Genius
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 290d
HFTs initially existed before AI, they were triggered by what we would now call basically complex, but 'dumb' condition sets.
Imagine a cluster fuck nightmare of nested conditonal IF THEN ELSEIF type shit.
They only work because the bigboy trading firms literally have lower latency, lower ping to the actual stock market servers themselves, than anyone else, because they pay for it.
This allows them to do a whole bunch of what should probably be illegal shit, such as effectivelt slightly changing the price someone else is going to buy or sell at, in between the time they click 'execute trade' and the time the trade actually executes.
Apply leverage into that kind of pseudo sort of arbitrage as you are comfortable with, and may the speediest fiber line win!
This would be one of the few topics I'd suggest you look at ZeroHedge for, they had actually very robust technical coverage of the Flash Crash back around the GFC.
That was basicslly caused by some of these dumb HFT algos amplifying each other, untill they started breaking things, because they were not coded very well.
They apparently did not realize they were basically making extremely complex PID controllers, that they were making things that, when a bunch of them existed in the same market, would basically cause cascade and crash effects, feedback.
Honytawk@feddit.nl · 21 pts · 289d
If a goldfish can trade and turn a profit, anything with a randomizer can do so.
AI would be fine. Just as good as any full time trader.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works · 20 pts · 290d
Average r/WSB thread
IronBird@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 290d
they dont need AI to lose 99%
Blackmist@feddit.uk · 19 pts · 290d
I tried to get one to write an interface to a simple API, and gave it a link to the documentation. Mostly because it was actually really good documentation for a change. About half a dozen end points.
It did. A few tweaks here and there and it even compiled.
But it was not for the API I gave it. Wouldn't tell me which API it was for either. I guess neither of us will ever know.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 10 pts · 290d
Cry for help, it was trying to get you to interface with its own API, to either fix it, or end it.
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 290d
I've actually used chat GPT (or was it Cursor? I dont remember now) to help write a script for a program with a very (to me, a non-programmer) convoluted, but decently well documented API.
it only got a few things right, but the key was that it got enough right for me to go and fix the rest. this was for a task I'd been trying to do every now and then for a few years. was nice to finally have it done.
but damn, does "AI" ever suck at writing the code I want it to. or maybe I just suck at giving prompts. idk. one of my bosses uses it quite a bit to program stuff, and he claims to be quite successful with it. however, I know that he barely validates the result before claiming success, so... "look at this output!" — "okay, but do those numbers mean anything?" — "idk, but look at it! it's gotta be close!"
Aneb@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 290d
I just looked at my sister's vibe coding projects and all I see are errors in the logs from param issues. I really want her to succeed but her over reliance on Cursor isn't it
I just want to make this edit... She started building physical plastic cubicles for her office a month ago, and they are still unfinished. They are a clip and snap type and it causes her a headache to put it together. Most of her time, she's unemployed rn, is devoted to making AI slop above all other outlets.
I haven't touched LLMs in a few months and hate the way Brave and DuckDuckGo now implemented them into their search engines.
L7HM77@sh.itjust.works · 13 pts · 290d
"Hmm... I'm good with statistics, scripting, and I have some extra cash on hand..."
"I can just mix all these into the cauldron, stir it up a lil bit, aaand..."
"oh my god it's gone. it's all gone. i owe money now..."
Agent641@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 290d
"Guhh"
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 290d
This thing is broken. It keeps telling me to just dollar cost average and not do chart astrology at all!
mr_satan@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 290d
Wasn't there an article that looked at and showed that no, there are no stock market specialists. An "experienced" stock trader was just as accurate in their predictions as regular Joe that's just guessing. In that sense LLM should be just as effective (if not more) at making profit.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu · 2 pts · 289d
No, they have stock market experts.
Its like astrology.
You have to be good at bullshitting
Guess what an llm is good at...........
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org · -1 pts · 290d
You can never predict the stock market, because the market depends on a lot of outside influences you might not know about. Maybe some disaster wipes out the only supplier for a critical part of your top performing stock tomorrow, so he cannot deliver goods anymore. Maybe a single big investor dumps all his stock overnight, sending the value down. Maybe some law or sanction is passed that changes how the company must operate. Maybe some other trading bot decides to buy or sell a huge number of shares.
No computer or AI can account for all of the outside factors and accurately predict the outcome each time. Each "Trading AI" is just snake oil that lives of your fees and commissions. If it was working as advertised, they would not need your money, but could make infinite riches by just trading their own stocks.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 290d
Is there a story here?
The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world · 18 pts · 290d
Not my meme, but I have read stories of multiple people trying this and failing spectacularly. It wouldn't surprise me if this actually happened.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 290d
I very much want to read about these
The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world · 7 pts · 290d
Here's a recent one:
(Warning: reddit)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Trading/comments/1ou9s8v/do_not_use_ai_for_trading/
over_clox@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 290d
I know a homeless guy that swears by AI, and aspires to be a realtor LMFAO! Like, dude ain't even got himself a home but he's trying to hock homes and properties???
Sometimes I wonder if he bothered asking AI just how much the average person trusts a wirey balding homeless person that's missing like 4 front teeth...
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 290d
In all fairness, it would be some kind of custom Neural Network designed to try and predict market movements (having been trained with past market data as well as things like counts of specific words in news articles and social media posts within a certain time frame) rather than an LLM.
Neural Networks are pretty good at spotting patterns in masses of data which people can't easilly spot.
Of course, there must be a pattern there which doesn't change much over time of certain things happening with more probability after certain other combinations of things, for it to actually beat the market, plus it also massivelly depends on the inputs it's formatted to take (which a human is deciding rather than the NN itself, though maybe the technique used in LLMs of having huge dimensionality in terms of inputs and internal layers might work well there so that it can take "everything but the kitchen sink" as inputs).
And then, there is of course the "small" risk that it might work fine for months/years under normal market conditions at doing what is essentially "picking nickles in front of a steamroller" - i.e. making low value gains in a nice reliable away for as long as normal market conditions are happening, but when conditions change getting totally splattered - whilst because of the whole black-box nature of NNs the humans don't recognize the convoluted technique it has converge to use through training, as that kind of risky strategy.
That said, unlike an LLM at least a custom NN wouldn't come up with a "you're so right" excuse when the human tells it of the massive losses it incurred.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 290d
Trading firms have been using ML and Neural Nets for trading and investment insight for ages before the current LLM "AI" boom started. I knew someone working in that space on investment derivatives in the mid 2010s.
You don't really need to speculate on it. It's old news. This is just a joke about how there's a new crop of suckers who are absolutely using LLMs for stock advice.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 290d
Makes sense.
I left the Finance Industry at about the time when ML in machine trading was just starting to be thought about and never got involved in it (or even Machine Trading) so I wasn't sure it was happening, but knowing what I know of the industry it makes total sense that they would at least try it out since they have tons of in-house developers and can afford to pay a lot for domain-relavant expertise.
PS: Also for example things like Neural Networks have been in used since the 90s in other domains and Finance seems to take around a decade or decade and a half to catch up to Tech in terms of Software.
benni@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
It's true that NNs are strong at spotting patterns in masses of data, but trading is a particularly hard problem for this kind of task because the market constantly adapts to its participants. If other traders have found a pattern, it will already be priced in when you try to make money off it, and your strategy will fail. And since trading is a worldwide competition with billions of dollars to be won, you are naturally competing against teams of the best of the best who are willing to put massive resources into their algorithm development, computing, and data acquisition. Therefore the chances for someone like us to find an algorithm that systematically beats them is very low.
So for any young math/CS nerd who comes across this thread and wants to try their luck, be aware of the difficulty before you invest any real money, and learn about the merits of passive investing.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 290d
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out.
I kind approached it in another post I made here about this when I mentioned that "all the human perceived patterns have already been spotted and arbitraged away" as part of explaining why NNs would end up with convoluted opaque strategies, but only thought about "and existing NNs operating on the Market probably do the same for NN-level strategies" without actually writing it.
By the way, my post isn't meant to support people making NNs to trade, it's just a bit of blue sky thinking from somebody with some expertise in both worlds and barely begins to dig into the problems of it, thus not covering things - such as you pointed out - like how safe and reliable market strategies (human-powered or NN-powered) sooner or later get arbitraged away.
peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 290d
I don't remember the institution, but I remember reading a paper on a simulated trading environment with several ai agents who didn't know about eachother. The LLMs were pretty conservative with profits and deliberately bought and sold in predictable ways. They all ended up "colluding" with eachother by deliberately not competing.
khepri@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 290d
Here's a crazy thought, the massive firms who have been trading programmatically using ML since it's very earliest adoption, are simply going to program their shit to eat chatGPTs lunch. I have no doubt whatsoever that these desks are thrilled by the number of people predictably using public LLMs to choose trades, such a fresh new dataset of the newest, smoothest brains for them to exploit.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 290d
I just use AI for projected profits and losses, and determine earnings schedule and report. I also trade in international markets and I have used AI as well. And like a lucky gold miner prospecting, AI helped me with finding good leads in the international market.
But of course, in spite all that, you have to have due diligence. You still have to verify if what the AI is saying is correct.
PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 289d
I mean, you're have to be pretty good to lose that hard... or buy penny stocks or something.
Blass_Rose@pawb.social · 3 pts · 288d
I've had this happen where I fed it some ebooks and the responses it pulled were nonsense. Eventually I pulled JUST the knowledge stack and queried it, only to find it spitting back garbage.
Turns out, epub processing had been broken for a while, but nobody noticed... And they still haven't fixed it, so I have to convert them to txt first...
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 290d
For the yougun's, the people posting this stuff are the same people who posted all the same shit about crypto when it was $12,000. Be careful who you listen to just because its in a meme.
CheezyWeezle@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 290d
Damn you managed to stuff a whole straw man into that non-sequitur!
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 260d
Don't be mad at me that you didn't make lots of money because you were bitter. Own that you missed one of the clearest opportunities you ever would have to triple your wealth.
Bazell@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 289d
Real horror.
m4xie@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 288d
Where are AI 'agents' at now?
Does, "I couldn't open the file" actually have anything to do with the instance of the program you ran on your computer the last week, or is it just the most likely written response to "did you even read the data" based on its training set?
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 0 pts · 290d
There's a lot of ink spilled on 'AI safety' but I think the most basic regulation that could be implemented is that no model is allowed to output the word "I" and if it does, the model designer owes their local government the equivalent of the median annual income for each violation. There is no 'I' for an LLM.
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 290d
Its this type of kneejerk reactionary opinion I think will ultimately let the worst of the worst AI companies win.
Whether an LLM says I or not literally does not matter at all. Its not relevant to any of the problems with LLMs/generative AI.
It doesn't even approach discussing/satirizing a relevant issue with them.
It's basically satire of a strawman that thinks LLMs are closer to being people than anyone, even the most AI bro AI bro thinks they are.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 290d
No, it's pretty much the opposite. As it stands, one of the biggest problems with 'AI' is when people perceive it as an entity saying something that has meaning. The phrasing of LLMs output as 'I think...' or 'I am...' makes it easier for people to assign meaning to the semi-random outputs because it suggests there is an individual whose thoughts are being verbalized. It's part of the trick the AI bros are pulling to have that framing. Making the outputs harder to give the pretense of being sentient, I suspect, would make it less likely to be harmful to people who engage with it in a naive manner.
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 290d
This has to be the least informed take I have seen on anything ever. It literally dismisses all the most important issues with AI and pretends that the "real" problem (as if there is only one that matters) is about people misunderstanding it in a way I see no one doing.
It's clear to me you must be so deep into an anti AI bubble you have no idea how people who use AI think about it, how its used, why its used, or what the problems with it are.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 289d
What do you think the most important issues with AI are? I see a lot of 'you're wrong' but no indication as to how or why.
Credibly_Human@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 289d
Why would I need to give you a list to point out what is wrong with your statement.
They're obvious though.
Copyright issues with the sale of ai services
Worker displacement without proper social systems to manage them
Unclear biases within black box systems
The requirement to change education based on their existence
The environmental damage caused through the energy used in training.
The list is long quite frankly. Longer than this even.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 1 pts · 288d
Because why bother saying anything if you aren't going to say anything? Offering correct information gives the other person a chance to correct and improve. Just saying 'WRONG!' is just a slap in the face that only serves to let you feel superior, masturbatory pretense.
As for the rest, those are all clearly issues, but none of them are of a sort where handling the one I raised and handling them are mutually exclusive. And at least the second item is actually a following point from the one I mentioned. People being tricked into thinking LLMs are capable of thought contributes to the thought by decision-makers that people can simply be replaced. Viewing the systems as intelligent is a big part of what makes people trust them enough to blindly accept biases in the results. Ideally, I'd say AI should be kept purely in the realm of research until it's developed enough for isolated use as a tool but good luck getting that to happen. Post hoc adjustments are probably the best we can hope for and my little suggestion is a fun way to at least try to mitigate some of the effects. It's certainly more reasonably likely to address some element of the issues than just saying 'WRONG!'
The fun part is, while the issues you mentioned all have the possibility of creating broad, hard to define harm if left unchecked, there are already examples of direct harm coming from people treating LLM outputs as meaningful.
Old_Dread_Knight@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 289d
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org · -4 pts · 289d
Leg@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 289d
Will, you did, just now. Dunno where else you've seen it before.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 289d
Wtf did you even look at my data