Hacker News Reader

Comment by hendzen | Hacker News Reader

Actually, there are also people [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] who are very successful betting small sums (relative to their total investable capital), very frequently, on securities they believe are slightly over or under valued.

[0] - https://www.rentec.com/

[1] - https://www.twosigma.com/

[2] - https://www.citadel.com/

[3] - https://www.mlp.com/

[4] - https://www.deshaw.com/

[5] - https://www.worldquant.com/

View on HN

Depends deeply on the time period and this list is most likely due to survivor bias. See Warren Buffet's hedge fund bet as a good semi recent example.

He was daring a human-managed fund to outperform S&P500. I don't think Warren is an authority on market's microstructure and quant trading, which these companies exploit.

Basically on very quick trades machines outperform humans. For long term investment a prediction market (stock market index) outperforms humans and machines.

It's called survivorship bias. With hundreds of millions of people making investments in the stock market, almost any strategy has many examples of people who "won" with it.

I understand survivorship bias.

These firms make many thousands of trades per day, year after year. They have multi-year track records of exceptional returns.

If their edge was truly no better than random then they would have been bankrupted years ago. You can do some back of the envelope math to easily convince yourself of this.

nobody said it's totally innefective (or random), just that it is vastly less effective (and you're exposed to terminal risk more often) than throwing lots of money on an index.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com