Man Vs. Machine On Wall Street

Any data mining driven approach that shows good returns is arbitraged out of existence almost immediately, unless it's niche and thus unscalable to a larger fund. All the blackbox systems end up doing pretty much the same thing and getting low returns. The markets are simply too dynamic for a pure data and algorithms system to work. One needs to use theory to win, and the guy picking the theories in the program is exactly the same thing as a manager in the first place.

The only way to get rich from a naive blackbox is to twist the risk knob up to 11, which always goes badly eventually.