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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in hedge funds for the last decade, this seems to miss the mark. Firstly we often reward skillstacking ie a technical person later becoming a trader. The more one person knows the better. These people are rare though hence the reason there is still many seperate job functions, so a person can specialize. But an AI agent? They all have the same brain, so why nerf them by specialising.

Secondly, browsing reddit for sentiment and doing technical analysis is not even a feature in the trading world. At the most basic level, these are lagging indicators. Something on options IV and premiums would have been closer to the mark.

Hedge funds are akin to the maintenance crew for markets, we keep them efficient and liquid. The process is quite scientific, you come up with a theory and validate with real data. Or you go from data to theory.

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> The process is quite scientific

This part is lost on many. The value of data is in the theories it confirms or more importantly disconfirms, and defining the trading edge is not easy after accounting for costs. I am wary of black-boxes that produce an edge - not only because I dont know how it works, but also because regimes shift unpredictably, and what works today may stop working tomorrow. That being said, AI can be useful to help automate many routine processes just like any other software.

Actually there is a really good reason, it has to do generally with making sure that all the aspects that you want evaluated are actually evaluated.

Now it may be possible with models like Astra that you no longer need to do this, but in earlier models it was beneficial.

So I might want a macro economic read which leads to a market thesis. Then I would hunt for exposure, then evaluate the candidates across different aspects. Breaking the process up at least made sure no steps were missed and the different aspects considered.

The obvious and dumb theory for trading on LLM recommendations is that lots of people are doing it so the price of stocks LLM recommend should go up. (ie: following the herd).

As local contexts/skills get better at depicting what's to be expected and what an agent can work with and work to get better at, having more and more little specialized agents working as a swarm get you, with a field-skilled human as a supervisor, really good results even in highly niche and technical fields

Reddit sentiment is mostly noise for a while now.

but...

options premiums imply volatility.

Lagging indicator would still be useful if it was accurate before the event. After the event, its just lagging history.

technical analysis is using historical data to make future predictions. No professional trader would trade anything without looking at price history.

Given what a know about the 2008 financial crisis, wouldn't an AI analysis in the years before that crisis of the real state funds helped to understand the risk of them better and avoid the big exposure.

The problem wasn't the analysis, given it was found out before it happened. The problem was politics, and as usual pushing the system to its limits and beyond.

Probably not. On the contrary, it would probably just amplify the mood.

I'd say it was more to do with how incentives lined up among different actors.

There's always risk somewhere in a financial system.

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