Eggheads demo how to fool share-trading bots with carefully crafted retweets For years, Twitter posts and other online messages have been gathered and analyzed by financial algorithms in an effort to anticipate stock market movements. But, it turns out, these smart systems are rather dumb. Financially minded developers have created programs that ingest the tweets of widely followed public figures, such …
I have spent the last 20 years in vain, pointing out that the only correct word in "Artificial Intelligence"is "artificial". I have yet to see any "AI" that isn't just sophisticated (or not so sophisticated) pattern matching.
Stories like this just prove my point.
Yes but PHBs have all seen lots of sci-fi movies and AWS, Google., et al have all been selling "AI services" for a few years nows, so AI has to be something amazing.
Same here, been in the biz for almost 35 years, I'm no syaing there's some smart work being done with "AI" as it is right now but all i ever see is "We have AI! Well we fed this algorithm with 17 billion data items and now it can tell the difference between a dog and a human in any photo you give it! Can we have our $25m grant money now?".
now it can tell the difference between a dog and a human in any photo you give it!
Well nearly any photo.
And in an inversion of reality, that isn't reason for binning the whole thing, but actually a call for more grant money.
I once ruined a potential sweetheart deal (corruption would be too strong a word) by doing with a bit of SQL and 14Gb spreadsheet what a firm claimed they needed £100,000. It was after that (some of) the board felt "big data" wasn't really ITs problem.
If I had any money, I'd be rather concerned that my highly paid fund managers were choosing how to invest it based on pattern matching random data posted to twitter.
It's almost as if investment funds are basically a scam that allows bankers to gamble with their customers money while charging them management fees for doing so.
"But, it turns out, these smart systems are rather dumb."
People fail to understand what these systems are used for. Traders are looking to make money in the next few minutes or seconds). Those who bet that the market would decline when the false bomb report came out made money, those who didn't lost money. The validity of the tweet had nothing to do with it, only the time it took to notice it and act on it.
The article is interesting but not that relevant. Traders won't care if the tweets are manipulated and the SEC is looking for unusual trading activity to identify and sanction market manipulation
Set up a hedge fund
Demand your salary is x% of fund managed (whichh is apparently SOP for hedge fund managers as described in "The Big Short")
Hire IT team to do the actual trading stuff.
Take the rest of the week (and every other one) off.
Bottom line the theory of seelcting these guys as managers (Like IDK William Rees-Mogg) is they are f**king geniuses.
IRL it seems the real genius is in persuading the investors that you are a genius at this sort of thing
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