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Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

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Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#31

Post by iopuy »

karmacondon wrote: post #30
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #22

I'm skeptical. There are skyscrapers in NYC's, Londons, Singapores and Hong Kong's of this world filled with people who are smart and have enormous computer resources and funds and are paid handsomely to work on solving this problem with all manners of ML and AI at their disposal, the "crowd" has no advantage over them. The "closed system" is much larger than the "crowd" in this case.

I don't think this is true at all. 10,000 people are just going to have more ideas and better individual ideas than 100 experts. The impact of that much creativity and perspective can be exponential, and it's hard to duplicate. When I'm designing a system, I hate to have to try to out think everyone on the internet. If you have a known set of opponents you can predict what they might do. When you're up against anybod…

I absolutely disagree. I'll take the word of 100 experts over 10,000 amateurs.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#32

Post by TrickedOut »

fpgaminer wrote: post #28

I started poking at this out of curiosity, and a desire to begin sharpening my TensorFlow axe, and one thing remains unclear. They give you two spreadsheets, one being the training data and the other is the tournament data (what you need to predict on). Each entry in the spreadsheet is 21 features and a single binary class. The latter is what you predict. But for the submissions they request a probability, not a clas…

Have you found any good TensorFlow examples which handle financial or time series data like this? Please do share! Most of the examples I find are either image processing or text processing. Rarely time series or traditional DB type data.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#33

Post by [deleted] »

fpgaminer wrote: post #28

I started poking at this out of curiosity, and a desire to begin sharpening my TensorFlow axe, and one thing remains unclear. They give you two spreadsheets, one being the training data and the other is the tournament data (what you need to predict on). Each entry in the spreadsheet is 21 features and a single binary class. The latter is what you predict. But for the submissions they request a probability, not a clas…

[deleted]

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#34

Post by richard_craib »

jldugger wrote: post #26
alexmingoia wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not possible. The data is encrypted. None of the participants can see which stocks (or anything) about the data they train with. Numerai turns stock prediction into a pure ML problem.

Okay, submit hundreds of bots, and have them generate random picks. One gets lucky, and is selected for hilighting.

Check your coin toss math on 1000, 10000, 100000 predictions.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#35

Post by bcherny »

iopuy wrote: post #31
karmacondon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true at all. 10,000 people are just going to have more ideas and better individual ideas than 100 experts. The impact of that much creativity and perspective can be exponential, and it's hard to duplicate. When I'm designing a system, I hate to have to try to out think everyone on the internet. If you have a known set of opponents you can predict what they might do. When you're up against anybod…

I absolutely disagree. I'll take the word of 100 experts over 10,000 amateurs.

The two aren't exclusive. What's to stop the experts from doing this as a side project?

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#37

Post by modeless »

So in exchange for giving a hedge fund a stock tip that earns 20% in a month, the guy gets $10k? That sounds like a ripoff to me! If you have the skills to do that repeatedly you can make a whole lot more than $10k doing the trades yourself.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#38

Post by TrickedOut »

dharmon wrote: post #15
davnn wrote: post #10

Interesting idea. Not that crowd driven investment algorithms are new, but I have not seen a machine learning one before. What really ennoys me about this kind of businesses is that they pay tiny prices and shut the competitions once they have found what they were looking for, however Numerai might be completely different in that regard and I wish them the best! Btw: The article kind of conveys the feeling as if mach…

Even more than "a couple of years". About 15 years ago I worked at a day trading firm and we were writing models that used machine learning. At the time we thought of it more as "computational statistics", but its basically what is called ML now and taught in ML courses (although we didn't use Neural Nets). BTW, even in 2001 we were far from the first to do this.

Almost everything I see on neural nets are related to either image processing or text processing. Rarely time series or traditional DB type data -- is there a classic hello-world example or common demonstration of how neural nets are applied onto tabular data common in financial markets?

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#39

Post by taneq »

iopuy wrote: post #31
karmacondon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true at all. 10,000 people are just going to have more ideas and better individual ideas than 100 experts. The impact of that much creativity and perspective can be exponential, and it's hard to duplicate. When I'm designing a system, I hate to have to try to out think everyone on the internet. If you have a known set of opponents you can predict what they might do. When you're up against anybod…

I absolutely disagree. I'll take the word of 100 experts over 10,000 amateurs.

Examples of the word of 10,000 amateurs:

* Anti-vaxxers

* The healing power of crystals

* Moon landing conspiracy nuts

* Multi-level marketing

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#40

Post by powera »

This is where the "accredited investor" warnings are appropriate. Don't do this with your money if you aren't willing and able to lose it!

In the long run, it's impossible for people to beat the market simply by looking at historic stock prices. Impossible. If it is possible in the short run, more and more people will do it until they don't make any money at all, or a "black swan" event occurs and they go completely bankrupt. (I suppose there's a third option, that they all make so much money that the entire rest of the world goes bankrupt, but that's absurd)

So be careful!

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