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Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

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Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#51

Post by lpage »

reverend_gonzo wrote: post #43
mjpuser wrote: post #13

I just checked out glassdoor, and it seems like they don't know what their product should be since top execs don't want to agree on anything. > We have too many executives for a company this size - most don't add much value except for fighting with each other and politicizing issues. The CEO lives in HongKong and remotely manages this crew of distrusting, non-supportive and close-minded execs. The HR function is prac…

Which is really odd, since if they had any idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't need to sell. Trading is among one of the few industries out there where you don't need to have anything like a customer. What you do is make money, and if you're making money, well, you don't need to ask anybody else for money. This tells me that its a bunch of executives who either don't know anything about trading and/or don't h…

Peter Muller has the most succinct summary of this that I've seen in his (very worthwhile) opinion piece on proprietary trading [1]:

Sharpe Ratio, Marketing department

≤ 0: Runs the firm

0.25: Very important; involved in all investment decisions; major focus on asset gathering

0.5–1.0: Secondary

1.0–2.0: Almost superfluous

≥ 2.0: What marketing department?

[1] https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/...

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#52

Post by edblarney »

bfrog wrote: post #26

Huh, hasn't wallstreet being doing this, and even putting these things into FPGA's for nearly a decade now? Hell I wouldn't be surprised if they're printing ASICs with their algos.

Surely - but 'AI' is new. Surely 'Deep Learning' is something at least they are not doing widely, because it's difficult to pull off.

That said, anyone actually doing it would be smart enough to shut the hell up about it.

Finally - one might argue that the big money is all made in 'soft insider' information anyhow, and that with so much tech, analysts already there ... there's just no way to win without clear leverage i.e. relationships, servers on premises of the trading facility, or some other non-market advantage.

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#53

Post by maverick_iceman »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #49
drpgq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for is around 100 people, but the few postings I have seen that are negative and descriptive are on the mark. Maybe Tolstoy was right about unhappy companies as well.

Curious to what your are referring to, related to Tolstoy (or Tolstoj as I like to write his name). Can you elaborate? Thanks!

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#54

Post by fancy_pantser »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #49
drpgq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for is around 100 people, but the few postings I have seen that are negative and descriptive are on the mark. Maybe Tolstoy was right about unhappy companies as well.

Curious to what your are referring to, related to Tolstoy (or Tolstoj as I like to write his name). Can you elaborate? Thanks!

It's called The Anna Karenina principle. Tolstoy posited an analogy in his novel Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Interestingly, Peter Thiel starts his book Zero To One with a reference to the Anna Karenina principle by showing a corollary in business: "All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike."

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#55

Post by reverend_gonzo »

bogomipz wrote: post #48
reverend_gonzo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is really odd, since if they had any idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't need to sell. Trading is among one of the few industries out there where you don't need to have anything like a customer. What you do is make money, and if you're making money, well, you don't need to ask anybody else for money. This tells me that its a bunch of executives who either don't know anything about trading and/or don't h…

>" Trading is among one of the few industries out there where you don't need to have anything like a customer." Trading yes but a hedge fund or any fund really implies customers no?

Hedge funds have customers because the majority of them don't beat the market in the long run.

If a hedge fund is consistently highly profitable, they stop taking customers. For example, see RenTec's Medallion Fund, which is only open to its own employees.

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#56

Post by crdb »

reverend_gonzo wrote: post #43
mjpuser wrote: post #13

I just checked out glassdoor, and it seems like they don't know what their product should be since top execs don't want to agree on anything. > We have too many executives for a company this size - most don't add much value except for fighting with each other and politicizing issues. The CEO lives in HongKong and remotely manages this crew of distrusting, non-supportive and close-minded execs. The HR function is prac…

Which is really odd, since if they had any idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't need to sell. Trading is among one of the few industries out there where you don't need to have anything like a customer. What you do is make money, and if you're making money, well, you don't need to ask anybody else for money. This tells me that its a bunch of executives who either don't know anything about trading and/or don't h…

> if they had any idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't need to sell

Having spent some time in the industry, I disagree, you're always trying to maintain or increase AUM. Funds constantly sell to existing and future limited partners (investors). Internal prop trading desks sell to management in order to keep their allocated VaR and to risk for similar reasons. Traders themselves sell to their boss and peers. VCs sell their top quartile-ness. All of the above sell to their junior staff to keep them around.

The thing is you don't know if you are good or lucky until many years into your career and someone has to put up the capital until then. Even the top funds with great track records can one day stop producing results, at which point people abandon ship.

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#57

Post by mavelikara »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #49
drpgq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for is around 100 people, but the few postings I have seen that are negative and descriptive are on the mark. Maybe Tolstoy was right about unhappy companies as well.

Curious to what your are referring to, related to Tolstoy (or Tolstoj as I like to write his name). Can you elaborate? Thanks!

Not OP, but this might be the reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#58

Post by digler999 »

SEJeff wrote: post #21

The clickbait headline is amusing, but "Wall Street" has been doing this > 10 years. I'm genuinely not sure if they're trying to "beat wall street" or simply be yet another quantitative hedge fund that happens to use machine learning and neural networks to power their strategies. Most real electronic trading firms are putting those algorithms in hardware. Source: Have worked in HFT the past 10 years.

> Source: Have worked in HFT the past 10 years.

OT question: how would I get into acquiring market data to try my own backtesting strategies ? Is there anyway to "get in" without putting up $5k + for the data ? I'm not green to this, I worked at a prop shop for a year writing market feed handlers. I know the dangers of overfitting data and how hard it is to make money (so I'm not deluded by a fantasy). I want to start out just for fun doing backtesting and see if I can scrape out a (paper) profit, but accessing historical data seems to be the hard part. I dont think online services that offer this would work for me because I want to use intraday data and replay many times with different parameters. I want access to "the whole firehose" if you will.

Re: Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

#59

Post by raw23 »

SEJeff wrote: post #34
jredwards wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFT is a different kind of 'beating the market', though, don't you think?

It isn't beating the market, it is literally "making the market": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker

Arguable whether or not HFT increases liquidity in the market.
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