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Cute project, but since it isn't actually hooked up to live trading, I'm going to suspect that they're not actually dealing with the issues which would keep them from making a profit on those trades: trading fees, losses going into the bid-ask spread, the fact that large enough purchases actually move the market, and the fact that the crash which wipes you out can come along on years later just when the victories of…
It may very well turn out that the difference between trading by looking at numbers and trading by sound and intuition is like looking at someone throw a ball and predicting where it will land versus being told the ball's mass and initial vector - in the former case you can very quickly predict with a good accuracy where it will land, while in the latter you need a good amount of time and a few sheets of paper and you achieve accuracy that's not that much better.
And yes, I realise that once you stretch the analogy too far it doesn't work, the ball will follow a completely deterministic trajectory, while the stocks move in a rather random fashion and the principles (if you can call them that) that govern their movement are not known to nearly the same precision as the principles of motion of a rigid body on Earth in normal atmospheric conditions.
But I'd say that if you look past that, the analogy is informative and serves to roughly illustrate the point.
A lot of people didn't get the idea that this is an art project, not an in-earnest investment strategy.
It's an art project, not a science experiment.
Finally. We can replace the Wall Street folks at 1 / 1.000.000 the price of today. This will be a significant boost to the economy.
Consider for a (rat) trader:
- success
- get treat
- eat treat
- loop
... passage of time...
- get fat
- judgement clouded by excess fat (perhaps inhibiting movement)
- less successful
- less treats
- loses weight
- become more successful again
...and so on...
The obvious next step is to try the same with voles, shrews, etc., and start a hedge fund that is actually located in a hedge.
/edit
Is this a joke or not?
Was the training and price input necessary at all? Doesn't random generator outperform some hedgefunds?
When tested on 800 data points, a purely random strategy would have a > 53.5% success rate about 2% of the time.