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We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

aitradearena.com

131–140 of 319 posts

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#131
prince of zamunda LLM edition or whatever that movie was based on that book was based on the realization how pathetic it all was based on was? .... yeah, some did a good one on ya. just imagine evaluating that offspring one or two generations later ... ffs, this is sooooooooooooooo embarrassing

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok would likely have an advantage there, as well - it's got better coupling to X/Twitter, a better web search index, fewer safety guardrails in pretraining and system prompt modification that distort reality. It's easy to envision random market realities that would trigger ChatGPT or Claude into adjusting the output to be more politically correct. DeepSeek would be subject to the most pretraining distortion, but ha…

I know that Musk deserving a lifetime achievement award at the Adult Video Network awards over Riley Reid is definitely an indication of minimal "system prompt modification that distort[s] reality."

...I'm not familiar with the reference.

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this discussion in previous posts about congressional leaders who had the risk appetite to go tech heavy and therefore outperformed normal congress critters. Going heavy on tech can be rewarding, but you are taking on more risk of losing big in a tech crash. We all know that, and if you don't have that money to play riskier moves, its not really a move you can take. Long term it is less of a win if a tech bubb…

They didn't just outperform "normal" congress critters.. they also outperformed nearly every hedge fund on the planet. But they (meaning, of course, just one person and their spouse) are obviously geniuses.

Hedge funds suck though. They don’t invest in FAANG, they do risky stuff that doesn’t pay off, you are still comparing incomparable things.

I’m obviously a genius because 90% of my stock is in tech, most of us on HN are geniuses in your opinion?

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#137

> Grok ended up performing the best while DeepSeek came close to second. Almost all the models had a tech-heavy portfolio which led them to do well. Gemini ended up in last place since it was the only one that had a large portfolio of non-tech stocks. I'm not an investor or researcher, but this triggers my spidey sense... it seems to imply they aren't measuring what they think they are.

Yeah I mean if you generally believe the tech sector is going to do well because it has been doing well you will beat the overall market. The problem is that you don’t know if and when there might be a correction. But since there is this one segment of the overall market that has this steady upwards trend and it hasn’t had a large crash, then yeah any pattern seeking system will identify “hey this line keeps going up…

For a nice historic perspective on hedge funds and the industry as a whole, read Mallaby's "More Money Than God".

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#139

> Grok ended up performing the best while DeepSeek came close to second. Almost all the models had a tech-heavy portfolio which led them to do well. Gemini ended up in last place since it was the only one that had a large portfolio of non-tech stocks. I'm not an investor or researcher, but this triggers my spidey sense... it seems to imply they aren't measuring what they think they are.

I mean, run the experiment during a different trend in the market and the results would probably be wildly different. This feels like chartists [1] but lazier. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chartist.asp

If you've ever read a blog on trading when LSTMs came out, you'd have seen all sorts of weird stuff with predicting the price at t+1 on a very bad train/test split, where the author would usually say "it predicts t+1 with 99% accuracy compared to t", and the graph would be an exact copy with a t+1 offset.

So eye-balling the graph looks great, almost perfect even, until you realize that in real-time the model would've predicted yesterday's high on today's market crash and you'd have lost everything.

Re: We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would almost be more interesting to specifically train the model on half the available market data, then test it on another half. Yes, ideally you’d have a model trained only on data up to some date, say January 1, 2010, and then start running the agents in a simulation where you give them each day’s new data (news, stock prices, etc.) one day at a time.

I mean ultimately this is an exercise in frustration because if you do that you will have trained your model on market patterns that might not be in place anymore. For example after the 2008 recession regulations changed. So do market dynamics actually work the same in 2025 as in 2005? I honestly don’t know but intuitively I would say that it is possible that they do not. I think a potentially better way would be to…

> you will have trained your model on market patterns that might not be in place anymore

How is that relevant to what was proposed? If it's trading and training on 2010 data, what relevance does todays market dynamics and regulations have?

Which further begs the question, what's the point of this exercise?

Is it to develop a model than compete effectively in today's market? If so then yeah, the 2010 trading/training idea probably isn't the best idea for the reasons you've outlined.

Or is it to determine the capacity of an AI to learn and compete effectively within any given arbitrary market/era? If so, then today's dynamics/constraints are irrelevant unless you're explicitly trying to train/trade on todays markets (which isn't what the person you're replying to proposed, but is obviously a valid desire and test case to evaluate in it's own right)

Or is it evaluating its ability to identify what those constraints/limitations are and then build strategies based on it? In which case it doesn't matter when you're training/trading so much as your ability to feed it accurate and complete data for that time period be it today, or 15 years ago or whenever, which is no small ask.

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