Isn't it forex, not stocks?
He traded forex and futures, not actual stocks. Headline misleading.
How is the headline misleading? It says 'traders' not 'stock traders' specifically.
Training Rats as Traders
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#22I wonder how this compares to using a neural network. I see no comparison to using other methods to predict the market, though he claims to outperform humans.
It is a neural network though, isn't it?
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#23I wonder how this compares to using a neural network. I see no comparison to using other methods to predict the market, though he claims to outperform humans.
It is a neural network though, isn't it?
Exactly. It just isn't an Artificial Neural Network ;-) After all, though rats are super disgusting, they were created by Nature.
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#24Fascinating. I'm extremely skeptical, of course. The thing that bothers me most is that they list percentages (perhaps this is the percentage of time that the rats guess correctly?) rather than $ amounts. Even if the experiment fails, explaining the fact that the later generations performed better could lead to some really interesting science.
Percentages rather than dollars are worthless. There are skewed bets; you can predict "up" rightly 70% of the time and lose money on the bigger downward 30% of the movements.
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#25Essentially, he made a more complicated version of a moving average quant system. The more interesting part was breeding top-performing rats to see if they are able to improve their "trading" genetically. You can do this exact same thing using evolutionary algorithms with trading systems that help you to adapt to the market. Quant finance is fun when you're doing it for yourself, not a bank.
I'm not sure that what you say is right. What makes you think that it's the same?
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#26Fascinating. I'm extremely skeptical, of course. The thing that bothers me most is that they list percentages (perhaps this is the percentage of time that the rats guess correctly?) rather than $ amounts. Even if the experiment fails, explaining the fact that the later generations performed better could lead to some really interesting science.
Percentages rather than dollars are worthless. There are skewed bets; you can predict "up" rightly 70% of the time and lose money on the bigger downward 30% of the movements.
Be that as it may, if the rats cannot do better than a coin toss, what use is it?
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#27My first thought was, is it April 1st already? "Since I did not want to make it too complicated, I only used the USD/EUR future to make the rats experts in this specific market segment, but other rats can be trained in other markets as well. I trained the rats for about 3 months, starting with 80 Sprague Dawley laboratory rats, 40 males and 40 females with the intention to cross the best of them to genetically create…
Considering the rest of the website, this is probably social commentary, not a real experiment...
But on the other hand the author seems to be accomplished in the financial field. From his site:
"He quit school at 17 and started his first own business in the financial field, publishing analysis on the financial markets and managing funds, until he sold his business at the age of 23. [...] He was also active in the field of software development, is the originator of many inventions, and holds international patents ranging from climbing equipment and bicycle gears to trading systems and electronic payment systems."
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#28Re: Training Rats as Traders
#29Awesome! Spoiler alert, predicting a self aware system like the stock market not so much possible in the long run. But profiting from the lucky guesses of rodents in the short term - possible and awesome. (As long as it's not your money on the line.)
> "predicting a self aware system like the stock market"
Please elaborate on why you think the stock market is self-aware!
Re: Training Rats as Traders
#30Awesome! Spoiler alert, predicting a self aware system like the stock market not so much possible in the long run. But profiting from the lucky guesses of rodents in the short term - possible and awesome. (As long as it's not your money on the line.)
> "predicting a self aware system like the stock market" Please elaborate on why you think the stock market is self-aware!
He saw the movie Pi.