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

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

#201

Post by tim333 »

stouset wrote: post #153
chris_st wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will have trained your model on market patterns that might not be in place anymore My working definition of technical analysis [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis

I am frankly astonished at the number of otherwise-intelligent people who actually seem to believe in this stuff. One of the worst possible things to do in a competitive market is to trade by some publicly-available formulaic strategy. It’s like announcing your rock-paper-scissors move to your opponent in advance.

A couple of subtleties in that. Rather than rock paper scissors with three options, there are hundreds of technical strategies out there so you may still be doing something unusual. Secondly the mass of the public are kind of following a technical strategy of just buy index funds because the index has gone up the past. Which is ignoring the fundamental issue of whether stocks decent value for money at the moment.

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

#202

Post by arisAlexis »

IgorPartola wrote: post #34
bcrosby95 wrote: post #12

> 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…

You believe in the tech sector because technology always goes well and it's what humans strive to achieve, not because it has done well recently. It has always.

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

#203

Post by gizajob »

culi wrote: post #125
bcrosby95 wrote: post #12

> 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'd like to see this study replicated during a bear market

Yeah the timeframe is crucial here. The experiment began as Trump launched his tariff tweets which caused a huge downward correction and then a large uptrend. Buying almost anything tech at the start of this would have made money.

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

#204

Post by chasing0entropy »

taneq wrote: post #157
IgorPartola wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always fun (in a broad sense of that word) when I make a comment on an industry I know nothing about and somehow stumble onto a thing that not only has a name but also research. I am sure there is a German word for that feel of discovering something that countless others have already discovered.

Any time I invent a cool thing, I go and try and find it online. Usually it's already an established product, which totally validates my feeling that the thing I invented is cool and would be a good product. :D Occasionally it's (as far as I can tell) a legitimately new 'wow that's obvious' style thing and I consider prototyping it. :)

What have you prototyped recently? Anything you have released to market? I'm in the same general area by am teetering on actually launching products wouldn't mind connecting with a like minded e gineer

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

#205

Post by morgengold »

Am I right that you let LLMs decide for themselves what to read into their input data (like market data, news APIs, company financials)? While this is worth testing, I think it would be more interesting to give them patterns to look for. I played around with using them for technical analysis and let them make the associations with past stock performances. They can even differentiate on what worked in the last 5 years, what in the last year, in the last 3 month etc. This way they can pick up (hopefully) changes in market behavior. Generally the main strength of this approach is to use their pattern recognition capability and also take out the human factor (emotions) for trading decitions.

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

#206

Post by Libidinalecon »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #45
etchalon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like they measured anything. They just confirmed that tech stocks in the US did pretty well.

They measured the investment facility of all those LLMs. That's pretty much what the title says. And they had dramatically different outcomes. So that tells me something.

It shows nothing. This is a bullshit stunt that should be obvious to anyone who has placed a few trades.

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

#208

Post by this_user »

chroma205 wrote: post #164
naet wrote: post #62

I used to work for a brokerage API geared at algorithmic traders and in my experience anecdotal experience many strategies seem to work well when back-tested on paper but for various reasons can end up flopping when actually executed in the real market. Even testing a strategy in real time paper trading can end up differently than testing on the actual market where other parties are also viewing your trades and makin…

>but for various reasons can end up flopping when actually executed in the real market. 1. Your order can legally be “front run” by the lead or designated market maker who receives priority trade matching, bypassing the normal FIFO queue. Not all exchanges do this. 2. Market impact. Other participants will cancel their order, or increase their order size, based on your new order. And yes, the algos do care about your…

If you actually were in the industry, you would know that most retail traders don't fail, because they lose a tick here or there on execution, they fail, because their strategies have no edge in the first place.

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

#209

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #34
bcrosby95 wrote: post #12

> 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…

> a hedge fund can beat the market for 2-4 years but at 10 years and up their chances of beating the market go to very close

In that case the winning strategy would be to switch hedge funds every 3 years.

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