Live data from Hacker News

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

aitradearena.com

71–80 of 319 posts

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

#71
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know very little about how the environment where they run these models look, but surely they have access to different tools like vector embeddings with more current data on various topics?

you can (via the api, or to a lesser degree through the setting in the web client) determine what tools if any a model can use

with the exception that it doesn't seem possible to fully disable this for grok 4

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

#72
>Each model gets access to market data, news APIs, company financials...

The article is very very vague on their methodology (unless I missed it somewhere else?). All I read was, "we gave AI access to market data and forced it to make trades". How often did these models run? Once a day? In a loop continuously? Did it have access to indicators (such as RSI)? Could it do arbitrary calculations with raw data? Etc...

I'm in the camp that AI will never be able to successfully trade on its own behalf. I know a couple of successful traders (and many unsuccessful!), and it took them years of learning and understanding before breaking even. I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the successful and non-successful. Some sort of subconscious knowledge from staring at charts all day? A level of intuition? Regardless, it's more than just market data and news.

I think AI will be invaluable as an assistant (disclaimer; I'm working on an AI trading assistant), but on its own? Never. Some things simply simply can't be solved with AI and I think this is one of them. I'm open to being wrong, but nothing has convinced me otherwise.

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

#73
So.. I have been using an LLM to make 30 day buy and hold portfolios. And the results are "ok". (Like 8% vs 6% for the S&P 500 over the last 90 days)

What you ask the model to do is super important. Just like writing or coding.. the default "behavior" is likely to be "average".. you need to very careful of what you are asking for.

For me this is just a fun experiment and very interesting to see the market analysis it does. I started with o3 and now I'm using 5.1 Thinking (set to max).

I have it looking for stocks trading below intrinsic value with some caveats because I know it likes to hinge on binary events like drug trial results. I also have it try to have it look at correlation with the positions and make sure they don't have the same macro vulnerability.

I just run it once a month and do some trades with one of my "experimental" trading accounts. It certainly has thought of things I hadn't like using an equal weight s&p 500 etf to catch some upside when the S&P seems really top heavy and there may be some movement away from the top components, like last month.

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

#74
Back when I was in university we used statistical techniques similar to what LLMs use to predict the stock market. It's not a surprise that LLMs would do well over this time period. The problem is that when the market turns and bucks trends they don't do so well, you need to intervene.

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

#76

> We were cautious to only run after each model’s training cutoff dates for the LLM models Grok is constantly training and/or it has access to websearch internally. You cannot backtest LLMs. You can only "live" test them going forward.

Via api you can turn off websearch internally. We provided all the models with their own custom tools that only provided data up to the date of the backtest.

But Grok is internally training on Tweets etc. continuously.

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

#77

OP here. We realized there are a ton of limitations with backtest and paper money but still wanted to do this experiment and share the results. By no means is this statistically significant on whether or not these models can beat the market in the long term. But wanted to give everyone a way to see how these models think about and interact with the financial markets.

[deleted]

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

#79

So.. I have been using an LLM to make 30 day buy and hold portfolios. And the results are "ok". (Like 8% vs 6% for the S&P 500 over the last 90 days) What you ask the model to do is super important. Just like writing or coding.. the default "behavior" is likely to be "average".. you need to very careful of what you are asking for. For me this is just a fun experiment and very interesting to see the market analysis it…

I look for issues with a recent double bottom and high insider buy activity. I've found this to be a highly reliable set of signals.

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

#80
post #10

There's also this thing going on right now: https://nof1.ai/leaderboard Results are... underwhelming. All the AIs are focused on daytrading Mag7 stocks; almost all have lost money with gusto.

If I'm understanding this website correctly, these models can only trade in a handful of tech stocks along with the XYZ100 hyperliquid coin?
Post reply on HN