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Comment by aswegs8

16 days ago

Given that LLMs can't even finish Pokemon Red, how would you expect they are able to trade futures?

(Unless you're a marketer) It makes a lot more sense to build a benchmark before the capabilities are there.

Because trading is mainly number-based, unlike Pokemon Red?

  • I'll bite: What part of the game, which is encoded entirely by a finite set of numbers, takes input as numbers, provides output as numbers, and is processed by a CPU that acts in a discrete digital space, cannot be represented by numbers?

    • The joy the player experiences in playing the game and becoming the best Pokemon Trainer :)

Computers managed to beat the world's best humans at chess long before they managed how learn how to walk. What's easy and hard for humans isn't necessarily a good guide to what's easy or hard for a computer.

(And I'm fairly sure it would be pretty easy to build a system that uses an LLM and a few other small components to beat Pokemon Red. The experiment you are talking about is deliberately hobbled by using a stock LLM without any such tools to make the whole thing entertaining. But when you are trading, you'd want to give your LLM as much help as possible.)

i always felt that emotions, instincts, fear, greed, courage, pain are elements of a self-aware conscious loop system that can't be replicated accurately in a digital system and that a seasoned successful traders realize and utilize that the activity is largely is a psychological one. I'm not talking about neutral plays where you can absorb market fluctuations in the short term to extract 1~2% a week but directional trades that almost all traders play (regardless of how what exotic option strategies they are employing).

also the other curious nature of the markets is its ability to destroy any persistent trading system by reverting to its core stochastic properties and its constant ebb and flow from stability to instability that crescendos into systematic instability that rewrite the rules all over again.

ive tried all sorts of ways to do this and without being a large institution and being able to absorb the noise for neutral or legal quasi insider trading via proximity, for the average joe the emotional/psychological hardness you need to survive and be in the <1% of traders is simply too much, its not unlike any other sports or arts, many dream the dream but only few get interviewed and written about.

rather i think to myself the best trade is the simplest one: buy shares or invest in a business with money or time (strongly recommend against using this unless you have no other means) and sell it at a higher price or maintain a long term DCF from a business you own as leverage/collateral to arbitrage whatever rate your central bank sets on assets in demand or will be in demand.

to me its clear where LLM fits and doesn't but ultimately it cannot, will not, must not replace your own agency.