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Comment by whazor

5 hours ago

It would be more interesting to compare trading agents with index tracking ETFs. The better version of an ETF could maybe be a model where you zoom in on the companies and add/remove to your portfolio on the company related news, but keeping a broader portfolio.

Maybe agentic trading still performs worse than ETFs. But alternatively, if it were meaningfully better then it would be okay to opensource, similarly how ETFs are publishing their portfolios.

The issue at stake is that financial markets are order-2 chaotic system, i.e. acting on them can change their outcome.

Put simply, if you open source your magic recipe, the behavioral change will affect the prices and you recipe will not work anymore.

I think this might work.

When I started working no the trading agent I mentioned above I wanted to see if it can be just a better investor over the long run. The intention was not to do high-frequency trading. As you can see most of the days it is not taking any actions. The losses where down to mistakenly setting the stop losses too close to the top. If it wasn't so careful it might have made some money tbf.

My gut feeling is that AI agents will be able to manage a long-term portfolio much better than a human. Though it is just a gut feeling.

  • Lmao, you llm people have some crazy delusions. You realize markets are zero sum, and if you're using a public model that everyone else also has access too, you llm psychos will destory eachothers "agentic" edge (not that there ever was one). Not to mention all the other obvious flaws with llms, lime having an effective memory of ~200k words and no ability to judge whats actually going on in the real world.

    • The 'edge' is holding the investments over long periods of times. Agents are merely automating the portfolio managing part for lower costs.

    • You really have no idea what you are talking about.

      I have been running an intermittent experiment with a multi agent "investment firm" for over a year now across model releases.

      They certainly can beat indexes, BUT.. the model families have some biases that you have to design around. The stop loss that bit the parent is certainly one. The models like to create rules. Often rules, one of those is making all kinds of exit conditions.

      Another big one from my experience is the bias to inaction in a scenario with risk. This means a model without structure around it will bias to keeping too much cash.

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