Every era has it's wild-eyed futurists. In 1970 it was Alvin Toffler... today it's Kurzweil. Has anybody bothered to check Alvin's 1970 "Future Shock" predictions? In addition... very importantly... We are in an era where Talk Radio is dominated by completely ridiculous UFO and Conspiracy shows... So clearly millions of people will believe almost anything... And the critical thinking faculties of the average 21st century man have been COMPRIMISED and NUMBED. Also... very importantly... As a Computer Science graduate (1982)... I have been watching the Artificial Intelligence field for 25 years... And there is no greater example... Of Wild Predictions leading to minimal real-life advances... than in the AI field. Also... Firms like DE Shaw where not mining esoteric patterns with esoteric nets... But applying standard quantitative techniques in an very OPTIMAL ways... And finding and exploiting ** garden variety ** market inefficiencies. Since I am totally skeptical of anything Kurtzweil says on principle... And he certainly has more to learn about running a hedge fund than the Great Ones have forgotten... I would tend to just IGNORE him (I do have his book). Academics and others... always fall flat on their face when up against Market Pros. One word: hubris As for the ACTUAL Fund Managers applying advanced techniques... They are well worth studying closely.
If someone invents a forecasting system that is 100% correct and the general public get hold of it then that is the end of the market as everyone will know which way its going and act accordingly. Might lead to a resurgence of horse racing or something.
just returned from a morning SBUX run. http://www.conservativecapital.com/ was wrirren on every stall wall.
pfft thats not the future of the financial markets......noobs. the real future was mentioned in the article though , nanobots. once that technology advances to the point these nanobots can control brain functions remotely they can be seeded into the right people and on que cause decisions to be made in unison amoung millions of individuals to send a particular market in a particular direction.
Directed at the Times article... This kind of nonsense is sign of a market top. Once again, I agree with HoundDogOne's points. Did anyone even look at Kurzweil's web site (www.fatkat.com)? It refers to Rentec as a "relatively small fund". come on!
I'm working on a new numbering system. It would specifically be used for forecasting, and not for counting the buttons on your jacket etc. I would tell you guys all about it but I haven't invented it yet - so maybe next year or sometime.
may have been posted somewhere already but i didn't see it. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5-2497900,00.html The Times December 11, 2006 Computers that digest the news to change trading Dan Sabbagh, Media Editor Reuters 'tags' its own articles Is the City trader obsolescent? Computers that read news stories and use the information gleaned as a basis for trading will become widespread over the next five years, Reuters said yesterday. The information provider will make available today a tagged version of its news feed â which provides 8,000 news stories a day â to make them easier for computer-based trading systems to digest. It describes the effort as generating âmachine-readable newsâ. Peter Moss, the head of Reuters Enterprise Solutions,said: âIn three to five years a much more sophisticated set of algorithmic trading will emerge, based on information as well as market data.â Today about 60 per cent of trading in the United States is conducted by computer; in London the proportion is estimated to be 40 per cent. But the trading patterns used by algorithmic systems are based principally on price and volume data, although the situation is changing fast. Computers reading news â in effect, trying to simulate human judgment â signals the beginning of the end for the brash City trader. It heralds an era in which human intervention in trading systems will be dominated by programming and monitoring computers. To help banks and hedge funds to generate their own trading models, Reuters is also making available a news and price archive dating to January 2003. That is intended to help to develop and test trading models based on historic information. Massive amounts of data are involved: the archive will include nearly 12 million news items and pricing information is updated up to 23,000 times a second, which includes data obtained from 258 exhanges and markets around the world. Richard Brown, of the companyâs machine-readable news programme, said that such systems will help computers to gauge how far the market will react to an earnings miss â but may also help to forecast an economic or political surprise by detecting a âflurry of news storiesâ before the crucial moment. Initially, Reuters is supplying only its own news stories and it is asking its own journalists to help to tag the stories with five to ten key items of information. Through licensing agreements, the company could supply news stories from newspapers and other outlets. However, the information provider believes that its clients will develop tagging systems of their own. âThis is a stealth technology,â Mr Brown said, noting that many of the companyâs clients refuse to disclose how they hope to use the data. Reuters expects that computers will be able to weight news stories based on the language used to evaluate how tenatative they are â and check the byline to establish whether it has been put together by a specialist in the subject in question.
As I said before, all the more reason to operate below the institutional liquidity threshold or trade stocks controlled by a good old fashioned manipulator who mops up the float and then ramps it up and dumps it on the suckers the good old fashioned way. Won't be long before he/management's learn how to manipulate the keywords in their press releases..................but then again, as Livermore said, the headlines are for suckers.