[mathgenius]

> 100 people try to develop a profitable trading algorithm....

It's much worse than this with machine learning approaches. Imagine a million people trying to find a profitable algo, all on your laptop, and you are choosing the best one out of all of those.

If you are used to pen-and-paper trading strategies, or even excel spreadsheets, machine learning is just a completely different level to this. And probably how it works will be unintelligible to anyone. I don't even see how someone can write a business plan based on this.

[selectron]

The type of approach used has limited effect on survivorship bias, what matters is the number of people employing different approaches and the size of the effect. So if machine learning approaches can produce real results, the data will show this. Survivorship bias is real, but it is not the full story.