[davnn]

Interesting idea. Not that crowd driven investment algorithms are new, but I have not seen a machine learning one before.

What really ennoys me about this kind of businesses is that they pay tiny prices and shut the competitions once they have found what they were looking for, however Numerai might be completely different in that regard and I wish them the best!

Btw: The article kind of conveys the feeling as if machine learning is something new to the hedge fund business and that's absolutely not the case. There are already smart people working on really complex algorithms since a couple of years now.

[dharmon]

Even more than "a couple of years". About 15 years ago I worked at a day trading firm and we were writing models that used machine learning. At the time we thought of it more as "computational statistics", but its basically what is called ML now and taught in ML courses (although we didn't use Neural Nets).

BTW, even in 2001 we were far from the first to do this.

[T-A]

Depending on where you draw the line between statistics and machine learning, it could be argued to have originated with Bachelier's thesis in 1900 [1], or Thorp's adaptation of Kelly's work first to gambling and then to finance in the early 60s (he may have been first to use computers for this kind of thing) [2] or maybe with James Simons' Renaissance Technologies in the early 80s [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bachelier

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

[hkmurakami]

Regarding Rentec, the only decent book on their history has been in "The Quants". Are there any others?

https://www.amazon.com/Quants-Whizzes-Conquered-Street-Destr...

[TrickedOut]

Almost everything I see on neural nets are related to either image processing or text processing. Rarely time series or traditional DB type data -- is there a classic hello-world example or common demonstration of how neural nets are applied onto tabular data common in financial markets?

[richard_craib]

Every other machine learning competition I've seen is kind of one-off in nature. But stock market data is being generated all the time so I think there will always be new strategies to learn on Numerai.

[shostack]

Can you clarify on the "pay tiny prices and shut the competitions once they have found what they were looking for" comment? Has this happened before? Is there anything here that makes it seem like this wouldn't be the case here?

[ikeboy]

They only require you to give them predictions, not a model. So you can reuse the same model over and over if it works, and they won't be able to cut you out, if that's what you're asking.

[shostack]

That was part of what I was asking. The other part was around whether there have been instances of firms cutting people out like you described.

[thedlade]

Exactly, machine learning has already been applied in a number of Wall Street firms for some time now