[solidasparagus]

> "good" at trading don't publish papers

I think this is a little unfair. I've seen high-quality papers from phD students who then get hired by financial firms and were apparently very successful. Every good real-world AI system requires both good engineering and good science and it's disingenuous to suggest that all science that isn't actively being applied yet is BS.

[traK6Dcm]

I don't claim that all the science that isn't actively being applied yet is BS, but this kind of science typically happens within trading firms, tested on real-world data, and is not being published on arXiv.

As a side note, what this specific paper here did is neither novel not innovative, so it's very fair to criticize it. A3C is 4 years old, and they just take it and run it on some data. It's like downloading a convnet and running it on MNIST. There have been hundreds of papers on RL + Trading. I see them in my arXiv emails every other day and they all do the same thing.

[solidasparagus]

I was referring to these statements:

> This paper, just like pretty much any academic paper on the subject, ends with a backtest on historical data, not a real system

> Whenever you see a paper ending with a backtest you can already assume it's BS.

[fakedang]

I guess he was referring to the fact that though the people may be great, their published content in that one paper need not be so.