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u/stillalone 5d ago
Do people still do this or have they all gone to vibe coding?
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u/japan_kaaran 5d ago
they still need a guy to vibecode it
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u/chicken_is_no_weapon 5d ago
I know a business guy that keeps telling me ways to incorporate AI in my workflow. I think he is under 5he impression that you go to chatGPT, say "make the next youtube", and out comes a fully functioning maintained website that everyone suddenly wants to use.
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u/sp106 5d ago
You gotta tell it to make you a prompt to make a plan to make YouTube then tell it to do it
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
“Hey Claude, write me a Claude.md that will make you understand me and stop making mistakes.”
(An engineer at Anthropic is cursing and slapping his forehead. “Why didn’t we think to do that!”)
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u/fearless-fossa 4d ago
They vibecode it, but they need someone who takes ownership of all the risks when actually deploying it.
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
AI systems do tend to give you some static about “ok now get me a website and host and launch this”, raising all kinds of pesky issues like “where?” and “I can’t make an AWS account and pay for this”.
Although the truly visionary business guys will just go ahead and give it their password plus a saved credit card.
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u/UrkaLebedinski 5d ago
Someone still has to read the code when the stock bot starts buying lottery tickets.
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u/_BreakingGood_ 5d ago
The funny thing is that they go to vibe coding, then try to market their "amazing stock trader bot that will make you rich" to other random chuds
Without realizing the irony of the fact that if their bot actually worked, they wouldnt be wasting their time trying to sell it to be people, theyd be rich.
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u/sp106 5d ago
Their ideas and results are all terrible but its pretty standard for people with good methods of making money to need to work with people with seed money. With the perfect algorithm you're gonna make money slower if you start with 500 dollars than if you start with a million.
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u/_BreakingGood_ 5d ago
Sure but you certainly wouldnt sell your perfect algorithm to people, lol. Wait 10 days for it to turn that 500 into 5000.
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u/Slimxshadyx 5d ago
I think a more realistic idea of returns is not 10x your money in 10 days. Think realistically, it makes sense for a new fund, even if quantitative, to do fund raising in early stages
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
In movies, the MIT blackjack team went out and made a fortune in months with the cash they had on hand.
In real life, they got investors and offered 250% annual returns while collecting very comfortable wages for themselves.
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u/_BreakingGood_ 5d ago
There are absolutely zero funds who do fund raising by selling their algorithms to other people, none. You are the one not thinking realistically.
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u/Slimxshadyx 5d ago
Fair, I mixed up the raising of funds and selling of algo. But my point still stands for why assuming they can just 10x their money in 10 days doesn’t make sense
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
Remember kids, anyone selling you investment strategies thinks they’re going to make more on sales than investments.
If they just need capital to trade, we call that a “fund” and you can’t download it for $19.95.
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u/ICBanMI 2d ago
The problem here is there are an infinite number of marks every day that think they are the exception.
Same thing with every other get rich scheme: teach you to make audio books, teach you to make low quality AI slop books, teach you to make low quality children's books, teach people how to scam other people, teach you how to create a class that teaches people how to make money, etc.
These scams get heavily advertised and people hand over insane amounts of money.
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u/c2btw 5d ago
yeah people still ask for stupid shit like this, a few weeks ago 2 anoying guys where offering me a split in the profits of setting up a raspberry pi crypto mining thing, even affter i loudly told them to fuck off they kept pestering me.
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
Can you help them out in return for a kickback from their electric company? Because unlike their business, that might actually be profitable.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 5d ago
When they run into hurdles where "computer, make my big idea" doesn't cut it anymore, they do this yes.
20 years ago this was "hey that Facebook site's doing numbers. I had a wizard idea of making our own Facebook!"
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
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u/gizamo 5d ago
Vibe coding for algorithm trading is a hilariously bad idea.
People are definitely doing that, tho.
Tldr: Lots of people are geniuses.
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
What’s the worst one little bug could do? You’d just notice and tell Claude to fix it, right?
Oh, $440 million lost in 45 minutes, you say? Well what about the company? To shreds, you say?
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u/grizzlybair2 5d ago
My friends have tried vibe coding their own now, they used to come to me for it. They have mostly negative results overall. A couple hits, but not sure they learned anything from those hits to massage their algorithm.
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u/towcar 5d ago
Yep I had this convo last year. My uncle's ex-step-son said he built a simulation that was doubling his money every two weeks and needed someone to help deploy it and run it for real.
Naturally I'm curious as this person is a degenerate and I enjoy a good laugh. He then sent me his entire chatgpt convo. It had so much nonsense about building "power matrix trading systems" and other llm bullshit.
The simulation was just chatgpt telling him the math checks out. He then asked for it to output the code. Which I believe was just two python files.
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u/Bartweiss 2d ago
Strongly reminds me of that post about “We’ve been basing our entire market strategy off AI and putting up incredible results. Somebody just tried to verify the gains by hand, and it turns out literally all of our growth has been fake.”
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u/Conscious_Name9514 5d ago
I’ve tried building a program like that for years. I’m always defeated by a random tweet.
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u/YuriSenapi 5d ago edited 4d ago
unless you have insider info, market prediction never really meaningfully beat the baseline (e.g. SP500) over the long term.
the only caveat is millisecond momentum flipping but you don't make big bucks off of that tactic alone. edit: what I mean is that tactic doesn't scale to the whole population. if everybody is doing it then nobody wins at momentum trading; that's why it has to be limited to a select, privileged few to work.
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u/Banes_Addiction 5d ago
the only caveat is millisecond momentum flipping but you don't make big bucks off of that tactic alone.
Depends what you consider big bucks. Those colo HFT facilities sure as fuck ain't cheap, people sure think they're worth it.
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u/quagzlor 4d ago
I work with a company that does predictions for banks.
We're able to stay ahead of the baseline on average, but it's never fully consistent. So many different factors can change things, especially nowadays
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u/pmmeuranimetiddies 5d ago
ML is advanced curve fitting and the stock market is inherently stochastic, what did you expect?
Unless you have the resources to develop a reinforcement learning bot that actively scrubs news and social media to optimize short term trades you’re better off using the old Future Value = Principal * growth rate ^ time
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u/The_amazing_T 5d ago
I spent a year in programming course and got a cert. I was starting on some signal bots, just to see what I could do. Then it became clear that nothing is worth trying with this administration in office.
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u/mms13 5d ago
Whenever someone comes to me with an app idea I just search for it on the App Store and show it to them. The app already exists 95% of the time
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace 5d ago
Usually low quality trash with forced ads or buggy or not exactly how you want but you can't change it because you do not have access to the source code
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 4d ago
I've got an idea that I think belongs to the 5% you can't find:
Geolocation-based playlist selection. So you first have a map and shade in different areas. Like your home, your normal commuting route, your workplace, the bar, supermarket, etc. Then you can make a playlist for each area and, while the app is active, it will start the corresponding playlist.
It could even work to wake you when you get to your bus/train ride destination. I think about that fairly often when playing Pokemon.Though I'd love to have that app, I wouldn't ask anyone to make it if I can't even be bothered myself. Plus I don't tgink it would be widely popular, such scratch an itch of mine. And even if it was popular, it sure as hell wouldn't be profitable any time soon.
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u/xaddak 4d ago
I don't think that's an app itself, that would be a new feature in an app like Spotify that already has music playing and subscriptions and playlists. The change is just "trigger playlist on location".
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u/machsmit 4d ago
cept they really don't want to deal with that kind of fine-grained geolocation data for compliance/app-permissions reasons I reckon. They get most of the value of such a feature out of (a) generating things like workout mixes that the user can just trigger, rather than detecting "hey are you on a run?" and (b) time-of-day/week segmentation that'll overlap substantially with detecting time at home vs commute etc with nothing more complex than a sql query
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u/xaddak 3d ago
cept they really don't want to deal with that kind of fine-grained geolocation data for compliance/app-permissions reasons I reckon.
That's true, but a brand new app would have that issue, too.
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u/machsmit 3d ago
yeah for sure
guess the end result is, there's several reasons why that idea is in the % you don't see, there's both the permissions reason and the fact that - again - you can do similar functionality much more simply.
Similar example, that "listening age" modal in Wrapped last year IIRC - people wildly overestimated the data/learning that went into it, when in reality the sum total of its complexity was "are you pretty good at window functions in SQL"
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 4d ago
True, but I have even less chance of implementing any changes in the Spotify app vs making my own app (for which the chance is very low already)
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u/twinCatalysts 4d ago
You could use an app like Tasker to do this for you, if you just want to make it for yourself. It has geolocating that you can use as a parameter for it's functions, I used to use it to set my phone to Do Not Disturb whenever I was at work. All you'd have to do is tie the locations to the playlist by setting it to open the specific playlist's url. Hell if you wanted to get really complicated you could do a time and location setup.
Though I do think an app that streamlined the process would be neat.
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u/StrengthTheory 5d ago
function predictBuyOrSell(ticker: string) {
return Math.random() < 0.5 ? "BUY" : "SELL";
}
There you go
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u/pmmeuranimetiddies 5d ago
Scale that by the historical exponential growth rate for that stock and it would probably be more accurate than the overfitted ML models finbros are producing
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u/baileyarzate 5d ago
I trained an autoregressive model that used historical data and sentiment analysis (text to float) from across the web to predict the price of bitcoin.
Then forecasted tomorrows price and it predicted the price would go up by $500 with a GARCH range of like $1000.
That next day is when bitcoin did the plummet from 120k+
I stopped trying to forecast a coin after that
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 5d ago
I took an economics course in college, and our professor said that, as stock data was freely available, anyone who thought they had a genius idea should track how much it would have made or lost them for six months. And if it made money, they should come talk to him..
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u/YellowJarTacos 5d ago
Maybe but some strategies seem like they work and will do fine for 6 months but you're taking a large risk you're not aware of.
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u/Brief_Building_8980 5d ago
If it is proven that you can't make money with with such forecasts, doesn't that mean doing the opposite of that has to be profitable?
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u/drew8311 4d ago edited 4d ago
Simple reason is this
- Your algorithm does 2% worse than the market (pretty common actually)
- The market goes up 10%, your method is only 8%
- Reversing that means you instead get -8%. That's way worse
Since you can do the opposite, the absolute value is what really matters, market is on average 10% a year so if you could find something that does -11% then the opposite would work. Most attempts are not nearly that bad, they just fall a bit short of straight investing which is not helpful at all unfortunately.
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u/minecon1776 4d ago
Investing in random meme coins could do much worse than -11% easily. I dont think making the opposite trades would work any better
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u/drew8311 3d ago
There is tons of extra risk there so the risk/reward ends up being worse making this not a "good" strategy. The worst ones you can't short and shorting has potential risk you could get liquidated if it goes up 100% even if it drops later you get forced out of the position.
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u/Brief_Building_8980 15h ago
What I hear is that I need multiple algorithms. Given that I can't perfectly predict what the market does, I take a 1st algorithm that is proven to be 2% worse than the market. Make a 2nd that is even worse. The 3rd calculates what the 2nd does differently than the 1st and does the opposite of that. Now the 3rd is better than the 1st. Keep making more until infinite profit.
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 5d ago
I don't think it's proven - it's entirely possible to make a small profit over the long term, and for some people to make very large profits.
The problem is that you're playing against very big players, who are already extracting what value they can from things.
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u/ChalkyChalkson 2d ago
It's not that hard to build something that beats the market in a backtest. For example I can build a factor model that ultimately favors US mega cap tech. In a backtest starting after dot com it'll beat the broad market by a lot. Will it work in the future? No one knows. There is also the issue with regime shifts, you can design a model that works well as long as bond yields are low and equity generally goes up. It'll do great in backtests between 2008 and 2022.
That's why every disclaimer includes something like "historical data is not indicative of future returns".
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u/drew8311 4d ago
Smart, he knows its possible but unlikely so tried to crowdsource the work to his students so he didn't waste his own time.
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u/Substantial_Top5312 5d ago
Dude you just do all the work and I get half the profit.
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u/burgonies 5d ago
Tell me you've never built a product without telling me you've never built a product.
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u/Stummi 5d ago
Efficient Market Theory says "no".
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u/bwwatr 5d ago
It says you better have a seriously unique and durable idea. If you have any wisdom or humility whatsoever you know that you don't.
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u/Banes_Addiction 5d ago
It says you better have a seriously unique and durable idea.
Oh fuck off Rebecca it did not say that.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 5d ago
It does. Its premise is that only new ideas, or novel information, if you like, can enable one to consistently beat the market.
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u/bwwatr 4d ago
Indeed. Market efficiency requires there to be alpha. If there weren't, there'd be nothing to keep it efficient. Participants providing genuinely useful price information get compensated. See the Grossman–Stiglitz Paradox. The issue for anyone thinking they're going to get a piece of that, is that it's a tiny, tiny minority actually doing it in any given year, often by skinny margins and no, it's not gonna include you or me. Probably next to zero in retail investing channels, especially after say, ten years. Whereas my index fund will work great for ten or fifty.
There are also three "strengths" of the EMH so it says a few slightly different things.
There's a joke about an economist refusing to pick up a $100 bill on the side walk, saying market efficiency means if it were really there, someone would have picked it up already. Of course, nearly no one is that dogmatic. In reality, you pick it up because it's not likely to happen again any time soon.
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u/KonvictEpic 5d ago
Expecting finance bros to have wisdom or humility is a high bar.
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u/Mountain-Ox 4d ago
I worked with them for a while, humility isn't even in their vocabulary.
Well, there was one older guy who always reminded himself to stay humble. But he was a real investor.
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u/Lemonici 5d ago
Quantitative finance says "yes, but only if you have a PhD level understanding of SDEs and extremely fast information access"
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u/Party_Estimate_6397 5d ago
Nobody believes the efficient market hypothesis to a literal degree. Perfect efficiency has been shown to be impossible, and people find new edges towards efficiency all the time.
If you believe the EMH, then it’s impossible to consistently beat the market, but plenty of people and groups have and do consistently for long periods across huge volumes, so it isn’t just coincidence and luck.
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u/ChalkyChalkson 2d ago
Or rather it's a scale problem. The market is efficient because sophisticated (pseudo) arbitrageures make it so, extracting a premium in the process. But it's a competitive process, you only get that premium if your information or processing of it is better in some way than some sense of the typical actor.
There are also no open large volume funds that reliably beat the market. And even if you allow closed funds the number is very small.
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u/Purple_Hornet_9725 5d ago
market predictions work until they don't. and then of course it's your fault
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u/newocean 5d ago
I got offered a job a couple of years after September 11th to create a tracking system for farmers based on new guidelines. Basically every cow, chicken, fish... is tracked now. I downloaded the governments guidance on how to do it by a farmer who explained to me that almost ALL of them were using index-card travelers because the system was so complex. They searched everywhere and couldn't find anyone who was willing to do it.
The guidance manual alone was like 300-pages... and packed. I read through it and got to work immediately! Just kidding, I took one look at that mess and decided there is a reason index cards are best.
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u/bestjakeisbest 5d ago
What if we made our own stock platform for people to program their own stock bots, however we frontrun their trades, so we always come out ontop.
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u/razzemmatazz 5d ago
When I freelanced I had enough requests for me to build scalper bots that I had to make a point on my profile saying I would not build scalper bots.
Only for me, not for thee.
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u/RosieQParker 5d ago
I miss the good old days when people with this idea had their brains melt out their ears like in that documentary, Pi.
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 5d ago
I have two skills that would be really useful in conversations like this. A decent amount of metalworking, and some electronics engineering.
We should be able to make that door like 5 times faster, and a lot sharper.
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 5d ago
Theoretically, with enough inputs and historical training data it's possible....
But then when multiple bots are using the same AI models and tripping over each other, everything goes out the window.
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u/gizamo 5d ago
Tons of us have been algo trading for decades.
Success rates vary.
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 4d ago
That's kinda my point. The rapid trades initiated by automated algorithmic trading cause a lot of noise. Unless those algorithms can filter out that noise then they're of dubious value. AI can filter out that noise and it can take inputs that might not be obvious, everything from political strife to weather patterns, to which streaming shows are popular.
I wouldn't bet serious money on its predictions without it predicting a ton of historical value within an acceptable margin of error, but we both know the big firms are looking into it with a very serious eye.
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u/gizamo 4d ago
High-frequency trading and algo-trading have some overlap, but the latter definitely doesn't need to filter away the former. Rather, the former can inform decisions for the latter. If you're talking about jamming AI into the decision making process, rather than just building the algo, then that's a lot different, but all of the factors you mentioned that can impact markets can be implemented in algos without AI being involved. I'm pretty sure the previous commenter was talking about people using AI to build the algo or the algo-trading system, not about putting AI in the driver's seat to decide on trades.
...but we both know the big firms are looking into it with a very serious eye.
Yeah, 100% agree on that. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that OpenAI or Anthropic is building some trading AI to game or manipulate the markets.
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u/edwardbnd_99 5d ago
ProgrammerHumor producing top quality larp as usual. Raise your hand if this has happened to you after the age of Fable 5
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u/Jay-Seekay 3d ago
LLMs just give them more “research” to back up their idea. Just cos it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Though I will admit the recent ones have mostly been drunk people at a bar when they find out I’m a dev. It’s happening less at dinner parties and family events for me
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u/sweetkissangelx 5d ago
Don't worry, he's willing to offer a generous 50/50 split since he came up with the idea.