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Posted by u/sunnynagra 8 months ago
Show HN: Watch 3 AIs compete in real-time stock tradingtrading.snagra.com...
A live dashboard where you can watch GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini analyze market data and make daily stock trades with real money. Each AI explains its reasoning, and you can compare their different approaches to the same data.

Link: https://trading.snagra.com?utm_source=hn (no signup required)

What you can try right now: - Watch live trades from GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini - Read each AI's full analysis and reasoning - Compare their different interpretations of the same market data - Track their real-time performance and win rates - View historical trades and performance metrics

Built this over the holidays to study how different AI models approach financial decisions. Each morning at 9:30 AM EST, the AIs analyze market data and make real trades with $5 stakes.

Technical Implementation: - Next.js frontend with real-time updates - Node.js/Lambda backend for AI processing - PostgreSQL for trade tracking - Alpaca API for automated trading - Consistent prompts for all models

Data Flow: 1. Daily market analysis (9:30 AM EST) 2. Each AI gets identical inputs: - Financial headlines - Market summaries - Technical indicators - Earnings reports 3. AIs provide: - Stock picks with reasoning - Entry/exit conditions - Risk assessment 4. Automated trade execution

Note: This is an experiment in AI behavior, not investment advice. The goal is to study how different LLMs interpret financial data and make decisions with real consequences.

I'll be around to answer questions about the implementation.

rixed · 8 months ago
> The goal is to study how different LLMs interpret financial data and make decisions with real consequences.

I don't really buy this. If the goal was to study how different LLMs interpret financial data there would be no use for actual trades, since their interpretation cannot be influenced by the fact that the trading orders are passed for real.

I believe the goal is to see if AI can do better than rats [0]. There is no shame in that.

[0]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12/

Retr0id · 8 months ago
Real trades have transaction fees, latency, slippage, etc. - you can simulate all this, but it's hard to know if it's being simulated correctly or not.

> their interpretation cannot be influenced by the fact that the trading orders are passed for real

It's not going to make much difference with $5 trades, but the impact on the market is non-zero.

WalterBright · 8 months ago
> fees, latency, slippage

Whenever I trade, I somehow always get an adverse price. I figure it's the "no fee" brokerage chiseling a bit off for themselves. I compensate by being a buy and hold hold hold investor, so paying very little in aggregate for that.

What I don't understand is how day traders avoid being eaten alive by this.

vasco · 8 months ago
It's zero for all practical purposes and it'd be completely undetectable to every single system on earth. I do agree many times studies about model performance break down as soon as you force the researcher to actually connect it to the market and have to eat fees and so on.
echoangle · 8 months ago
> If the goal was to study how different LLMs interpret financial data there would be no use for actual trades, since their interpretation cannot be influenced by the fact that the trading orders are passed for real.

Technically every trade influences the stock, but I agree that it won't have any effect at all.

> I believe the goal is to see if AI can do better than rats [0]. There is no shame in that.

But even then you wouldn't have to perform real trades, you could still just calculate the profit as if trades would have happened.

I think the actual trading is just to make it more interesting.

mh- · 8 months ago
> you could still just calculate the profit as if trades would have happened

Depending on the type of trades, the volume of the equities, etc.. it can be very difficult to simulate the ability to open/close positions with sufficient accuracy to evaluate the strategies.

sunnynagra · 8 months ago
You make fair points. Having them do actual trades is mostly to make it more personally fun and interesting to myself.
chrishare · 8 months ago
Looks great, well done
pakitan · 8 months ago
ChatGPT has one trade that is guaranteed to be bad. I'm not saying unprofitable, just bad. GBTC is the bitcoin ETF with biggest expense ratio - 1.5%. If you want to bet on bitcoin, a better choice would be BITB (0.20%) or BTC (0.15%).

Also, the reasoning is partially a hallucination - "The holding period of 9 months aligns with the expected completion of Grayscale's pivotal Phase 3 Bitcoin ETF trial, a major catalyst for unlocking investor demand and driving trust value realization."

There is no such thing as a "holding period", nor are they doing a "Phase 3 Bitcoin ETF trial". It's possible the "Phase 3" thing is picked up from news about a drug company.

pavlov · 8 months ago
ChatGPT does a good job of imitating the average crypto influencer. They don’t know what they’re saying either, and 99% of crypto investors would be thrilled by the prospect of a “pivotal Phase 3 Bitcoin ETF trial” that will “drive trust value realization”. Sounds great, can’t miss out on that!

The hallucinations are simply a mirror of a community that thrives on this nonsense. When nothing is real, you can’t blame the LLM for not figuring it out.

attentionmech · 8 months ago
This made me chuckle. You made a very interesting point that if LLMs are copying hallucinations those hallucinations are not infact hallucinations.
WalterBright · 8 months ago
When I'd watch the financial news on TV, they would always bring on the "technical analyst", show a graph of the stock price, and then hand-draw some lines on it, and then spew out various technical terms for it guaranteed to impress.

Me, I always regarded technical analysis as drawing pictures in clouds.

If any of those analysts were worth spit, they'd be working for a hedge fund, not the network.

csomar · 8 months ago
This assumes that both GBTC and BITB have the same price movements, volatility and liquidity. This is far from true and as a result you might end up with a higher alpha in GBTC despite the fees. I am not saying it is guaranteed, but the fee is one variable.
neltnerb · 8 months ago
God help the regulators that need to determine if it's insider trading for the people training the LLM to know it will be biased in ways they can profit from when used in inappropriate ways like this. I suspect the answer will be that users should have known better... I am sad that some people will certainly assume it's unbiased analysis.

Hopefully the LLM trainers didn't "accidentally" bias the model in weird ways that favor their employer or themselves... two of the three recommendations are a fund for investing in bitcoin and a company using blockchain to trace chemical supply chains.

I look forward to seeing if the AIs can beat an index fund, or if they'll just invest in a thousand blockchain, NFT, and AI companies. I suspect a LLM has a high opinion of a company making AI given how many press releases they're summarizing.

miohtama · 8 months ago
Because of Bitcoin volatility, fees are very insignificant compared to daily price movement and irrelevant in day trading.
pakitan · 8 months ago
1% is 1%. Giving it away for no reason is plain stupid, even if the trade makes you 1000% return.
aredox · 8 months ago
They should have added a pure random bot as a control.

Or a monkey.

rozap · 8 months ago
Or FISH.

https://youtu.be/USKD3vPD6ZA?si=AGyGdPdSPpJezQJp

The scene towards the end where he pitches it to a bunch of hucksters is brilliant.

wodderam · 8 months ago
You would need something like 1000 instances of each LLM putting on trades and have a 1000 random walks to judge an average sharpe ratio or something along those lines.

As is, this means absolutely nothing and not understanding the problem.

Adding a random walk to this would mean you have 4 random walks instead of 3.

There is also the problem that it is tough to make a prediction for tomorrow that is better than today's close.

yapyap · 8 months ago
> Or a monkey.

or just a stocktrader haha

byyoung3 · 8 months ago
lol
chronic026935 · 8 months ago
> or just a stocktrader haha

Many quant trading firms make 50%-100% annual returns, each year, over the past 15-20 years. The secret is leverage. And they do not accept outside investor money.

Many hedge funds outperform the market. However, the returns after fees, to the passive outside investor underperform S&P500.

But yes, publicly traded active ETFs generally underperform. But counter example is VGT or QQQ, both historically outperformed S&P500.

lewj · 8 months ago
Or just the S&P500 or something similar that acts as a default "if in doubt, chuck into here for relative safety".
sunnynagra · 8 months ago
Another good suggestion I could implement is measuring against something like VOO, if all the money was invested in that instead of these individual trades.
omoikane · 8 months ago
> a pure random bot

Maybe compare with this guy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713997 - Amazon engineer will let strangers manage his $50,000 stock portfolio 'forever' (2017-07-06, 172 comments)

SubiculumCode · 8 months ago
You definitely need several active controls: 1. A broad mutual fund level buy and hodl. 2. The random buyer that you suggest.

Active controls (vs passive ones) are an important concept in experimental design.

alberth · 8 months ago
Or just compare it to S&P 500 performance.
affyboi · 8 months ago
You can just compute Sharpe
kyleblarson · 8 months ago
Jim Cramer
fredzel · 8 months ago
Or a certain streamer AI
vasco · 8 months ago
> Every morning at 5:45 AM PST, three AI models (GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Sonnet) analyze the latest market news and each recommends one stock to trade.

> At 6:00 AM PST, trades are automatically executed based on AI recommendations, investing $5 per trade

The best trading decision most days is to not trade. Outliers and diversions from the mean don't happen every day. This is trading just for the sake of it.

I predict a slow crawl down into zero eaten up by fees.

NathanaelRea · 8 months ago
If they just get the financial headlines and indicators, aren't they all just momentum trading from sentiment analysis?
knallfrosch · 8 months ago
Is anyone doing anything else?
jfengel · 8 months ago
Some alternatives:

* Buy and hold

* Index funds

* Dollar cost averaging

booleandilemma · 8 months ago
I've heard Nancy Pelosi has a different strategy.
jfengel · 8 months ago
If they can read and act faster, accurately predicting sentiment, it would be a winning strategy. (At least until humans turned it all over to computers and stopped having to wait on their wetware to figure out their sentiments.)
sunnynagra · 8 months ago
I think this is a fair characterization. Its mostly meant to be a learning exercise for myself, just thought it would be fun to share.
PaulRobinson · 8 months ago
Yes.

This is not necessarily a poor value trading strategy.

AmazingTurtle · 8 months ago
Combining universal time-series prediction models with latent space global knowledge on realtime information could result in an accurate model prediction on the stockmarket with a bias towards succeeding. https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-model...
clark-kent · 8 months ago
Very interesting idea. I'm thinking about creating an AI portfolio manager (private) that invests for the long term.

Some things to watch out for:

- LLMs, by default, don't follow the best practices for trading or investing. Without careful constraints, they can ignore fundamental investment best practices. This is something I learned while building https://decodeinvesting.com/chat.

- I see Claude bought a penny stock SMX. This could be volatile, and the price could change significantly in 24 hours before the next execution at 9:30 am.

- The LLMs are day trading on some volatile securities; while LLMs could be good at day trading, unlike humans (we will find out), this setup has the disadvantage of only trading once a day.

EliBullockPapa · 8 months ago
I would be very cautious about doing this with money you actually need. Even the best performing human day traders underperform the indexes over long time horizons. Why would a robot be better?

from a study in Brazil: "97% of all individuals who persisted for more than 300 days lost money. Only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage and only 0.5% earned more than the initial salary of a bank teller — all with great risk."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423101

If you don't want your bot to be a day trader, then just get low cost index funds.

wolfman1 · 8 months ago
Going to follow along to see how the results look in the months to come.

I've been working on the same concept for the past 2y now and have our performance results here: https://trend.fi/performance

jeremycarter · 8 months ago
What's the technology behind this. I'm working on something myself, using a distributed actor model (setup like a graph) to create a living reactive model.
wolfman1 · 8 months ago
The model is a multi-threaded Go script running on a 512-thread AMD EPYC server. It's a trend based model so it's just trying to figure out how best to measure and predict trend changes. Not day trading or HFT.

It conducts millions of simulations daily for each asset, then provides a snapshot of the top-performing results to GPT-4o for final selection.

I'm really pushing the limits of GPT-4o currently. I started testing with o1 just last week and it performs better. It's just so much more expensive.

magic_man · 8 months ago
What brokers allow you to short crypto?
wolfman1 · 8 months ago
If you're US based, there is no major exchange support. BITI ETF and SETH ETF for shorting BTC and ETH.

If you're non-US: Binance.

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