The Wolf of Wall Things

Hacker news had the following article at the top of their list: the wolf of wall tweet. It talks about algorihms that used a rumor and the options market to make millions in seconds. This article refers to Flash Boys as well, a famous book about high frequency trading. However the big news is that whatever the article talks about as being magical is not magical at all, you can do a lot more and you will read about examples later on.

How does tweet option buying work?

Advances in neural networking have led to Deep Belief Networks (DBN). DBN in some cases are able to do natural language recognition and other types of recognition better than human beings, or at least a lot faster. So a DBN that is trained to read from the Twitter firehose and scan lots of news articles will beat humans in speed. Add an interface to options trading and you have what the article describes.

Taking it to the next level – knowing the future of the economy

What if you would know economical facts with a high degree of certainty before anybody else, and not sub seconds but hours, days, weeks, even months before anybody else. This is what Internet of Things combined with DBNs and automated trading can give you. How? Imagine you are into trading car stocks. Via computer vision you are able to count events. There are lots of public street cameras that stream in real-time data about what is happening on the roads. Humans look at them to see if there is a lot of traffic. Computers can use them to recognize and count events. So what would happen if strategically picked street cameras get hooked up to DBNs, you would be able to count how many trucks leave a factory with cars. You would be able to correlate these events month after month with the revenue figures of car manufacturers and then correlate with their stock value. The car manufacturers will at the end of a quarter announce their profits and a key aspect of their success depends on how many cars where sold. If you would know weeks or a month in advance that the volumes of cars coming out of a factory have picked up dramatically then you know the stock value will go up. If you would buy minutes before the figures come out a large quantity of car stocks then trading algorithms will pick up on this and will make you loose lots of the potential profit. However if you can spread purchase orders over weeks in small quantities then HFT can not detect your strategy.

Street cams is only the beginning

Using street cams would only be the beginning. Add weather sensors and lots of other sensors and you can do magic at large scale and would have a magical dashboard of the real economy before anybody else. If you are interested in this subject be sure to reach out on LinkedIn…