Building AI Trading Systems
I tried doing some forecasting with various neural network models after assembling what I thought was a good amount of forex data. The neural net (I tried various architectures) couldn't do any better than chance. After playing around with it and trying to double-check everything, that was as far as I could get. This puts me ahead of most traders, since most of them lose money, then quit.<p>This makes me wonder what kind of trading systems can actually have any kind of edge, since some kind of autoregressive time series forecasting system seems pretty unreliable.<p>On a more general note, how do you move beyond it being gambling? Just because a system backtests well doesn't mean a phenomenon will continue to happen, especially if your system will significantly impact the market you're in. If you make a trend-following system, every time you trade, you're gambling that the trend is more likely to continue than not. If you're right, you'll come out ahead over many trades. If you don't have enough capital to withstand drawdown the way most beginners don't, you won't be able to last long enough for whatever phenomenon you've found to average out.<p>It takes a lot of time, effort and risk to do all this, so, this is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's for me. If you build a SaaS product and it fails, at least you can talk about what you learned from building it and use that in future endeavors. If you lose money trading because your algorithm doesn't work, what do you learn from that besides that your algorithm doesn't work?