I was going to title this something about robot trading….blah, blah, blah but sticking the words bodybuilding Mexican and academic in the title seemed to be much more fun.
This article does what it says o the can – it is a about a bodybuilding academic whose speciality is artificial intelligence and its application to trading systems. The notion of AI systems does intrigue me because they all seemed to focus on the same style of trading which is seemingly a variant upon the notion of high frequency small gain trading. This makes me wonder sometimes if these systems don’t introduce an inherent instability into the market place as evidenced by last years flash crash. And whether there might not be something Darwinian in their evolution. For examples in the 1980′s before the advent of world wide data networks it was often possible to arbitrage certain markets because of price discontinuity that occurred as a function of the lumpy flow of information. These opportunities disappeared with the integration of world markets. I wonder whether we will reach a situation where the opportunities targeted by high frequency AI systems gradually disappear as the high frequency market place becomes ever more crowded.
PS: That’s the good doctor in the photo above