Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by gravypod on Sunday October 16, 2016 @01:57PM (#12719921)

Couldn't I make thousands of fake accounts and submit thousands of slightly different models. Then after a while I could push one or two of my stocks higher in my models artificially. If you represented a large enough % of the "data scientists" in this hedge fund you could make it look like your stock is "definitely" work investment. After they invest in your company, you could take off to the hills.

Hell, you don't even need to be the owner of the company. This would be a great way to obtain large amounts of political sway/power. Like a company/want it to succeed for some agenda? Make it look better as an investment opportunity. Dislike a company? Well that stock is going to do horrible next quarter. It's also a self fulfilling prophesy.

For all of you finance people out there, is what I am saying impossible or stupid? I hope I'm wrong otherwise this is a horrible idea.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by nradov on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:25PM (#12720074)

You don't even need to push one or two stocks higher. With thousands of fake accounts you could just pick a different stock for each account at random. Certainly a few of those stocks will turn in huge returns. Collect your Bitcoin reward from Numerai. Repeat.

Maybe they have some way of preventing people from gaming the system that way?

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by mikbob on Sunday October 16, 2016 @03:43PM (#12720537)

The thing is, with the data no one knows what each row represents, or even what the features are or what they're predicting is. Each submission has 30,000 predictions, so you would need to have an unreasonably good random guess to get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by gravypod on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:32PM (#12720133)

I didn't think of that, great idea!

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by Houshalter on Sunday October 16, 2016 @04:33PM (#12720779)

This won't work. As far as I can tell, you don't get to "pick stocks". You just submit predictions for unlabelled variables that could represent anything. It's no different than a standard kaggle competition.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by gravypod on Sunday October 16, 2016 @07:10PM (#12721608)

Then could the operators not do this? Just claim that they sent it out to N people and they all suggested the stock. How would you prove they didn't.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by Houshalter on Sunday October 16, 2016 @11:17PM (#12722484)

Well the hedge fund manager can invest in whatever stocks he wants already, so I don't see the point of this scheme.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by gravypod on Monday October 17, 2016 @08:27AM (#12724399)

The manager could take bribes to invest in a few failing companies and cover his ass while doing so by saying "anonymous statisticians" told him to.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by Hasz on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:07PM (#12719967)

It sounds a bit like pump and dump, which is considered fraud. However, instead of being against hundreds or thousands of individual investors, you're going against one (obstinately) accredited investor, so you might be one firmer legal ground, as they should know better.

It's probably against their TOS though.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by gravypod on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:17PM (#12720026)

Aren't the "data scientists" anonymous? Login over tor, exert some basic opsec, and live in a country with no extradition treaty. Do it as a service for billionaires who want to play the never ending game of chess that is the the economy.

For 100k per "tweak" you could make a lot of money and still give people rather significant influence over the world (especially if a LOT of people used this service).

> pump and dump, which is considered fraud

Yea it is definitely a pump and dump but if it makes you rich and you're in a country with no extradition treaty who cares? Remember the golden rule of the "elite class": laws are for poor people. As long as you get rich before anyone sees what you aredoing, and you "cant" be found, you're all good.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by volker48 on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:59PM (#12720311)

You don't know anything about the dataset they give you so this wouldn't really work. Its not like they tell you which stocks each row in the dataset correspond to. On top of this you know nothing about the features.

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by noobermin on Sunday October 16, 2016 @03:56PM (#12720616)

Shhh! Don't give my strategy away!

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by jon_richards on Sunday October 16, 2016 @02:20PM (#12720047)

If they aren't managing correlation between different models there is an even bigger issue...

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Re:Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of ano... by mikbob on Sunday October 16, 2016 @03:44PM (#12720541)

They are - your rank on the leaderboard is the importance of your model in their 'meta-model' so submitting the same model as someone else would just net you 0.

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