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Re:Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are im... by pyrale on Monday January 02, 2017 @05:57AM (#13300421)
I can reasonably say that you make this comment because you know nothing about the business logic of trading desks.

A trader is not necessarily a sales or a broker, though. Nor is he a quant, or a dev. People rarely imagine how many different jobs are involved in the trading job, and how rich the business logic is. At my shop, traders are the piece that connects all of the jobs in the value chain.

I believe, currently, the business logic can be improved locally by learning systems (and it is), but there is no public example of an industrial learning application encompassing a scope comparable to what the usual trading desk handles. Sure, there are many inefficiencies ; traders work on heuristics, afterall. But I don't believe we have the necessary horizon to aptly predict the end of traders, because I don't see how we could make AIs with a better efficiency.

Re:Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are im... by deepGem on Monday January 02, 2017 @10:32PM (#13306470)
I'd say I know something about the business logic of trading desks. Some of my friends worked at GS. I'm not implying traders are brokers. I do agree that the trading business logic is very rich and that AI will be nowhere close to replacing a trader in the next 15-20 years at least.

I do foresee a future in which a trader can accomplish a lot more than he/she can today using AI. So in the future as the per trader efficiency increases, the number of traders required will most probably decline, unless there is a dramatic increase in trading volume that cannot be matched by the then state of the art AI.

This is essentially what's happening today with X.ai, Facebook messenger and the like. Sure the logic involved in booking air tickets for a group of 5 over 10 conversations isn't as complicated as the rich business logic of a trade, but 5 years back Facebook messenger would've seemed almost impossible, just like the trading business logic seems impossible to do with AI today.

Re:Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are im... by pyrale on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @04:07AM (#13307875)
I have no doubt new technology will be leveraged to improve productivity, but that's been quite common in the last decades.

On the other hand, the technology advances needed to transform the tools into standalone actors are not merely a matter of scaling current technology. Especially, the creation of training datasets is a problem for which we currently have no solution, that's why we fall back on human trainers (mturk, etc). That's why a solution to a problem with no clear, bounded model and no easy dataset seems out of reach.