I don't claim that all the science that isn't actively being applied yet is BS, but this kind of science typically happens within trading firms, tested on real-world data, and is not being published on arXiv.

As a side note, what this specific paper here did is neither novel not innovative, so it's very fair to criticize it. A3C is 4 years old, and they just take it and run it on some data. It's like downloading a convnet and running it on MNIST. There have been hundreds of papers on RL + Trading. I see them in my arXiv emails every other day and they all do the same thing.

I was referring to these statements:

> This paper, just like pretty much any academic paper on the subject, ends with a backtest on historical data, not a real system

> Whenever you see a paper ending with a backtest you can already assume it's BS.

I guess he was referring to the fact that though the people may be great, their published content in that one paper need not be so.