First, let me say that all the content in this blog is written manually by myself without any use of the fancy AI tools. I’ve been tinkering around with ChatGPT Plus to keep myself up to date with the latest technology. AI tools are great for content, translation, marketing materials, online search, working with data, automating manual tasks etc. Though AI can help with new ideas, it lacks human logic and creativity in my opinion. AI will need some past data to provide a response, therefore it doesn’t think much about the future, at least not yet.
The randomness in tomorrow
The world has a thousand possible paths it can take and each day brings in new events that influence it, letting us only see the one path it took. We are always facing the uncertainty of what will happen next. Asset prices in the stock market look into the future and are influenced by all the new information coming in day by day. You can’t trick this complex system by just having AI data mining and looking for price patterns from the past, cause the future will be different. That’s where the critical thinking of a human brain gives an edge to play against other market participants, be it other humans or even computers if not considering speed.
ChatGPT is good but not almighty
ChatGPT has been one of the strongest AI language models since its release to the public in late 2022. While testing its capabilities on some basic programming and content tasks, I’ve been hitting the Plus plan limit in ChatGPT once or twice per week that tells me to take time off for a couple of hours before I can continue with the same model. Alright, I understand they limit the length and amount of responses in a specific timespan, but recently I received a notification that the memory was full and my ChatGPT account couldn’t learn anything new anymore. 
Not impressed. I had to manually delete some of the knowledge in the database to let my account learn new things again. This showed me how limited the ChatGPT paid plan actually was. They have now released a new Pro plan that doesn’t have the time limit but I’m not sure about the memory limit yet. Overall, it has been able to finish most of my tasks well, but sometimes I see how it forgets something we’ve been going over many times before. As an AI operator, you still need to be smart about giving the right prompts in a way you would teach a child new things. ChatGPT, being a computer system, is obviously faster and better at analyzing data, it has access to all the information on the web, but for now I haven’t felt it had more critical thinking than my human brain does.
Man plus machine
Maybe in ten years the AI tools will replace me as a trader, who knows, but for now I’m safe to say that these computer systems are not so clever facing the future uncertainty in financial markets. They know what has happened in the past, but the past is not a good guide into the future. Things happen that have never happened before. The way market participants trade the financial instruments will have an affect on how the market works, and if everyone adopts their new fancy AI tool to make decisions in a risk environment, then it will just be eveyone’s AIs against each other, having no meaningful difference. If these days folks jump into crowded trades and lose money, then it will be their AIs doing the same thing on the information available, until the AI operator feels too much pain and decides to shut it down. AI tools will probably replace lots of other roles and jobs that work with certain information before it can replace the need for a human brain in an uncertain risk environment.
Final thoughts
AI can work well on past data that is already here, it can do it better than a human can. But as a human I can’t just leave everything for the AI or computer, because things happen in the markets that haven’t happened before, therefore are not included in the data. The human brain is a magnificent black box that can still be a lot more creative than AI can today, but this may change in the future, of course. I would use the current AI technology only for some basic research in my trading, but not let it into the final decision-making process.
Share this post