DailyDirt: Making Money The Old-Fashioned Way… By Algorithms
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
People are changing the way they make decisions now that technology can help them crunch more numbers than ever before. Instead of just going with a gut instinct, decisions can be based on all kinds of random data analysis (for better or worse). Big data is a popular trend, and more and more successful examples of data mining for profit seem to get publicized every day. But are we only looking at the winning combinations and ignoring the losers? Here are just a few examples of algorithms that might be making some money.
- If you don’t think your cellphone metadata matters to anyone, venture capitalists might not want to fund your new venture. Apparently, some VCs fund entrepreneurs based partially on an unconventional algorithm that includes things such as the age of the founder’s cellphone number and the average time of his/her first call in the morning. [url]
- Can an algorithm pick stocks better than human financial analysts? Sure, but a monkey throwing darts can, too, sometimes. The wisdom of a crowd of analysts might not be a bad algorithm to use, but it still relies on a crowd of humans. [url]
- Poker players can bluff to win, but now that more players are practicing against algorithms and using simulations — it might be harder for those bluffs to work. It’s not so reliable to try to guess when a player is bluffing, but a simulation of thousands of poker hands can give you some statistical confidence…. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: algorithm, artificial intelligence, big data, data mining, gigo, poker, simulation, venture capital
Comments on “DailyDirt: Making Money The Old-Fashioned Way… By Algorithms”
VCs and the NSA seem to have some common traits…
As JMK Said ...
… ?The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent?.
Re: As JMK Said ...
This is true, and not to sound too far-fetched, but on a large enough scale even irrationality can become rational. That is to say, these algorithms can comprehend things at a much larger scale than we can, and at a certain point the random scattering of data can begin to make a SEEMINGLY predictable pattern.
feedproxy for RSS feeds?
Disappointing techdirt (and I noticed ars aalso) is using feedproxy for RSS feeds. Feedproxy is labeled as tracking its users. Ghostery blocks.
This will mean fewer visits to techdirt, overall, for me.
Re: feedproxy for RSS feeds?
as an RSS feed user, you can use things like Yahoo pipes to obscure the tracking, if you really wanted to.