Given that he might convince other people to engage in high tech gambling in a less-favorable market than the one he operated in, strong words are called for in this case.

  Needless to say, a lot of people, based off one story that I haven't yet finished, 
  now think I'm just another halfwit gamble-my-savings-away day trader.

  On some days, I feel the same way about myself [that he is in fact a 
  halfwit gambler].

  You have no idea how much I've read up on financial history, probability, and
  behavioral finance. You have no idea the number of profitable 
  traders (whose track records I get to see or witness in real time) I've spoken
  to whom use a variety or combination of different methodologies.

Looking worse now.

He then sets up several straw man arguments against him. But, amazingly, does not refute them.

Okay, I give up.

Put another way, hes so smart but losing money in the market thus the market is "wrong" and someone is cheating.

But, the degree of absurdity across predictions undermines even that strategy over time. I think he does himself a disservice here. He should get out of his own way and allow his actual achievements to speak louder than irrational predictions (and other distractions).

I would also question the rest of the analysis as well.

The fact that he went from "CS 101" to "major stock exchange" as the barometer seemed a little fishy to me, ya know?

The article seems to be fixated on how he lied to his finance sources, and acts like that was the only thing he did wrong.

If you read the SEC lawsuit [1], the problem is less that he lied to his finance sources and more about what he did with the funds, which was blatant market manipulation:

"Archegos, through Hwang and Tomita, effected this scheme by dominating the market for its Top 10 Holdings, as well as by “setting the tone” (i.e., engaging in large pre- market trading), bidding up prices by entering incrementally higher limit orders throughout the trading day, and “marking the close” (i.e., engaging in large trading in the last 30 minutes of the trading day) and by other non-economic trading, all with the goal of artificially inflating the share prices of its Top 10 Holdings."

I mean, obviously he lied to his finance sources. It's not like he was going to tell them that he was using their funds to manipulation the market.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr...

IIRC at one point his numbers showed on a month to month basis losses only 4% of the time.

He didn't 'take advantage' of anything. He did his homework and reached an accurate and objective conclusion about the state of the financial system. He then provided this information to the markets by betting on what his research predicted.

The real people who were taking advantage of the situation were the counterparties on his trades who were recklessly speculating on an unsustainable bubble (with other people's money).

He was so successful doing this because at that point there were so few other dissenting voices to compete against. I don't know how you can say that it provides no value to be right when everybody else is wrong.

And went on to say:

> The market will decide a huge part of what comes after sharing something, so continually increase your odds by building, publishing, then repeating.

All the people here decrying everything he had done up until this point and proclaiming any degree of success is attributable only to luck is amazing. It's not the same as stumbling on a winning lotto ticking on the street (unless you have spent years scouring the streets looking for winning lotto tickets).

Are you kidding me? This is huge; this is what prevented the financial crisis, as bad as it was, from turning into something much worse (it's "bad" for a bubble to pop, but it's worse for it to keep growing and pop later). This guy made the difference between billions of dollars going into houses that people couldn't afford and weren't worth the cost, and that same money going into productive investments. He probably contributed more to humanity than the rest of the list put together, with the possible exception of the other Goldman guy.

I know everyone thinks their own field is the most important, and I love academic maths, but goddam the snobbery towards the people who did something more directly useful with their talents is irritating here.

This strikes me as dubious and high-handed, to say the least.

First, as to the value of the endeavor. He is trying to, in his words, "come up with an algorithm that finds pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness." If he could really do this, it would create capital flow, the ability to borrow, and so on, for people that could turn it into wealth that would not otherwise have access to that wealth. Financial markets serve a real function, and beating the efficient market hypothesis would improve their ability to fulfill that function.

Second of all, he's extremely interested in the problem. He's obsessed with modeling complex systems and sees this as a sort of holy grail. Surely the fact that he's interested in it and values it counts for a lot, especially if you grant the above point, that there is a value to what he's doing. He has his reasons for being interested in it, and it's a productive endeavor.

I think it's false that his lack of progress, or the reasons that he's frustrated at his lack of progress, have to do with these aspects of his goal. It's more that he's working on an extremely hard (arguably insoluble) problem where it's hard to see incremental gains. This is a problem that ambitious people in many different fields face.

I'd also like to note the irony of your snarky comment about wishing that those who disagree with you ought to study some math, given the background of managers like Jim Simons.

Edit: > First, he didn't beat the market average 227 times in a row -- for most of those periods, he didn't lose money, but then a buy & hold investor also didn't lose money. A meaningful comparison would have to compare his outcomes with that for a buy & hold investor riding the ascending market value by holding a boring, geriatric index fund

The stock market rose by about 8 or 9% annually during that time. Dismissing his 227 positive months requires absurd contortions, like positing that his firm would invest in the stock market or t-bills for 11 months out of the year, and then make a series of large bets in the remaining month. Given that he made, I believe, 10k bets a year, the disparity in bet size must be massive to even come close to supporting your hypothesis.