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Comment by bdefig | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried selling to high-frequency traders / hedge funds? If they bite, it's probably not even worth having a low-cost/self-serve tier.

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Everyone who is anyone in the finance space has been doing stuff like this since way before LLMs were a thing, and they've put a lot of time and effort into their tools. This suggestion is kind of like saying you should try to sell your lemonade stand to Coca-Cola.

This is not possible without LLMs. The interesting stuff is not the numbers but the soft values and insights. Go check out the example reports.

With that said, I agree that hedge funds probably already have their own internal versions of this.

This is a good example of Dunning-Kruger, no offense. Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool to guide investments since the late 90s and there are companies out there who have been doing it for decades. LLMs didn't really break any new ground here, they just made this more accessible for the masses.

> Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool ... since the late 90s

Yes!

> LLMs didn't really break any new ground here

I don't think this is true. LLMs are a gigantic leap forward from any traditional sentiment analysis I've seen. Pre-2013, bag-of-words and TF-IDF were still state of the art. Call me out if you think I'm wrong, but hand-waving away the transformative power of LLMs here because we had some sentiment analysis approaches before seems unfair.

Sounds like you are the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger. Just check out one of the reports and you will see that it's lots more than just "sentiment analysis", and much more dynamic.

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you've got something novel/hard to replicate, it's a no-brainer for them to pick up at any price. If not, that's good to know too.

Btw, Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid Lemonaide in 1960. :)

I'm in the business of selling AI tools to high-frequency traders / hedge funds and the bad news is that, most of them are so risk averse and/or technically illiterate that sometimes we joke that there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.

Let's do it :)

I think you might be slightly misunderstanding why you're struggling to sell. In finance, correctness matters. A tool that's mostly right most of the time, but radically incorrect sometimes is a very hard sell when there's battle tested and well understood boring tools out there that do the same thing.

Ive heard many variations of this along the lines of pennies and steam rollers. Yes, you have to have positive EV across the strategy. And just about everyone makes money when times are good, or theres volatility that matches your strategy, or your pods null out a bunch of factors.

But to survive long term you have to _not fail_ in a very repeatable and consistent manner. Long term success is risk and downside management.

> there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.

Maybe hedge funds are completely out of step with the rest of the finance world, but much of finance has been using AI for a long time. AI is old news at this point.

I’d guess they’re already using this signal and if not they’d be more likely to do it at competitively high speed and internally, where they can control and iterate? Maybe crypto HFT since that’s a big more sluggish.

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