4 ms·

Couldn't I make thousands of fake accounts and submit thousands of slightly different models. Then after a while I could push one or two of my stocks higher in

Couldn't I make thousands of fake accounts and submit thousands of slightly different models. Then after a while I could push one or two of my stocks higher in my models artificially. If you represented a large enough % of the "data scientists" in this hedge fund you could make it look like your stock is "definitely" work investment. After they invest in your company, you could take off to the hills. Hell, you don't even need to be the owner of the company. This would be a great way to obtain large amounts of political sway/power. Like a company/want it to succeed for some agenda? Make it look better as an investment opportunity. Dislike a company? Well that stock is going to do horrible next quarter. It's also a self fulfilling prophesy. For all of you finance people out there, is what I am saying impossible or stupid? I hope I'm wrong otherwise this is a horrible idea.

Hasz 10y ago
It sounds a bit like pump and dump, which is considered fraud. However, instead of being against hundreds or thousands of individual investors, you're going against one (obstinately) accredited investor, so you might be one firmer legal ground, as they should know better. It's probably against their TOS though.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Aren't the "data scientists" anonymous? Login over tor, exert some basic opsec, and live in a country with no extradition treaty. Do it as a service for billionaires who want to play the never ending game of chess that is the the economy. For 100k per "tweak" you could make a lot of money and still give people rather significant influence over the world (especially if a LOT of people used this service). > pump and dump, which is considered fraud Yea it is definitely a pump and dump but if it makes you rich and you're in a country with no extradition treaty who cares? Remember the golden rule of the "elite class": laws are for poor people. As long as you get rich before anyone sees what you aredoing, and you "cant" be found, you're all good.
jon_richards 10y ago
If they aren't managing correlation between different models there is an even bigger issue...
- mikbob 10y ago
  They are - your rank on the leaderboard is the importance of your model in their 'meta-model' so submitting the same model as someone else would just net you 0.
nradov 10y ago
You don't even need to push one or two stocks higher. With thousands of fake accounts you could just pick a different stock for each account at random. Certainly a few of those stocks will turn in huge returns. Collect your Bitcoin reward from Numerai. Repeat. Maybe they have some way of preventing people from gaming the system that way?
- gravypod 10y ago
  I didn't think of that, great idea!
- mikbob 10y ago
  The thing is, with the data no one knows what each row represents, or even what the features are or what they're predicting is. Each submission has 30,000 predictions, so you would need to have an unreasonably good random guess to get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard.
volker48 10y ago
You don't know anything about the dataset they give you so this wouldn't really work. Its not like they tell you which stocks each row in the dataset correspond to. On top of this you know nothing about the features.
noobermin 10y ago
Shhh! Don't give my strategy away!
Houshalter 10y ago
This won't work. As far as I can tell, you don't get to "pick stocks". You just submit predictions for unlabelled variables that could represent anything. It's no different than a standard kaggle competition.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Then could the operators not do this? Just claim that they sent it out to N people and they all suggested the stock. How would you prove they didn't.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Well the hedge fund manager can invest in whatever stocks he wants already, so I don't see the point of this scheme.
    - gravypod 10y ago
      The manager could take bribes to invest in a few failing companies and cover his ass while doing so by saying "anonymous statisticians" told him to.

Hasz 10y ago

It sounds a bit like pump and dump, which is considered fraud. However, instead of being against hundreds or thousands of individual investors, you're going against one (obstinately) accredited investor, so you might be one firmer legal ground, as they should know better. It's probably against their TOS though.

gravypod 10y ago
Aren't the "data scientists" anonymous? Login over tor, exert some basic opsec, and live in a country with no extradition treaty. Do it as a service for billionaires who want to play the never ending game of chess that is the the economy. For 100k per "tweak" you could make a lot of money and still give people rather significant influence over the world (especially if a LOT of people used this service). > pump and dump, which is considered fraud Yea it is definitely a pump and dump but if it makes you rich and you're in a country with no extradition treaty who cares? Remember the golden rule of the "elite class": laws are for poor people. As long as you get rich before anyone sees what you aredoing, and you "cant" be found, you're all good.

jon_richards 10y ago

If they aren't managing correlation between different models there is an even bigger issue...

mikbob 10y ago
They are - your rank on the leaderboard is the importance of your model in their 'meta-model' so submitting the same model as someone else would just net you 0.

nradov 10y ago

You don't even need to push one or two stocks higher. With thousands of fake accounts you could just pick a different stock for each account at random. Certainly a few of those stocks will turn in huge returns. Collect your Bitcoin reward from Numerai. Repeat. Maybe they have some way of preventing people from gaming the system that way?

gravypod 10y ago
I didn't think of that, great idea!
mikbob 10y ago
The thing is, with the data no one knows what each row represents, or even what the features are or what they're predicting is. Each submission has 30,000 predictions, so you would need to have an unreasonably good random guess to get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard.

volker48 10y ago

You don't know anything about the dataset they give you so this wouldn't really work. Its not like they tell you which stocks each row in the dataset correspond to. On top of this you know nothing about the features.

noobermin 10y ago

Shhh! Don't give my strategy away!

Houshalter 10y ago

This won't work. As far as I can tell, you don't get to "pick stocks". You just submit predictions for unlabelled variables that could represent anything. It's no different than a standard kaggle competition.

gravypod 10y ago
Then could the operators not do this? Just claim that they sent it out to N people and they all suggested the stock. How would you prove they didn't.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Well the hedge fund manager can invest in whatever stocks he wants already, so I don't see the point of this scheme.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    The manager could take bribes to invest in a few failing companies and cover his ass while doing so by saying "anonymous statisticians" told him to.