The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust. John Coates
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place in the markets. I, like many others, find the markets increasingly inhuman, and when I trade now I often have difficulty catching the scent of the market’s trail.
Human traders such as Martin are therefore in a fight for their lives. Unbeknownst to outsiders, every day a battle rages up and down Wall Street between man and machine. Some informed observers believe human traders have had their day, and will meet the same fate as John Henry, the legendary nineteenth-century railway worker who challenged a steam drill to a competition and ended up rupturing his heart.
Others, however, note with optimism that human traders are more flexible than a black box, are better at learning, especially at forming long-term views on the market, and thus in many circumstances remain faster. Evidence of their greater flexibility is found when market volatility picks up after some catastrophic event, like a credit crisis. Then managers at the banks and hedge funds are forced to unplug many of their boxes, especially those engaged in medium- and long-term price prediction, as the algorithms fail to comprehend the new data and begin to lose ever increasing amounts of money. Humans quickly step into the breach.
Something much like this occurred during the credit crisis of 2007–08. Anecdotal evidence and published fund performance statistics give us something like the following scorecard: in high-frequency trading, humans and machines fought to a draw, both making historic amounts of money; in medium-term price prediction, in other words seconds to minutes, humans pulled slightly ahead of the boxes, as flow traders made record amounts of money; but in medium- to long-term price prediction, minutes to hours or days – the boxes engaged in these time horizons are known as statistical arbitrage and quantitative equity – humans outperformed the boxes, because only they understood the implications of the political decisions being made by central bankers and Treasury officials. Thus, in what may have been the first major test of human versus machine trading, humans won, but only just. And so it is that this futuristic battle ebbs and flows.
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