Trading Automated? Stock Market Trading Software The Good and Limitations
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | Finance
Every brainchild of human thought seems to be inevitably fraught with complications, especially when money is mixed in. It pains one to visualize the inner workings of something like the stock market, especially now that the world is besieged by global economic and financial recession. Many companies are struggling to be rid of the vise grip of the crisis that has already claimed many others, not just any companies, but known ones. With such influential organizations rising and falling, stock traders need all the help they can get trying to make sense of stock market figures that might some might even try their luck in automated trading via stock software.
The World Wide Web spawns as many useful things as it does subterfuges, and taking advantage of a computer’s forte of data gathering and analysis, stock software are today common tools in a trader’s repertoire. These software come in a variety of ranges: from observational systems designed to gather and organize data to analytic software that analyzes stock market information to actual AI traders that do the decision making as well. The data observation and gathering plus the analysis parts make such market research software virtual assistants to stock traders and are quite accurate and useful. But the decision making software is rather dubious.
It may be true that a computer is the best machine to analyze such twisted data as stock market figures and also best suited for performing the analysis based on a predefined principle or theorem like fundamental or technical analysis, but it is also true that the stock market can at times be beyond logic. The 1987 stock market crash for example; until now, no probable cause has ever been proven to cause a drop of 22. 6% in the Dow Jones Index. None logical, at least. Even if today’s computers had been there, they could not have been able to foretell such an event happening. The same is true today, in more minute terms. Even if trends do occur in Gaussian distribution, no computer can accurately pinpoint an outlier possibility and thus make use of it. Furthermore, the Efficient Market Hypothesis of Professor Eugene Fama effectively negates a computer’s potential to break the bank, or in this case, beat the market. Stating that it is not possible to consistently outperform the market from information from the market, though the hypothesis has its drawbacks and contenders, is sound enough to ring true for the case of a investment management software.
Finally, there is the psychological aspect wherein a computer can’t predict human over or under reaction that can cause over or under pricing. In the end, though computers are undoubtedly excellent in observation and analysis, humans should still have the final say.