A black box model is a magical, computational input-output system, where the input is financial, and market data and the output is investment strategies.
Sounds great, right? Have the black box on the computer do the heavy lifting of deciding what to do with all that cash. But that’s not necessarily the case. Using a black box model can be risky, particularly when the market is going cray (or ‘volatile,’ as the fat cats say).
Crashes in 1987, 1998, and 2015 have people giving black box models some serious stink-eye. Today, black box models include machine learning and AI, and are still controversial, especially during market freak-outs.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is a Chartist?26 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is a chartist Well here's a
chart and here's a chart and here's a chart All
right Well these are pages from the investing bible of
a chartist A chartist is an investor really a traitor
as they tend to own stocks for a much shorter
period of time than a longer term Really invest or
type person a chartist relies solely on the patterns The
pattern's right there These are all patterns imputed by the
charts that they you know sitting poor threw for hours
and hours So check out this chart see how the
plotted data closely follows the characteristic line there The characteristic
line basically is plodded through all those dots Yes So
they're going to stare at that try to figure out
where that line is going in the future right Get
the crystal ball or all right Well let's look at
this one where the data forms what looks like Well
the head and shoulders of someone who you know doesn't
have a neck that's Just common pattern in trading And
you know if you stopped looking at it and two
thirds of the way through there it's heading down Well
Maybe you'd be short the stock for a few days
and then you see it bottoming and then you'd be
long and try to make money that way Good luck
All right len look at this chart Where is right
here where the data appears to We'll break away from
the established pattern which was all just kind of boring
Lee along down here And then suddenly everything goes up
Yeah start doing its own thing Well maybe the company
reported a good quarter or ah you know the government
cut taxes again Everything went up So these were the
tools of the chartist The chart's a chartist is the
opposite of a fundamental investor meaning that she doesn't know
or care what the company does for a living Really
she doesn't care about their p e ratio nor their
profit margins nor their debt levels on their balance sheet
nor much of anything fundamental about how their business runs
Chartist just care about the pattern they glean from the
charts and all the charts always work until they don't
And what happens when the meteor hits that is that 00:02:06.0 --> [endTime] predictable on a chart Ah
Up Next
What is program trading? Program trading refers to the use of computer algorithms to place and execute large volume, multiple buy and sell orders o...
What is the Black Scholes Model? The Black Scholes Model is used to determine the price of call options. It looks at the change in stock price over...
Technical analysts don't care how companies make their money or how they run their business; they're just interested in the numbers. The data. Yeah...
What is a Breakaway Gap? A breakaway gap is the point in time when a stock price changes direction (it goes from increasing to decreasing or vice v...