Why AI can help you beat the market

Humans have always welcomed other beings in finance: over twenty years ago, some of the best Wall Street traders were outsmarted by Raven, a chimpanzee who picked stocks by throwing darts. Her index, called MonkeyDex, became one of the biggest sensations at the turn of the century after delivering a 213% gain. Perhaps because animals are not so easy to fit in offices, people have turned to other kinds of brains to choose equities. Big institutions are resorting to artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse stocks collating all sorts of information coming from a plethora of sources. In fact, while investments could previously be assessed based on financial reports and share price movement – what is called structured data – markets have been heavily influenced by unstructured data over the past few years.