Pit.ai puts a financial twist on reinforcement learning to outperform hedge funds

Despite mystery and intrigue, the reality is that most hedge funds don't make money. This hasn't stopped a growing list of startups from trying their hands at employing machine learning to tip the scales in their favor. But Pit.ai, a new machine learning-powered hedge fund, adopted into the YC W17 class, thinks it can best Numerai, Quantopian and others with its own unique recipe for automating money making. Hedge funds employ aggressive trading strategies to "seek alpha," which is industry jargon for above market returns. These are not your standard trading shops, and over the last decade firms have gone to great lengths to seize data for information arbitrage.