On Stocks And Machine Learning

The Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, for many years a poorly performing and unsuccessful team, surprised everybody during the 2000-2001 season. The team had a remarkable run of wins, led the Major League in performance, and broke a number of League records. Michael Lewis, in his bestselling book, "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game", describes the secret to this turnaround. The A's new, young and unexperienced manager, Billy Beane, "revolutionized" the team's roster by releasing a number of star players (despite the protests of his closest advisors) and instead, signing a number of unknown players. He chose these players by using a model/algorithm that was based on several professional, well-defined baseball parameters.