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5 reasons you should check the Numerai Competitions.
I’ve been competing in the Numerai Quant competitions ( there are 2 ) for the past 3 years and thought it could be interesting to write a follow up to my previous two posts as a way to catch up…
Previous posts you might like:- Numerai walkthrough: Quantitative Analysis & Machine learning for fun and profit. The practical parts are now outdated, but the introduction explanation is still relevant. - Practical Keras Simple regression for the Numerai Tournament An up to date (late 2020) technical look at setting up a Neural Network for the tournament.
What is it again ?
In a nutshell Numerai is a Hedge Fund with crowdsourced elements in the form of two quant competitions, the main tournament ( numerai ) and the newer ( signals ). The main tournament consists of an obfuscated dataset that represents years of market and financial information and you are tasked with predicting a future date. Signals in its current form is closer to traditional stock picking/portfolio construction in that you submit a list of tickers with short/long ranks and are scored on returns over a shorter weekly period.
You get paid in a volatile cryptocurrency called Numeraire (NMR), but only if you stake and lock some NMR beforehand, so it is strictly pay to play, your stake can also decrease ( get burned ) if your predictions are wrong, so you can also lose money.
A few pros and cons based on my experience :
In Favor.
1.There’s still nothing like it. The longevity of the project (more than 3 years at this point) is perhaps the best indicator of the success of Numerai, starting and maintaining a hedge fund is not easy, double so if you add the challenges of exposing some of the decision making to Data Scientists and Quants along with a cryptocurrency to maintain.
2. The problem while complex is interesting. Financial markets are unpredictable creatures since they encapsulate the economic environment along with capital markets, human behavior and decision making. Predicting them is a career and interest of many, and here you can put your…
