Joel Rieger Abandons 1-Year AI Trading Bot After It Fails to Beat S&P 500

1 articles · Updated · Bloomberg · Aug 3

A year of nights-and-weekends work left Joel Rieger with an automated options-trading program that performed little better than simply buying an S&P 500 index fund.
Rieger — a Los Angeles software sales executive — wrote the Python code himself, ran simulations to test strategies and tracked hundreds of stocks in an effort to mimic hedge-fund trading systems.
That gap between effort and returns led him to conclude the project was not worth continuing, underscoring how hard it is for retail investors to match Wall Street firms with teams of Ph.D.s.