LLMs are terrible stock pickers but can beat indexes with buy-and-hold, investor finds
dougclinton · x · 2026-11-04
Investor Doug Clinton builds on Steve Mandel's point: RL-tuned LLMs are deterministic optimizers good at verifiable binary answers, but structurally disadvantaged at regime-change and 'n of 1' market moments. His testing found LLMs are bad at the pod game and active trading, yet given buy-and-hold, index-like tasks they perform well—even beating indexes where most human managers fail.
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