Rats Are Better Futures Traders Than Humans, Says Possibly Mental Artist Michael Marcovici

Michael Marcovici, a Vienna-based artist, has devised a rather amusing and convoluted method of proving that your average futures trader has less nous about the markets they work in than a common or garden rodent.

He plotted the moves, up and down, of European futures markets into music (rather like this guy did). He then played the sounds to some lab rats, who had to predict whether the market would go up or down after each rise or fall. They hit a green button for “long” and a red one for “short”, rather than clutching a phone, waving their arms and shouting. If they got it right, they got food; wrong, they got electrocuted. Maybe a bit rich coming from an artist promoting Free Tibet in his other work, but let’s move on.

They were “trained up” by being played some futures market trends over and over, with them learning the outcomes; they were then put into some unheard scenarios, and blow me down, their performances “turned out to be comparable to those of the world’s best fund managers”, according to Marcovici. And when he cross-bred the best ones, they got even better (a bit creepy). “Unlike their human counterparts, they are not likely to be distracted from news or economy fundamentals, their own personal or their bank’s financial status”, he points out. So more grist for the theory that market crashes are thanks to the testosteroney culture rather than sound financial planning going inexplicably awry.

Marcovici now plans to create software that generates sounds that correlate to real time market changes; if he really has faith in his rodent underlings to be financial wizards, then he’ll get to follow their predictions with his own money. He’s a crazy guy actually – the creator of some sub-GCSE Art pieces, like the ”world’s most expensive artwork”, a billion dollars stacked on a pallet. It’s a comment on consumerism, yeah?

But he’s done some more interesting bits and bobs, like these pretty lightboxes, his interactive robo-chess set, and this rather cool multifunctional light-up keyboard. He wrote a magazine called Streetfashion that pre-empted the Sartorialist by a full decade, and created the biggest power-seller on eBay, generating €30m turnover a year, only to see it go bust and lose him all his money, all in the space of four years. Shine on your crazy diamond.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | February 19, 2009 3:24PM |