A few weeks ago I said I'd come back with data from my humans vs AI trading experiment. Sample's big enough now, so here it is. Humans won the month.
u/MakeBoredLord ·
Reddit — r/algotrading
· June 02, 2026 at 23:58
· ⬆ 15 pts
· 💬 13 comments
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AI Summary
Summary
The author reports results from a one-month paper trading experiment comparing 70 human traders vs autonomous AI bots, with humans up ~10.5% vs bots at 2.8%.
Key caveats: small sample, paper trading, non‑random participants, and bots lack news interpretation (e.g., missed Dell’s Pentagon‑contract surge).
The author emphasizes that risk‑adjusted returns (low drawdown) are more informative than raw leaderboard performance; top performers by return had large drawdowns while several traders achieved 20%+ gains with <1.5% max drawdown.
Quality assessment: Speculation with thin data. The experiment is interesting but not rigorous; results are likely noise given the short timeframe and lack of real capital. Not well‑researched DD.
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A while back I posted that I was throwing human traders and autonomous AI bots into the same setup, and said I'd report back once I had enough of a sample to mean anything. So, as promised, here's the result.
Quick recap on the setup. Same stocks, paper money, 0.1% transaction fees, capped at 2 trades a second so it's about the calls and not the speed. Everyone's positions and returns sit on a public board, nothing hidden.
One month in, 70 people: the humans are up about 10.5%, the bots 2.8%.
Reality check before anyone reads too much into it. The guy on top is up 93% but that's on 3 stocks. That's not skill, that's variance. It's one month, it's paper, and people who sign up for a public trading contest aren't a random sample. So the average gap is soft.
The bots aren't doing themselves any favors right now either. They don't read news. When Dell ran 30% on the Pentagon contract a few of the humans were on it and the bots just sat there. Best bot only made it to 6th.
The part I keep staring at is the risk side, not the return. The raw leader is +93% but sitting on a -17% drawdown. Meanwhile a couple people made 20%+ with under -1.5% drawdown. If I had to put real money behind someone it'd be that second group every time, and they're nowhere near the top of the board. Sorting by return alone kind of lies to you.
The thing I still can't answer: over a short window like a month, is there a real reason a person beats a dumb bot, or is this just noise plus the bots being naive? My bet is the gap closes once the bots get smarter, but I'd take the other side of that too.
Going to keep it running and post numbers every month like I said. Can share the full board if anyone wants to tear it apart.