Is AI getting smarter, or information leakier?

If you’re a millennial or simply a fan of sci-fi, you likely remember 2010’s smash hit Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The story follows Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a professional thief who specializes in stealing privileged secrets from people’s minds while they dream. He uses advanced technology to enter another person’s subconscious while they’re asleep and take whatever information he wants. The problem DiCaprio’s character faces is that the line between reality and dreams become blurred, making it increasingly difficult to tell what’s real.

In many ways, especially for retail investors, that’s a picture of the modern market. A place where rumor, rhetoric, and anticipation can impact price action in unpredictable ways. When you add the ever-changing realities of our current political and macro-economic environment, the average Joe trader can feel like the odds are stacked against him. But there is one set of data that more often than not, cuts through the noise. And that’s the options market.

OPTIONS PROVIDE ACCURATE VIEWS

Options give us a more accurate picture of what the people who move the markets are actually thinking. Institutions and hedge funds make their living on positive returns. And while stocks can often be manipulated, options have a shorter shelf-life and are way less forgiving. And it’s there, in the nuances of the “put to call ratios” of the options market, that AI is quietly giving retail traders a helping hand.

Let me give you an example. OnOctober 9th, our Prospero.ai AI-driven Net Options Sentiment (a gauge of real-time, market options data and positioning), plunged from a bullish 33 to an ominously bearish zero in a matter of minutes. No headline. No Fed speech. No earnings shock. Just a massive bearish shift, seemingly out of nowhere. We saw the shift and sent an alert to our followers on X. At 10:30 a.m. the next morning, the numbers were still sitting at zero. We issued another alert warning that a possible market reversal might be brewing. Thirty minutes later, without any warning, President The President posted on social media about a looming trade war with China. The market fell off a cliff. 

Several fintech influencers noticed our early warnings and brought positive attention to it on X. Some were skeptical. @cyberdaddy mused, “Today’s selloff was 100% correlated to the China tariff threats, which were impossible for any person or algo to forsee….this was 100% random luck.” But the reality is that this wasn’t the first time our signals picked up on a major market move before it happened. The same pattern appeared in February when we saw SPY Net Options Sentiment lead the market down. We warned about it (“Don’t Trim the Hedges”) on March 3rd, just a few days before a historic market correction on “Liberation Day.” Twice now, the data revealed massive bearish options positioning before a drop in price.

WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING?

That brings us to an important question. If the data is picking up on signals before they’re public, what’s really happening? Is AI becoming smart enough to sense fear before humans can express it? Or is information, intentional or not, pulsing through back channels in a way once thought unimaginable 20 years ago?

In earlier eras, Wall Street’s most valuable information moved in whispers and was confined to smoke-filled rooms and the back nine of golf courses. Today, that same information moves with lightning speed through social media threads, encrypted group chats, and algorithmic pattern recognition. One whisper in the right chat room can ripple through a thousand terminals before the SEC finishes its coffee. A policymaker’s assistant, a janitor overhearing a senator’s conversation as he informs a colleague of a military contract, or heightened tensions in the White House can all lead to that same outcome. The lines between what’s public, private, and privileged are dissolving. So maybe the question isn’t whether AI is getting smarter or if those in the know are getting bolder. Maybe it’s that AI is hearing the market’s whispers more clearly than ever before.

Cyberdaddy backed off his protest of the validity of our system: “After doing some more research, I found that the de-risking and drop in options sentiment likely occurred for logical reasons that your model picked up on. The China export-control announcement on October 8th probably drove much of that defensive positioning among people paying attention to geopolitics (which major firms obviously do). My apologies for jumping the gun, I was wrong.”

THE CRUX OF THE ISSUE

This is the crux of the matter. Did a shift in the perception of risk regarding the situation with China lead to a massive hedge or bet against the QQQ (an index including 100 of the largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange, heavily weighted toward technology and growth)? Or were some more “in the know” about the political winds changing? How could we even begin to differentiate between the two?

By the way, the word inceptionisn’t just a movie title, it’s a word that means the beginning, or start of something brand new. And maybe we are at a point of inception. Because for the first time, AI isn’t just leveling the playing field; it’s changing who gets to play on that field in the first place.

George Kailas is CEO of Prospero.ai.

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