Wall Street’s Top Trader Has No Pulse

June 21, 2025

Wall Street’s Top Trader Has No Pulse

BY KEITH KAPLAN
CEO, TRADESMITH

It’s the largest haul in hedge fund history…

In 2022, while most investors were nursing double-digit losses, Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund took in $16 billion in profit.

That’s about $9.7 million every hour the market was open – more than most folks make in a lifetime.

This record-breaking haul didn’t come from a hot tip… or a lucky “big short.”

Instead, Citadel built a machine that could out-trade the world.

You see, most of Citadel’s portfolios aren’t run by humans – they’re run by systematic models and machine learning, a powerful branch of AI.

To be clear, Citadel’s trading is not just assisted by machines. It’s run by them, end to end.

That old image of a trader – a guy in a suit and suspenders, watching over a bunch of charts, tickers, and newsfeeds – is headed for the history books.

And it’s not just Citadel that’s using AI systems to manage vast sums of money. So is the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock.

Its AI-powered Aladdin system (which stands for Asset, Liability, and Debt and Derivative Investment Network) manages risk and decision-making across $21 trillion in assets.

That includes $10 trillion in assets BlackRock manages as well as the assets of clients such as Apple, Google, and the World Bank.

To put that in context, globally there is an estimated $100 trillion in assets under management. That means 1 in every 4 investment dollars on earth flows through Aladdin’s “brain.”

Why am I telling you this?

As Ken Griffin put it: “The role of human discretion in trading is diminishing. The future belongs to those who can build the best models.”

Until now, these kinds of models were the exclusive domain of Wall Street giants. But that’s about to change.

Thanks to the biggest breakthrough so far in our 20-year history at TradeSmith, self-directed investors like you can now tap into the power of AI-assisted trading.

It gives individuals a fighting chance in a market increasingly dominated by hedge funds, institutions, and algorithmic trading.

And hands down, it’s the most exciting piece of software I’ve worked on in my 25-year career.

I’ll be getting into all the details, on camera, on Wednesday, June 25, at 10 a.m. ET. So, make sure to join the early preview list here.

Then read on to see why attending could be a game-changer for your own wealth-building goals.

Do You Fall Into These Psychological Traps?

The No. 1 enemy of successful trading is human emotion.

Fear, greed, hesitation. These aren’t just buzzwords – they’re the psychological traps that cause folks to miss opportunities, panic sell, or hold on too long.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Every year, market research firm Dalbar publishes a report on investor behavior called Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior.

It analyzes how individual investors perform versus the markets. The goal is to measure the impact of investor behavior on returns – and it’s always a sobering read.

In April, Dalbar released its latest report, which covers 2024. And it showed that the average stock market investor earned 16.5% last year compared with the S&P 500’s 25% return.

That gap is the fourth largest underperformance since Dalbar began tracking investor behavior trends in 1985.

What accounts for this woeful underperformance?

The report cited nine types of behavior that plague investors…

Loss aversion – expecting to find high returns with low risk
Narrow framing – making decisions without considering all implications
Mental accounting – taking undue risk in one area and avoiding rational risk in another
Diversification – seeking to reduce risk, but simply using different sources
Anchoring – relating to familiar experiences even when inappropriate
Media response – the tendency to react to news without reasonable examination
Regret – feeling too negatively after making a mistake
Herding – copying the behavior of others, even in the face of unfavorable outcomes
Optimism – the belief that good things happen to them, while bad things happen to other people

Now, I’m not saying you fall into all nine of these traps. But if you’re anything like the average investor, chances are a few will sound familiar.

And as Dalbar has shown year in and year out, that hurts your returns.

But AI doesn’t suffer from these behavior problems.

AI Doesn’t Flinch

As the folks at Citadel and BlackRock know, AI doesn’t flinch

It doesn’t enter a trade because of FOMO…

It doesn’t bias its decisions based on optimism, pessimism, or any other unhelpful human emotion.

And it doesn’t get rattled when the market opens red.

It simply follows the data.

And unlike a human trader, AI doesn’t sleep, take breaks, or need a vacation.

Instead, it constantly scans the markets, analyzing millions of data points, backtesting strategies, and adjusting in real time.

Something no human – no matter how skilled – can do with the same level of speed and accuracy.

That’s why, by leveraging AI, you can start to level the playing field with elite Wall Street firms.

And it’s why my team and I at TradeSmith are releasing a powerful new AI tool that can pinpoint a stock’s “profit window” – the ideal timeframe to trade a stock on any given day.

It’s engineered on over 120 million data points, including…

2 million historical price outcomes across more than 2,400 stocks over seven years
9 million daily forecasts that model price movements across a 21-day horizon
Tens of millions of “validation” runs, which refine accuracy and confidence with each new day of data

And the results are stunning.

In backtests, this tool identified time windows where stocks surged so fast, it was like compressing four, eight – even nine – years of market gains into just a few weeks.

Of course, seeing is believing.

That’s why I’ll be demonstrating this new proprietary AI tool, on camera, during my presentation next Wednesday.

I’ll also be passing along the names and tickers of three new opportunities for July 1 that could each shoot up 100% or more in days.

So, if you want to be among the first to see this new AI in action…

Here’s that link again to join our early preview list.

While you’re there, you can try TradeSmithGPT for yourself – for a limited time.

Wall Street’s Top Trader Has No Pulse