Be Water: An Evolutionary Proof for Trend-Following
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866915901576577024 |
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| author | Chen, Yijia |
| author_facet | Chen, Yijia |
| contents | The proliferation of diverse, high-leverage trading instruments in modern financial markets presents a complex, "noisy" environment, leading to a critical question: which trading strategies are evolutionarily viable? To investigate this, we construct a large-scale agent-based model, "MAS-Utopia," comprising 10,000 agents with five distinct archetypes. This society is immersed in five years of high-frequency data under a counterfactual baseline: zero transaction friction and a robust Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) safety net. The simulation reveals a powerful evolutionary convergence. Strategies that attempt to fight the market's current - namely Mean-Reversion ("buy-the-dip") - prove structurally fragile. In contrast, the Trend-Following archetype, which adapts to the market's flow, emerges as the dominant phenotype. Translating this finding, we architect an LLM-driven system that emulates this successful logic. Our findings offer profound implications, echoing the ancient wisdom of "Be Water": for investors, it demonstrates that survival is achieved not by rigid opposition, but by disciplined alignment with the prevailing current; for markets, it critiques tools that encourage contrarian gambling; for society, it underscores the stabilizing power of economic safety nets. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29593 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Be Water: An Evolutionary Proof for Trend-Following Chen, Yijia Physics and Society Computational Finance The proliferation of diverse, high-leverage trading instruments in modern financial markets presents a complex, "noisy" environment, leading to a critical question: which trading strategies are evolutionarily viable? To investigate this, we construct a large-scale agent-based model, "MAS-Utopia," comprising 10,000 agents with five distinct archetypes. This society is immersed in five years of high-frequency data under a counterfactual baseline: zero transaction friction and a robust Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) safety net. The simulation reveals a powerful evolutionary convergence. Strategies that attempt to fight the market's current - namely Mean-Reversion ("buy-the-dip") - prove structurally fragile. In contrast, the Trend-Following archetype, which adapts to the market's flow, emerges as the dominant phenotype. Translating this finding, we architect an LLM-driven system that emulates this successful logic. Our findings offer profound implications, echoing the ancient wisdom of "Be Water": for investors, it demonstrates that survival is achieved not by rigid opposition, but by disciplined alignment with the prevailing current; for markets, it critiques tools that encourage contrarian gambling; for society, it underscores the stabilizing power of economic safety nets. |
| title | Be Water: An Evolutionary Proof for Trend-Following |
| topic | Physics and Society Computational Finance |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29593 |