Chinese retail traders embrace DeepSeek in a nod to quants

By Samuel Shen and Tom Westbrook

SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - If you cannot combat them, articulation them, is the mantra among Chinese mom-and-pop investors who are embracing DeepSeek and different artificial quality tools, successful crisp opposition with past year's authorities crackdown connected computer-driven quantitative traders.

Online clang courses person mushroomed and grooming rooms are packed with retail traders anxious to bushed the marketplace utilizing machine models, arsenic the popularity of DeepSeek - itself backed by a quant money - changed not lone the marketplace trajectory, but the cognition of China's $700 cardinal hedge money industry.

The accelerated adoption of DeepSeek successful China's retail-dominated banal marketplace is besides prompting changes astatine brokerages and wealthiness managers, portion creating caller risks for investors successful a marketplace dominated and driven by small-time traders' currency flow.

"The aboriginal is the integer age, and AI volition beryllium vital," Hong Yangjun told a packed country of idiosyncratic investors learning to commercialized with AI connected a play successful February.

Just arsenic aboriginal warfare volition beryllium fought with drones and robots, the banal marketplace volition beryllium a battleground betwixt computers, the lecturers told the people successful an bureau successful downtown Shanghai.

Such piety is successful stark opposition to the nationalist outcry a twelvemonth agone against computer-driven quant funds, viewed arsenic "bloodsuckers" by retail investors, and blamed by regulators for contributing to marketplace unfairness and volatility.

The manufacture was besides the people of a authorities crackdown astir a twelvemonth ago, erstwhile the assemblage was worthy $260 cardinal by immoderate estimates.

Last month, however, investors handed implicit 15,800 yuan ($2,179.91) each for a play lecture by Mao Yuchun, laminitis of Alpha Squared Capital, connected however to commercialized stocks with AI, according to the organiser, who promoted the lawsuit by drafting attraction to Alpha Squared's geographical affinity with High-Flyer.

High-Flyer, based successful eastbound Hangzhou, is the hedge money down DeepSeek - the Chinese AI commencement up that stunned Silicon Valley with its cost-efficient ample connection exemplary and spurred a rally successful Chinese stocks.

Meanwhile, Chinese societal media is brimming with online courses teaching traders however to usage DeepSeek to measure companies, prime stocks, and codification trading strategies.

"Using quantitative tools to prime stocks saves a batch of time," said Wen Hao, a Hangzhou-based trader.

"You tin besides usage DeepSeek to constitute codes," said Wen, who uses machine programs to find the timing for buying and selling.

U.S. money giants including BlackRock, Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma person already been utilizing AI successful investing for immoderate time. Analysts accidental tiny plus managers and adjacent retail investors successful China basal to payment from the emergence of DeepSeek's open-sourced model.