Numerai

Both. The Numerai Tournament is a public ML competition where data scientists submit predictions and stake NMR on their models. Behind the scenes, Numerai Global Equity runs a real hedge fund that combines the best submitted models into a meta-model and trades equities at institutional scale. The fund has been live since 2016. Retail participants don't invest in the fund directly — they compete in the tournament for NMR rewards.

Realistically, most data scientists lose money staking NMR, especially when starting out. Top performers can earn double-digit percentage yields on their stake during good periods, but burns are equally common in bad periods. Treat Numerai as a skill-building and experimentation platform, not an income source. The payout structure is designed to reward long-term model quality.

Gradient boosted trees (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost) have historically dominated, with neural networks and ensembles gaining ground. The community publishes public notebooks and baselines that routinely place in the top half of the leaderboard. The real differentiator is feature engineering, era-aware training, and managing the correlation-to-meta-model trade-off. Creativity and robustness beat raw compute.

NMR is a utility token required for staking — not a conventional investment. Its price is driven by tournament demand, token burns, speculation, and broader crypto cycles. Numerai periodically burns NMR from poorly performing stakes, which creates deflationary pressure, but prices remain volatile. Treat NMR exposure separately from your view of Numerai as a company.

Instead of raw fundamentals or prices, Numerai provides hundreds of numerical features with meaningless names (feature_1, feature_2, ...) and a target that's some transformation of future returns. The idea is to remove survivorship bias and prevent participants from leaking outside data. You can't apply traditional finance intuition — you're forced to do pure statistical learning.

Yes. The tournament is free to enter and NMR staking is framed as performance-based rewards, not an investment security. Numerai is based in San Francisco. That said, NMR is an ERC-20 token and US users should check their state tax rules — staking rewards and burns may be taxable events. Consult a tax advisor for specifics.

The main Tournament uses Numerai's encrypted, era-based dataset — you train on obfuscated features. Numerai Signals lets you submit predictions on real, raw tickers using any data you bring yourself (fundamentals, alt data, price history). Signals is more flexible but also more competitive since participants can use whatever edge they have. Both contribute to the live meta-model.