The DeepMind Hedge Fund Myth: Why ‘DeepTick’ Died

At some point in 2023 or 2024, in a quiet corner of DeepMind’s London office, a group of researchers watched their model lines edge above a benchmark line on a trading backtest chart. In that moment, the DeepMind hedge fund myth basically wrote itself. Here’s where the story gets strange: those same models, according to Reuters’ reporting, sometimes beat the market in tests… and then the whole thing was shut down and folded back into more respectable AI work. TL;DR DeepMind ran a secretive internal trading project nicknamed “DeepTick” that, per Reuters, sometimes beat the market in tests — but never became a real hedge fund. The project died not because the tech failed, but because running a stealth Renaissance Technologies inside Google is a governance, legal, and reputational nightmare. The DeepMind hedge fund rumour went viral because it solves a narrative itch: we want neat stories about genius quants and villainous labs, not boring stories about risk committees. DeepMind hedge fun