I'm sure it was profitable in keeping him busy during the pandemic. Not everything has to derive monetary value, you can do something for experience, fun, kick the tyres, open-source and/or philanthropic avenues.

Besides it's a low margin, heavily capitalized and heavily crowded market you'd be entering and not worth the negative-monetary investment in the short and medium term (unless you wrote AI in the title and we're going to the mooooooon babyh)

It was in the sense that I learned that trying to beat the market is fundamentally impossible/stupid, so just invest in index funds.