for what it's worth, I employ a convolutional network in order to predict co-integration properties of financial time series. I am disincentivized to go into details but I can tell you that every hedge fund, every bank, every buy side firm that I have friends working at is at the very least researching and experimenting with deep learning networks. Some are making serious inroads into utilizing every last bit of academic research in this space as well as pushing the limits further. Deep learning networks will revolutionize most every area of our lives in the next 10 years.
Never yet known a consistently profitable NN. But given time ? Lots of time imho
also if the input is always >> 1, the activation could always fire full.