Steve G. Steinberg (Steinberg Consulting)--Wall Street is largely populated by hackers. For the first time, however, hackers increasingly run the show. Major funds, like Renaissance Technologies, are run by ex-computer scientists, and they are among the hottest firms on Wall Street. How do these financial markets hackers think? Where do they look for data? How do they find an edge? We’ll hear about untangling web addresses, monitoring wireless traffic, and all sorts of leading-edge gambits for...
Larry Tabb (TABB Group)--Dark pools, algorithms, disappearing traders—the markets are being transformed by technology. Capital is increasingly disappearing into markets where immense computational power is required to find trading parties; and algorithms are replacing traders at many funds. Renowned Wall Street technology analyst Larry Tabb walks us through the numbers, showing what’s changing, how fast, and where technology is going in money and capital markets.
Martin Wattenberg (IBM Research )--More data is better, right up until it isn’t. Because after a while everything starts to disappear in data smog, with meaning lost in terabytes of data feeds and general information overload. How do you cope? Martin Wattenberg is a deep thinker in this area, having created one of the most widely known market visualization tools out there, SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. He will walk us through its creation, as well as the future of high-volume data visualizat...
Paul Kedrosky (Venture Capitalist), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)--The Web 2.0 wave is slamming into Wall Street. Sharing and social networks that once seemed antithetical to the zero-sum world of money are finding their places in investing. From social stock-picking, to new and tradable web-based data, to search, all of these Web 2.0 technologies are showing up on Wall Street. At the same time, Wall Street is pushing the edge in technologies in areas ranging from realtime to databases. ...
David Leinweber (Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley)--Technology has transformed investment and trading over the past 30 years. Markets have become computer networks, brokers are disintermediated by direct access and algo trading. Reporters are disintermediated when investors have access to primary sources at the same time they do. An ever larger view of exploitable economic and business activity can found on the web. Alpha innovators with the right technology are positioned to access, ana...
Steve Skiena (Stony Brook University)--Back in the 1980s, computer scientist and hacker Steve Skiena thought of a great way to beat jai-alai markets. Trouble was, it required faster computers and more data than he had at the time. That changed in the late 1990s, as Skiena exploited faster computers and web-based data to beat jai-alai markets, at least for a while. The story, which later became a self-authored book, is a fascinating one, sitting right at the intersection of money and technology...
Devin Wenig (Reuters Group PLC), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)--Reuters is the largest information services company on the planet. It sits on some of the most widely used data, but is that data’s time past? We’ll find out with the company’s Devin Wenig. He has the task of sorting out how and where to add web-based data to the company’s panoply of information services. What is Reuters buying? What will it build? Why? The company also has some major product-related product launches up its ...
Tony Berkman (Majestic Research ), Stephen Kaufer (TripAdvisor), Penny Herscher (FirstRain, Inc.)--The Web is like an infinite library. Prices, popularity, schedules, economic releases, weather data, ocean buoy heights—it’s all there, and often in realtime. It can feel like a data bonanza to more enlightened financial market sorts, with this profusion of data opening up myriad doors for new strategies that go far beyond the traditional reliance on company filings, earnings data, and quarterly ...
Randall Winn (Capital IQ), Robert Passarella (Bear Stearns), Kevin Pomplun (SkyGrid), Renny Monaghan (Salesforce.com)--The news and information business is changing rapidly. There is simply far more of it, with thousands of stories moving on major newswire on any given day, but there are also hundreds of market-moving niche sites and blogs. The result is risk and opportunity. On the one hand, what if you miss something important? It could hurt your portfolio, or damage your business. On other ...
David Friedberg (WeatherBill), Michael Ferrari (Weather Trends International), Robert S. Marshall (WeatherBug)--Everyone talks about the weather, including investors. Weather data isn’t just for weather geeks anymore, with it rapidly becoming a crucial source of data about retail trends, hurricanes, catastrophe bonds, event insurance, resort traffic, and on and on. And with the rise of web-based data and related services, it is finally cheap and realtime too. How do you separate the weather si...
