blogTrends @ O’Reilly Money:Tech 2008
19 February 2008The first annual Money:Tech Conference in New York was excellent. Almost every one of the dozens of presentation/panel sessions involved interesting, forward-looking work in finance, computing, or both. A couple of highlights:
Context is king - there seems to be increased emphasis on technology that puts information into context as a means to combat information overload and find alpha.
David Leinweber described how information on a breakthrough cancer treatment could have been been sourced months before it hit mainstream news and financial markets. The key (excerpted from David’s Nerds on Wall Street Blog): Obtain the “meta-knowledge†(e.g. in this case, the relationship between the vaccine name and the company that makes it) needed to interpret news in a trading and investing context.
Much of the work in this area involves mining massive amounts of unstructured data (web documents) to summarize, filter and otherwise analyze, not only to get to the right content, but to help the investor see it the way he or she wants it:
SkyGrid- uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms on news to track market sentiment, digesting detail to show broader trends.
InfoNgen - classifies and filters news, blogs, etc. to deliver relevant content in a way that’s specific to the investor’s preferences.
FirstRain - extracts patterns from web documents in a variety of ways that fit into the investor’s research process.
The other class of work being done to reduce overload through context involves contributions from individuals who supply information or help to interconnect it:
Wikinvest - users collaborate wiki-style to profile companies, and link them together through concepts (market trends) - features strong charting (wikicharts), a clever way to capture sentiment (bulls & bears), and soon will have quantitative modeling capabilities
Expert networks are heating up - Alexander Saint-Amand gave a compelling presentation of the value that Gerson Lehrman Group have pioneered in this area. Shortly thereafter Mike Gamson announced that a competitive offering, based on the strength of their 18M “attractive demographic” members, is coming soon from LinkedIn. Already-established Techdirt, having shown how expertise on blogs can evolve into an expert community, were also in the house.
Data, increasingly free, is becoming increasingly valuable - paradoxically, oversupply of open data is creating scarcity value within it. David Leinweber demonstrated several cases of this, including information-rich reports freely and easily obtainable from Edgar revealing how drastically Enron’s SEC filing activity differed from that of its peers leading up to the crash.
Thanks to hosts Tim O’Reilly and Paul Kedrosky for this. Let’s hope this kind of conference becomes a trend as well.
Mark
