Never Mind Bitcoin. China Loves AI Stocks

Future looking bright for active management

FinTech Start-Up ForwardLane’s New APIs for Personalized Insights

Sophisticated cyber threats and being ready for GDPR are major concerns for finance sector IT pros

Automation Will Create More Fulfilling Work

Facebook to demote posts fishing for Likes

Generational Tech Shift to Transform Trade Lifecycle

Today in Technology: The Day the Horse Lost Its Job

‘Decision intelligence platform’ Element Data raises another $2.6M to fuel growth

…ofit estimates. And yet it’s one of the hottest stocks in China, gaining 117 percent this year as of Dec. 18, thanks to the latest investment craze sweeping the country’s $7.5 trillion equity market:. Iflytek and other AI-related companies are dominating gains among large-cap Chinese stocks. The buying frenzy has added $61 billion of market value to China’s five most popular AI plays, vaulting some into the ranks of the world’s most actively traded securities. BOE Technology Group Co., a Beijing-based maker of LCD panels that’s developing a system to help drivers avoid traffic accidents, had… 2017-12-20 00:00:00 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/never-mind-bitcoin-china-loves-ai-stocks : “AI-related companies are dominating gains among large-cap Chinese stocks…” Hmmm. Makes one wonder what sort of classifications would allow you to identify a company as “AI-Related”. Our industries are categorized and standardized. For example, Moriningstar uses 11 standard classifications: Basic Materials, Communication Services, Consumer Cyclical, Consumer Defensive, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Industrials, Real Estate, Technology, Utilities) Do these still make sense to you? Where does Amazon properly fit? Are they a Consumer Cyclical because they are a retailer? Should they be considered Technolgy because they host computers? Maybe you as an algo creator or data scientists should think in terms of creating your own classifications based on what the company is doing today. What companies fall into your category of “AI-Related”? How are they doing in comparison to other companies that haven’t launched AI-Realted projects? Looks like there is an opportunity here for you to seek alpha!… said Keith Lewis, head of Americas for T. Rowe Price Group Inc.’s global investment services division, Baltimore. Technology on the rise Industry insiders also foresee technology — everything from— will play a significantly increased role within money management. “is incredibly important. Likewise, with risk analytics to construct portfolios,” said Geraldine Buckingham, BlackRock (BLK) Inc. (BLK)’s global head of corporate strategy in New York. “Every asset manager has to consider how the role of technology plays into their business,” she added. … 2017-12-25 00:00:00 http://www.pionline.com/article/20171225/PRINT/171229922/future-looking-bright-for-active-management?google_editors_picks=true : Quantitative portfolio managers have always relied on technology and innovation. We have seen portfolio managers move from using Bloomberg terminals and excel spreadsheets 20 years ago to using Jupyter Notebooks, Python, and sophisticated data science techniques today. Any money manager who isn’t using innovative data science into their daily jobs is likely to fall behind on their ability to keep up with changing markets. The recommendation to diversify into alternative investments in this article provides an interesting and compelling argument. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in one’s portfolio is a great idea. We strongly believe that portfolio managers should add technical and quantitative skills to their personal skills portfolio to help them grow in capabilities to serve their investors.…FinTech Start-Up, ForwardLane’s New AI APIs for Personalized Insights ForwardLane, a FinTech start-up based in New York City, is a next generation(AI) company using machine learning to aggregate and scale firm-specific content, market data news, investment research, product materials, and strategic analytics for financial professionals to deliver personalized stories for their clients. ForwardLane’s two configurable APIs leverage natural language processing and deep learning AI for advisory, sales and distribution professionals. The first… 2017-12-20 00:00:00 http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2017/Dec/20/fintech-start-up-forwardlanes-new-apis-for-personalized-insights/ : At the Newsweek AI conference in early December our CEO pointed out that there are hundreds of Alternative Data (AltData) providers and the number keeps growing. Using natural languge processing to develop trading signals from written and spoken content is on the increase. Numerous data scientists are using some of these AltData sources in their trading algorithms already.…ted to modernisation. Respondents were also asked to rank the relevance of various emerging technologies, and cited Intelligent Process Automation as the most useful to their business, followed by(35 per cent) and Predictive Modelling (33 per cent). Blockchain ranked lower in terms of perceived relevance (25 per cent) and was only currently used by a fifth of those surveyed within their organisation. Fintan Galvin, chief executive officer at Invotra, says: “It’s clear from our study that finance technology professionals understand the need to drive change. But, they are charged with pr… 2017-12-21 00:00:00 http://www.hedgeweek.com/2017/12/21/259617/sophisticated-cyber-threats-and-being-ready-gdpr-are-major-concerns-finance-sector : Cyber threats aren’t going away. This has been a major initiative for the financial industry over the past 5 years and will continue to grow.…cale unemployment. In fact, SpaceX and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, along with Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have expressed such concerns. Last month, amidst North Korean tensions, Musk tweeted that(AI) posed a greater risk than the country’s nuclear capabilities. This is not the first time Musk has voiced caution on the topic; he’s repeatedly said that AI and automation are the “biggest risk we face as a civilization” and that “robots will do everything better than us.” In response, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has challenged Musk, calling “people who are naysayers and try to drum up these… 2017-12-25 10:56:05-05:00 http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/12/automation-will-create-fulfilling-work/ : Fearing innovation has never helped grow an economy. We all value the innovations that advance our society. Yes, in some cases that technology is a “job killer” but at the same time, it opens opportunities in other areas. I was recently reminded of how innovation changed the world in watching Hidden Figures. The movie showed the introduction of the computer to NASA. While the mathematicians could have resisted and complained about the “job-killing” possibilities of the computer they didn’t. They saw that the computer brought opportunity. With a little re-tooling, a little effort, and without fear they learned the new skills needed to be valuable. Robots may do some things better than us. Ok. We all know that. So What? The rate of change is ever increasing. Let the robots have the old stuff as we focus on the future! Robots are incapable of automating innovation.… Facebook worries it might be bad for you, adds a mute button “To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform amodel that can detect different types of engagement bait,” the company said in a blog post. “Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed.” The company said it will have stricter demotions for repeat offenders. It added that page administrators looking to increase brand reach on the site should “focus on posting relevant and meaningful stories.” The update will be rolled out over … 2017-12-18 00:00:00 http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/18/technology/facebook-spam-posts/index.html : Nice. Hope that their machine learning and data science team have truly found a way to have a more authentic user engagement. Did you notice the link to the previous link? In this case Facebook has created new opporutinities using AI. The jobs created here didn’t exists last year. Learning how to use big data to improve the user experience is a high growth job opportunity.…tion of new technologies. As global financial markets continue to evolve, the real opportunities are yet to be delivered in transparency and efficiency for investors.” Distributed ledger technology,, portfolio optimisation techniques and the cloud are being used today but the paper said the challenge for markets and policy-makers is to harness this potential while managing its new risks. “Neither legacy systems nor policy inertia should be allowed to stifle this generational opportunity,” added NEX. Mark Whitcroft, founding partner at venture capital firm Illuminate Financial Management, s… 2017-12-18 03:39:54+00:00 https://marketsmedia.com/generational-technology-shift-transform-trade-lifecycle/ The idea of using best of breed components to put together a trading system, or a regulatory system isn’t new. Making use of third-party components without violating license agreements or intellectual property is going to be a real challenge in our trading industry.…erviced cars and that utilized motorized vehicles for transportation and delivery. [17] There are interesting insights to be gleaned from the shift from horses to automobiles. As with automation andin our own day, it was a shift driven by new technology. But it wasn’t driven by technology alone, and its ultimate impact in many ways was by no means predictable at the time. As one author has noted, what appears today as obvious – the transition from horses to cars – was in many respects far less than inevitable. As she points out, “the replacement of animal power took a particular form that … 2017-12-21 00:00:00 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/today-technology-day-horse-lost-its-job-brad-smith/ Another historical reference, written rather nicely, to remind us that the innovations caused by AI and Big Data shouldn’t be feared and should be embraced. Plus, who can resist reading an article that includes firemen and horses?…n Element Data is now $7.8 million. The fresh cash will help the year-old company increase sales and marketing efforts for its flagship product, Decision Insights Computing Engine (DICE), which usesand machine learning to help people make decisions based on a broad range of criteria. It’s been a busy 2017 for Element Data, which bought three companies this year and now employs 25 people. In April, it acquired the technology and team of PV Cube, a Seattle machine learning startup led by two vets of Microsoft Cortana and Bing. In October, it bought the assets and patents of BehaviorMatrix, a… 2017-12-24 20:05:46+00:00 https://www.geekwire.com/2017/decision-intelligence-platform-element-data-raises-another-2-6m-fuel-growth/#disqus_thread : We wonder what sort of AltData is available from them. Is anyone in the crowd interested?