We enjoyed an electric session this week with Bloomberg on what we used to call machine-readable news. Along with our own excellent webinar on Big Data last week – where we heard from, among others, Thomson Reuters Starmine’s Adam Baron on event-driven research – the seminar at Liverpool Street’s Andaz Studio offered some fascinating insight on how ‘news’ has been transformed to feed quantitative models for trading.
Hosted by the irrepressible Rob Passarella, who runs event-driven feeds for Bloomberg, the session explained the data vendor’s approach to generating news for consumption by computers, with fascinating presentations from Miles Osborne, senior research scientist, and Gary Kazantsev, head of machine learning R&D. As well as discussing how Bloomberg’s news services have been developing to fit the new quant requirement, the presenters explained the mechanics of the company’s recent partnership with Twitter. The volumes of data involved in breaking news of major events from Tweets truly live up to the Big Data name.
Even more exciting was a panel session featuring quants from QuantBridge, Man AHL and JP Morgan. Much of what was discussed was covered by a kind of Chatham House environment, but one highlight was when a panellist suggested that his group would consider job applications only from those completing their PhD’s now; anyone older is effectively past it from a tech/quant point of view!
The overall message – from the Bloomberg seminar and our own Big Data webinar – is that machine learning and related technologies are finally impacting how trading groups operate. The quant panel left no doubt that this kind of approach to capturing news to generate order indications is here to stay, which is encouraging to say the least.
For us, this adds more grist to the Intelligent Trading mill. Certainly, it wasn’t long ago that sessions on machine-readable news at our Low Latency Summits drew tepid interest from a largely sceptical audience. It seems that these technologies – call them what you may: predictive analytics, sentiment analysis – may have turned the page, and this surely will be a space we’ll be watching closely.
Expect to hear animated discussion of this kind of intelligent trading technology at our Intelligent Trading Summits. We finally have dates for our 2016 events, and are now putting together agendas, speakers and topics. Our London event will take place on February 4; New York will be May 24. If you are interested in speaking or sponsoring, or would just like to chat about ideas, please get in touch. We’ll have more news on our plans shortly.
Subscribe to our newsletter
