The Next Big Source of Alpha: Your Phone?

A new alternative data platform aims to turn insights streamed from mobile phone locations into a source of returns for fund managers.

Could geolocation information gleaned from mobile phones be the next big source of alpha? At least one company is betting that it will.

Thasos, an alternative data platform founded out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed MIT Media Lab in 2011, is going live with a service offering insights culle…

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Hot jobs of the future: Machine learning, AI, robotics, and more

“Roughly 50 percent of all the jobs on the planet will disappear by the year 2025,” predicts futurist Thomas Frey, founder of the DaVinci Institute think tank.

While that claim might seem a bit overblown, it is clear that new technologies like robotics, self-driving cars, 3D printing, drones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality will create major upheavals in all sorts of labor markets, not just technology. (Think self-driving cars and ta…

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Top 3 Breakthroughs in Combating Financial Crime

AI and Analytics driven solutions have been widely adopted across different industries for various purposes. However, only a handful of banks around the world are working with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to improve their risk and compliance activities.

In times of political and economic change, financial crime and corruption tend to grow fast. The shock o…

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Buy Side Ramps Up Cloud Adoption

Asset managers are making significant investments in data, cloud computing, and emerging technologies to drive greater insights and growth, according to new research published by Sapient Consulting.

The research, conducted in conjunction with WBR Research, revealed where firms are currently investing their IT budgets, as well as how and where they anticipate IT spend will evolve over the next five years. Based on a survey of 99 senior decision m…

Sell Side: Relationships Rule

The role of the sales trader remains one of the most important in trading relationships.

And as Jason Radzik, Managing Director, Head of Americas Derivatives Execution & Clearing at BNP Paribas put it, the market color, expertise and support sales coverage supplies to the buy-side client is key to a firm’s success. Sales’ ability to cultivate existing relationships and forge new ones is as important as connecting pipes or fiber optics. The trend towards electronic trading is only becoming greater but relationship building is the driver to growing that part of the business.
“We’ve hired additional sales coverage who supplement our trading desk,” Radzik began. “There’s a growing trend on The Street where cultivating relationships is as important as connecting the pipes. The sales role is alive and very much needed these days.”

The robotic revolution of AI and machine learning

As financial markets become ever more unpredictable, the collection, aggregation, and use of accurate data is becoming crucial, and it is that data which is really the crux of this brave new technological world.

The use of predictive analytics, or predictive AI, is helping corporates and banks alike to get ahead in risk management at a time where market movement is increasingly defined by geopolitical risk.