Money:Tech and the Holy Quest for New Alpha Sources
September 17th, 2007 | by PHC |O’Reilly announced a new addition to its conference roll with Money:Tech, which will take place in New York in February 2008. This event brings some excitement back to a market that’s been out of favor with Silicon Valley’s cognoscenti since the burst of the Internet bubble and the e-brokerage consolidation.
The theme Finding Alpha in a World of Commodity Data takes on an interesting spin in the current market context, where asset-backed securities – initially designed to commoditize risk and marketed with the blessing of agency rating – turned into an unfathomable risk factor, because of their opacity. Nevertheless, this is an exciting theme, and most likely a great opportunity to benchmark/ showcase services, such as deep search, blog analytics, and other esoteric weak signal technologies.
New sources of data (and an improved ability to process it) will provide a more real time grasp at developing trends at both macro and company levels, thereby providing opportunities for timing the market. However, this ever deeper reach into multiple sources of data will push the limits of the mosaic theory and might well collide with the expansive definition of insider trading under US law and blurrier line between public and non-public corporate information.
Other relevant links on Money:Tech: