Payless bankruptcy correctly predicted using WHOIS data. [Volmanac] Why discretionary hedge funds struggle to integrate their data scientists. [efinancialcareersBloomberg] Yodlee at odds with JPMorgan: “JPMorgan has been insisting in negotiations that it will provide easy access to its data only if technology companies agree not to sell the data to third parties”[NYTimes] Alternative data to eliminate 90K jobs and become a $7B industry by 2020. [efinancialcareers] VC panel on alternative data with Point72, Foursquare, et al. Investor use cases & process (9:10, 43:00), org structure & recruiting (25:10), privacy (37:10) [FirstMark Capital] How Citadel uses datathons to recruit data scientists and engineers. [Bloomberg] Why machine learning won’t replace the discretionary manager: "We're still quite a long ways off before machine learning is advanced enough to replace the discretionary fund manager because everything that we do is forward-looking, we're predicting structural breaks, political events...By definition, machine learning is a momentum concept…so it is always lagging." [CNBC] Bernstein tepid on AI driven funds: “While it has attracted a lot of attention, currently the AUM of AI specific strategies is very small compared with the total active fund industry. As they attract new entrants and assets these strategies might run into difficulties of scale and implementation. Also, as we discuss in this note it is not a panacea as there are hurdles of data mining and the likelihood that newly discovered "factors" may prove to be ephemeral. At some point they may well suffer a significant drawdown, especially if many funds are using similar data sets, which will be an ultimate test of their robustness and popularity.” [FT Alphaville]
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