Forward by Ted Aronson

Nerds on Wall Street Forward by Ted Aronson

Quantitative finance is not a topic usually associated with laughter. That is about to change with the publication of Nerds on Wall Street.

I was first exposed to Dave Leinweber’s wit when he delivered a speech entitled “Nerds on Wall Street.” I believe the event happened 20 or 25 years ago at a CFA Institute conclave. He was a dude obviously knowledgeable about the investment business, with impressive credentials (MIT, Harvard, RAND), alluding to technical aspects of numerical finance and getting into the minutiae of electronic trading. Certainly on Wall Street such qualifications aren’t unique. But, oh, how he delivered his message! His rapid-fire sense of humor was worthy of Henny Youngman or Shecky Greene.

Dave’s speech was augmented by equally hilarious visuals. (Unfortunately, some of Dave’s props are so rare they are no longer available. Rats!) On a particularly memorable occasion (one of ITG’s famous conferences), Dave did his shtick with a drummer punctuating his one-liners with rimshots. I kid you not! The crowd, loosened up by cocktails, was reduced to tears from laughter.

Now, decades later, I’ve heard Dave deliver numerous speeches and presentations with various titles. But they are always roughly the same subject — yup, you guessed it — “Nerds on Wall Street.” So sit back and be prepared to be educated by a master. The education will come with images, illustrations, and humor you will not soon forget. It will be love . . . at first sound bite!

Theodore R. Aronson
Managing Partner, Aronson_Johnson_Ortiz
Past Chairman, CFA Institute

>>>>>> READ MORE HERE < <<<<<<

Wall Street Analytics

• Sitemap (>>>>>> READ MORE HERE < <<<<<< )
• Chapter 11 – Three Hundred Years of Stock Market Manipulations (300 Years of Stock Market Manipulations - From the Coffeehouse to the World Wide Web's Stock Manipulations In previous chapters, we saw that many of the changes in securities markets brought about by information technology in general and the Internet in particular are positive, democratizing access to markets and information. We also saw that technology is [...])
• Part 3 – Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification (Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification in Financial Markets Securities Markets are Machinery Now. This raises the question of how to best participate in the world’s new wired markets. People who use information technology most effectively will be rewarded. Artificial intelligence (AI) as an academic discipline began at the famous 1955 Dartmouth conference organized by John McCarthy from Stanford [...])
• Chapter 09 – The Text Frontier – AI, IA, and the New Research (Hunting Investment Alpha and Trading Alpha from Online News, Social Media, and Rumors Alpha hunters are always looking for new territory. When a strategy becomes known and used by too many players, the collective market impact of getting in and getting out will squeeze out all the profit juice, and only the lowest-cost transactors (large sell-side [...])
• Chapter 12 – Shooting the Moon – Stupid Financial Technology Tricks (Stupid Financial Technology Tricks and Global Economic Collapse Like many others from the stock side of greater Wall Street, I felt blindsided by the events of 2008. “Blindsided” is actually a gross understatement; I felt like the guy who comes home and finds the neighbors were running a meth lab that has exploded and flattened the [...])
• Chapter 14 – Nerds Gone Green – Nerds on Wall Street, off Wall Street (Clean Energy and Nerds off Wall Street This book closes with another chapter that, like the previous two, I didn’t expect to be writing. Recent headlines (Wall Street layoffs could reach 200,000, Citigroup is cutting 50,000 jobs) imply that many nerds on Wall Street (NOWS), mostly innocent bystanders in the meltdown, may soon find themselves on [...])
• About (David Leinweber is a Haas Fellow in Finance at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and founding Director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at Berkeley. He is the founder of two pioneering financial technology firms and successfully managed multibillion-dollar institutional portfolios for many years. Dr. Leinweber has consulted, published, and lectured widely [...])
• Part 4 – Nerds Gone Wild – Wired Markets in Distress (Financial Nerds Gone Wild - Global Markets in Distress The original plan for this book stopped after the three parts that you’ve just read. These parts are about how markets became machines, and about using more machines to pick stocks and trade them electronically, bringing in an assortment of nifty ideas from finance and computer science [...])
• Praise for “Nerds On Wall Street” ("Leinweber isn't half as crazy as people said! He foresaw the profound change that wired technology would bring to markets (robots trading millions of shares in six milliseconds). Now he nails the Stupid Financial Engineering Tricks that dumped the markets, and offers his patented, sound insights on how the nerds will help bring us back." [...])
• Overview of “Nerds on Wall Street” (Technology has transformed global markets, but this is nothing new. Markets have been shaped by machinery for hundreds of years, and this continues at a rapid pace today. Author David Leinweber—a computer scientist who accidentally stumbled upon Wall Street and became an innovator in the application of modern information technology in trading and investing—is a well-qualified [...])

• Alpha as Life (Passive Investing - Active Investing - Alpha Returns Index funds are passive investments; their goal is to deliver a return that matches a benchmark index. The Old Testament of indexing is Burton Malkiel’s classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street, first published in 1973 by W.W. Norton and now in its ninth edition. For typical individual [...])
• Wired Markets ( Financial Markets - Electronic Markets Not too long ago, going to a stock market meant you would meet lots of new people who were energetically shouting, running around, and making a mess with great quantities of paper. No more. Visiting a financial market now is more like visiting a telephone exchange. It can be a wild ride versus parking your cash in a few money market funds. Computers and network gear [...])
• Nerds Gone Wild – Wired Markets in Distress (Financial Nerds Gone Wild - Global Markets in Distress The original plan for this book stopped after the three parts that you’ve just read. These parts are about how markets became machines, and about using more machines to pick stocks and trade them electronically, bringing in an assortment of nifty ideas from finance and computer science [...])
• A Little Artificial Intelligence Goes a Long Way on Wall Street (A Little AI Goes a Long Way on Wall Street: Artificial Intelligence and Securities Trading “If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.” This is a history and technical overview of one of the earliest artificial intelligence re (AI), and is a far cry from simple financial planning software [...])
• Collective Intelligence, Social Media, and Web Market Monitors (Web Market Monitors and the Impact of Social Media on Financial Markets "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls." — Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence Opinions vary widely on the value of collective wisdom, with ample supporting evidence both for and against. The Internet has many positive examples: The collective ratings [...])
• Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification (Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification in Financial Markets Securities Markets are Machinery Now. This raises the question of how to best participate in the world’s new wired markets, and this is anything but personal finance software. People who use information technology most effectively will be rewarded. Artificial intelligence (AI) as an academic discipline began at the famous 1955 Dartmouth conference organized by John McCarthy from Stanford [...])
• AI, IA, and the New Research (Hunting Investment Alpha and Trading Alpha from Online News, Social Media, and Rumors Alpha hunters are always looking for new territory. When a strategy becomes known and used by too many players, the collective market impact of getting in and getting out will squeeze out all the profit juice, and only the lowest-cost transactors (large sell-side [...])
• Stupid Data Miner Tricks (To Err Is Human. To Really Screw Up, You Need a Computer. — Popular Campus T-shirt, circa 1980 Stupid Data Miner Tricks in Quantitative Finance This chapter started out over 10 years ago as a set of joke slides showing silly, spurious correlations. Originally, my quantitative equity research group planned on deliberately abusing the genetic algorithm (see Chapter [...])
• Greatest Hits of Computation in Finance (Computational Finance, Stock Market Analysis, and Investment Trading "A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage." - Robert McNamara The Journal of Portfolio Management (JPM*) is one of the more upscale investment management and financial articles publications around. For $500 a year, you get [...])
• An Illustrated History of Wired Markets (An Illustrated History of Wired Capital Markets "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long." -- Ogden Nash This chapter is based on a number of ever-evolving dinner and lunch talks I have given over many years, all called “Nerds on Wall Street" irrespective of their actual subject. Many financial conference [...])
• A Gentle Introduction to Computerized Investing (Computerized Investing, Index Funds, Quantitative Investing, and Active Management “Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.” — Hacker proverb The beginning of index investing in the 1970s was the result of a convergence of events, one of those ripe apple moments. Institutional investors began to use firms like A.G. Becker to actually [...])
• Three Hundred Years of Stock Market Manipulations (300 Years of Stock Market Manipulations - From the Coffeehouse to the World Wide Web's Stock Manipulations In previous chapters, we saw that many of the changes in securities markets brought about by information technology in general and the Internet in particular are positive, democratizing access to markets and information. We also saw that technology is [...])