Quant Invest in Chicago on June 26th 2012
Randy Saaf speaking on: Behaviorals – quantitative sentiment investing
For the first time in human history mass sentiment can be measured from Twitter and the social Internet. How to collect and normalize the data is the challenge. Applying well established behavioral economics best practices to avoid spurious relationships in this nascent field. Machine learning is the appropriate tool for model building. Thousands of inputs you get from the social Internet are too much for traditional factor modeling. This shifts the role of the quant from mathematician to computer scientist.
Predictive Analytics World in Chicago on June 25th 2012
Randy Saaf speaking on: Sentiment Investing – Above Market Returns Extracting & Analyzing Twitter & the Social Internet
For the first time in human history a collective measurement of sentiment can be taken from Twitter and the social Internet. The data is often free and available for everyone to see. The challenges for prediction is collecting, normalizing, and analyzing the unstructured data. AlphaGenius can describe our process of doing this for building investing models.
Battle of the Quants in New York on March 28th 2012
Randy Saaf speaking on: Quant Funds Trading on Sentiment, Does it Work?
A recent survey indicated that 30% of hedge funds are employing some type of sentiment analysis in their trading models. Many multi-factor based quantitative hedge funds are adding a sentiment factor to reflect how markets are reacting more often to headlines, fear and greed vs. fundamentals. Other trading strategies are going further and relying purely on sentiment to trade the markets. In this panel we go to the innovators in this space who use sentiment analysis to trade markets. We examine the successes and failures and find out how best to leverage sentiment to drive returns.
Text Analytics World in San Francisco on March 7th 2012
Randy Saaf speaking on: Behaviorals – Using Twitter & the Social Internet to Obtain Above Market Returns
Behaviorals is not an introduction to behavioral economics or about knowing yourself as an investor. There are lots of books on behavioral economics that give thorough analysis of why investors, as people, make irrational decisions and how to not let yourself fall victim to your own human emotions while investing. Instead, behaviorals is about studying other people as emotional investors and using text analysis of the social Internet to measure mass psychology to obtain above market investment returns.
Battle of the Quants in Hong Kong on December 14th – 15st 2011
Randy Saaf speaking on: Texts, Tweets, Twits – How is Market Sentiment Analysis of Value in Quantitative Trading
Quants are frequently reminded of the lack of a computers’ ability to interpret text news stories (as the human mind can) and have those stories reflected appropriately in the trading process. Significant capital and intelligence has been poured into developing news reading algorithms, measuring new social media interactions for sentiment and even creating information arbitrage strategies, all to gain predictive capabilities in market moves. Several solutions are generating significant success for quant funds. What is behind the technology and how can the solution enhance an existing model.
Academy of Behavioral Finance and Economics at UCLA Anderson School of Management on September 21st – 23rd 2011
Randy Saaf speaking on: Trading Strategies and Behavioral Finance
Behavioral economists struggle to make their concepts accepted in an economics profession dominated by the Efficient Market Hypothesis. In a similar fashion, behavioral investors struggle to make their concepts accepted in an investing world dominated by fundamental and technical analysis. Behaviorals is what AlphaGenius refers to as the study of achieving above market investment returns through mining the social Internet.
