Building useful tools for finance professionals
We have made strides in both product design and technology development this year.
Our first product will be Exabel Intelligent Monitoring™, which sifts through enormous amounts of data from a broad range of sources, and identifies the situations that matter for your investments in real time. We use mathematics and machine learning trained on years of historical data, to analyse, compare and make connections in the data.
Think of it as having a room full of quantitative analysts working for you day and night.
Pilot partners secured
Some of the top investment communities in Norway have entered into pilot partnerships with us, and are actively involved in validating our solutions. In 2018 these partners will be the first to get access to the product.
Growing an excellent team
We are happy to have added four more people to the team this year, growing from five to nine people in our offices in Oslo.
- Asgeir Hoem joined as Head of Product Design.
- Erlend Aune joined as Director of Data Science.
- Andreas Aglen joined as Chief Operating Officer.
- Alberto Guillén will join as Research Scientist in April.
We have another seven full-time positions that we are actively working to fill. This will be a top priority going into 2018.
We have been watching the industry closely
It is an exciting time to be working at the intersection of finance and technology. This year we attended both the AI and Data Science in Capital Markets conference in NYC and NIPS in Los Angeles, as well as the C2I conference in Cambridge.
These are some of the most interesting stories we read in 2017:
- Hedge Fund Bosses Make the Case for Humans: Bloomberg posted several insightful long-reads in 2017. This one, about humans’ role in the future of investing, was one of their best, and one which aligns with Exabel’s view of the world.
- 5 misleading myths about alternative data: In a single blog post, Quandl’s Abraham Thomas debunks prevalent myths, while also making a strong case for using alternative data in the investment process. We plan on introducing alternative data sources into future versions of Exabel Intelligent Monitoring™, so we are following the space closely.
- AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch: We get excited whenever machine learning makes headline news, even when it’s not related to finance. In May, AlphaGo beat Go master Kie Jie, marking another breakthrough achievement for AI. This post excellently describes the rapid progress of reinforcement learning techniques.
- Eagle Alpha’s 12 case studies: 2017 was the year of large reports on data science in capital markets, with the likes of JP Morgan, Barclays, Deloitte, and Greenwich Associatesall publishing new research. One of the less circulated ones was Eagle Alpha’s Use Cases report. We like the way it summarises key insights from other reports, while using real-life examples to show the benefits of alternative data.
