Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Nerds on Wall Street
Math, Machines and Wired Markets
Additional Praise for Nerds on Wall Street "Most new technologies are exploited first by "alpha geeks," the folks with the skills to push the envelope. This is as true on Wall Street as it was on the web. David Leinweber was one of those alpha geeks, but is also the first to chronicle the innovation process from early adopter to mainstream acceptance." "Nerds on Wall Street is a thoughtful, funny, and comprehensive history of the overlooked role geeks have played in our financial markets from the earliest days of telegraph, to risk management systems in the current credit crisis. The book is an irreverent "I Was There" chronicle of how our financial markets were formed from silicon, savvy and software. Highly recommended." "For decades Dave has not only understood more investment technology than anyone, but with patience and a great sense of humor, he has made the effort to explain it to his less tech savvy friends. Nerds on Wall Street is a home run for us all." "Nerds on Wall Street is a wild, funny ride though the technological changes that underpin modern financial markets. You will find yourself laughing out loud at what could otherwise be a dry subject. And, if you’re not careful, you might even learn something!" "If you're interested in what computers are doing with your money, then this book is for you." "In David’s words, the stock market is a "victim not a cause" of the great mess of 2008. It’s refreshing to read a book with such insight during these difficult times. I applaud David Leinweber for this timely masterpiece." "Clear, light language and wry humor mask David Leinweber’s exhaustive compendium of technological innovations for and impacts on asset trading. Leinweber brings an entrepreneur’s experience and an academic’s perspective to financial technology; and has produced the definitive work, as up-to-date as it is encyclopedic." "Dr. Leinweber continues to be a patron saint of any nerd who stumbles onto Wall Street. Many of his most insightful ideas are here in this book, the utility of which are only matched by the humor of their presentation. As the markets have changed in 2008, the need to collect, process, and understand novel information sources has never been greater." "Thoughtful insights covering trading, investment practice and system design encased in humor by an expert in all four: a good and practical read." "David is one of the top practitioners in the fields of textual analysis and sentiment and its application to trading. Leveraging "smart" machines to parse and extract signal from massive quantities of textual data is hard, and David’s work has put him at the vanguard of the next wave of alpha generation."
—Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO O'Reilly Media
—Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed, Ten Asset Management and Kauffman Foundation
—Richard Rosenblatt, CEO, Rosenblatt Securities
—Richard R. Lindsey, Chairman, International Association of Financial Engineers; Principal, Callcott Group LLC
—Richard Peterson, MD, Managing Director MarketPsy Capital LLC; Author, Inside the Investor's Brain
—Bill Aronin, Co-founder Quantitative Analytics, Inc; Sr. Manager, Thomson Reuters
—David K. Whitcomb, Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Automated Trading Desk and Professor of Finance Emeritus, Rutgers University
—Jacob Sisk, Infoshock, Yahoo
—Evan Schulman, Founder, Tykhe, LLC.
—Roger Ehrenberg, Information Arbitrage, and IA Capital Partners
David J. Leinweber (Author), Theodore R. Aronson (Foreword by)
9780471369462, Wiley
Hardback, published 16 June 2009
400 pages
23.1 x 16 x 3.6 cm, 0.612 kg
Praise for Nerds On Wall Street "Leinweber leads his readers through a largely unexplored forest, turning over ordinary-looking rocks to reveal hidden colonies of peculiar creatures that feed on moldering mounds of numbers teeming with trailing zeroes. His book is absorbing, instructive, and very, very funny." "David Leinweber has been a pioneer in developing and applying advanced technologies in the capital markets. This book is a virtual tour de force survey of many of the key innovations over the past two decades, with key insights for the future. It is a highly engaging, insightful, and entertaining book for all investors who want to understand the increasingly important role of technology in the financial markets." "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." "Through the lenses of finance 'nerds,' Dave Leinweber recounts the quantitative and technological revolution in equity trading. The book is humorously written but it is serious and insightful. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of financial innovation and the evolution of the capital markets." "Finally, a book that rightly honors the pocket-protected, RPN-loving, object-oriented, C-compatible, self-similar Wall Street quant! This is a delightfully entertaining romp across the trading floors and through the research departments of major financial institutions, told by one of the early architects of automated trading and a self-made nerd." "David Leinweber is one of the great financial innovators of our time. David possesses a unique combination of expertise in the fields of money management, artificial intelligence, and computer science." "An important, accessible, and humorous guide to today's electronic markets. Like Capital Ideas mixed with Being Digital, as told by Steve Martin." "Slicing and dicing data to predict the future can get dicey. The Super Bowl market indicator holds that stocks will do well after a team from the old National Football League wins the Super Bowl. . . The "Sell in May and go away" rule advises investors to get out of the market after April and get back in after October. . . hundreds -- of Web sites hawk "proprietary trading tools" and analytical "models" . . . There is no end to such rules. But there isn't much sense to most of them either. An entertaining new book, "Nerds on Wall Street," by the veteran quantitative money manager David Leinweber, dissects the shoddy thinking that underlies most of these techniques." "One of the best reads that I have picked up in some time. It stimulated me about things in the market that I didn't know.... A wonderful book" "Where technology will take investing and trading in the future is anyone's guess. Yet, David J. Leinweber in his newly published book, "Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets," provides a glimpse of the direction. In his lively — alternately raucous and reverent, deriding and respectful — Mr. Leinweber recounts the history of how technology has transformed investing and trading through the people that developed ideas and pioneered applications, most famously in indexing, optimization and quantitative investing. . . The book makes one of the best reads of the summer — suitable for the beach as well as for a serious reader in suit and tie at the office." “Explains complex financial instruments in relatively simple terms, and the same goes for complex trading techniques. . . The average reader will learn a lot here. I recommend the book to those that want to dig into how the equity markets became more computerized.
–David Shaw, Founder, D. E. Shaw & Co.
–Blake Grossman, CEO, Barclays Global Investors
–Jane Bryant Quinn, Financial columnist, Bloomberg.com and Newsweek
–Andre F. Perold, George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking, Harvard Business School
–Andrew W. Lo, Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management
–Blair Hull, Founder, Hull Trading & Matlock Trading
–Frank Fabozzi, Yale School of Management, Editor, Journal of Portfolio Management
— Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal
—Vince Rowe Radium, Biz Radio
—Pensions & Investments
— Seeking Alpha
An intriguing look at how technology is changing financial markets, from an innovator on the frontlines of this revolution
Nerds on Wall Street tells the tale of the ongoing technological transformation of the world's financial markets. The impact of technology on investing is profound, and author David Leinweber provides readers with an overview of where we were just a few short years ago, and where we are going. Being a successful investor today and tomorrow--individual or institutional--involves more than stock picking, asset allocation, or market timing: it involves technology. And Leinweber helps readers go beyond the numbers to see exactly how this technology has become more responsible for managing modern markets. In essence, the financial game has changed and will continue to change due entirely to technology. The new "players," human or otherwise, offer investors opportunities and dangers. With this intriguing and entertaining book, Leinweber shows where technology on Wall Street has been, what it has meant, and how it will impact the markets of tomorrow.
Foreword by Ted Aronson xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv Part One 1 Wired Markets Chapter 1: An Illustrated History of Wired Markets 5 Chapter 2: Greatest Hits of Computation in Finance 31 Financial Technology Stars; Hits and Misses; The Crackpot as Billionaire; Future Technological Stars; Mining the Deep Web; Language Technology; EDGAR; Greatest Hits, and the Mother of All Greatest Misses Chapter 3: Algorithm Wars 65 Early Algos; Algos for Alpha; Algos for the Buy Side; From Order Pad to Algos; A Scientifi c Approach; Job Insecurity for Traders; So Many Markets, So Little Time; Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns; Models Aren’t Markets; Robots, RoboTraders, and Traders; Markets in 2015, Focus on Risk; Playing Well with Robots and Algorithms; Seeing the Big Picture in Markets; Agents for News and Pre-News; Algorithms at the Edge Part Two 89 Alpha as Life Chapter 4: Where Does Alpha Come From? 95 Alpha from Innovation; Alpha, the ARPANET, and the Internet; Summary Chapter 5: A Gentle Introduction to Computerized Investing 109 Indexing 101; Active Management; What Do Quantitative Managers Do?; Active Management on Steroids; Finding Information and Inefficiencies to Produce Alpha; All the Stocks, All the Time; Jumping the Trading Cost Hurdle; Putting the Pieces Together; Does This Really Work? Chapter 6: Stupid Data Miner Tricks 135 “Your Mama Is a Data Miner”; Strip Mining the S&P 500; Enough Regression Tricks; Is There Any Hope for Data Miners?; Summary (and Sermonette); Counting the Kiddies Part Three 149 Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification Chapter 7: A Little AI Goes a Long Way on Wall Street 159 Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence on Wall Street; AI People Can Use; Where’s the AI?; Real Charting; Virtual Charting; Descriptive Programming; Information Flows and Displays in MarketMind and QuantEx; Integration with Real-Time Feeds and Historical Databases; Composing Syntactically Bulletproof Programs; From Indications to Orders to Executions; Vapor No More; Future Plans for AI in Finance (in 1995) Chapter 8: Perils and Promise of Evolutionary Computation on Wall Street 181 The AI Spring?; Genetic Algorithms; Evolving Financial Models; An Early Lesson; Arbitrage and Predictive Strategies; Maximizing Predictability; Chromosomes for Forecasting Models; FitnessFunctions for Forecasting Models; Use of the GA for Coping with a Combinatoric Explosion of Models; Genetically Optimized Forecasting Models in Hindsight; Genetic Algorithm Warning Label Chapter 9: The Text Frontier: AI, IA, and the New Research 203 Ten Pounds of News in a Five-Pound Bag; Pre-News and Disintermediation; More Pre-News on the Internet Chapter 10: Collective Intelligence, Social Media, and Web Market Monitors 227 Investing with Crowds; Never Met a Data Vendor I Didn’t Like; Santa Claus Is Coming to Town; Counting Messages; Whisper Numbers—Ruined by Success; Monitoring Web Activity; More Web, More Warnings Chapter 11: Three Hundred Years of Stock Market Manipulations: From the Coffeehouse to the World Wide Web 253 The Power of Manipulation; A Classic Market Manipulation; The Very Model of a Modern Market Manipulator; Bluffing; How Communication Changes Market Manipulation; Anatomy of a Successful Manipulation; The Internet Era; Cyber-Manipulations; It’s Not Just Micro-Caps; Where Are We Headed? Part Four 273 Nerds Gone Wild: Wired Markets in Distress Chapter 12: Shooting the Moon: Stupid Financial Technology Tricks 279 To Protect and to Serve; Stupid Engineering Tricks; Stupid Financial Engineering Tricks; Take Them Out and Shoot Them; Tech Hall of Shame; Quants Who Saw It Coming Chapter 13: Structural Ideas for the Economic Rescue: Fractional Homes and New Banks 305 Chapter 14: Nerds Gone Green: Nerds on Wall Street, off Wall Street 327 Accelerating Innovation; From the Vault; Billions of Dollars and Millions of Tons of Carbon; Epilogue; Web Site Index 343 About the Web Site 353 NerdsonWallStreet.com
Subject Areas: Finance & accounting [KF]
