Wall Street & Technology is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Careers

12:10 PM
Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken
Commentary
Connect Directly
Facebook
Google+
Twitter
RSS
E-Mail
50%
50%

Welcome to the New Quants: Data Scientists

There's a lot of buzz around the role of the data scientist, which is wrapped up with Big Data and developing new approaches for analysis of financial markets.

Buy side firms are constantly looking for new ways to analyze data that can yield alpha, so don’t be surprised if the role of data scientist emerges at hedge funds and traditional asset managers.

“The area of data science is only three or four years old and it’s wrapped up with the buzz around Big Data,” said John 'Fawce' Fawcett, CEO of Quantopian, a community for algorithmic development.

On Thursday, BNY Mellon released a white paper on the transformational impact that data science will have on all phases of financial services.

Big data will lead to new approaches for analysis in all phases of financial markets, including asset management, research, analytics, asset allocation, trading, and risk management, according to the report.

[For more on Big Data Can Transform Global Financial Markets , see Greg MacSweeney's related story.]

“For the buy side, analytical and statistical analysis and then automating that analytic with software via machine learning is a burgeoning field across all different fields of analysis,” said Quantopian’s Fawcett. "And so, people are learning to incorporate data science in all areas on the buy side," said Fawcett.

While portfolio analysis and risk analysis has always been quantitative, the difference is that with the typical approach, quants develop models that explain behavior and then use that model to predict the future. But data science is more about mining data and hunting for interesting patterns. “The danger is over fitting. If you mine it enough you think you have something predictive, cautioned Fawcett.

Data science is important due to all the automated trading in the market, and all the trade flow and information that the exchanges yield has become saturated with machine learning and automated analysis, said Fawcett. Algorithmic trading is based on similar techniques, he notes.

What is a data scientist?

From Wikipedia:

>

Data scientists solve complex data problems through employing deep expertise in some scientific discipline. It is generally expected that data scientists are able to work with various elements of mathematics, statistics and computer science, although expertise in these subjects are not required. However, a data scientist is most likely to be an expert in only one or two of these disciplines and proficient in another two or three. There is probably no living person who is an expert in all of these disciplines — if so they would be extremely rare. This means that data science must be practiced as a team, where across the membership of the team there is expertise and proficiency across all the disciplines.

However, there may be a shortage of people with the right experience, since most people with experience in data science are either financial quants or people working at Internet companies like Google and Facebook.

As far as the future talent pool, aspiring traders will be those with a background in engineering, math and any of the hard sciences, as well as statistics and biology. All of these disciplines train people for the core areas of data science, while operations research is another popular academic area that drives people into this area, said Quantopian’s founder.

Sites like Quantopian are also helping to quant researchers to design their own algorithms.

The firm is developing new tools for quants to build algorithms on its site and new backtesting tools while the site is gearing up for live trading.

Last month, Quantopian went live with Fetcher, a backtesting tool. This lets someone take an algorithm and run it through historical paper trading and then live trading, explains Fawcett. Traders can take data from Quandl, a web site that provides four million data sets and integrates through Fetcher. It offers data in the CSV (common separate values) format, which is the most common data format for time series data.

One of the areas that it's trying to streamline is the gap between the quant research and the quant developer. Usually a quant researcher will hand over their research to a developer who writes code for placing the trades in another language, C, Java or Python. This can be a dangerous area— which Fawcett calls "the rewrite gap" — where bugs are introduced between the original idea and the implementation. "What we did is eliminate that. What you write for your backtesting and simulation is what we will run for your live trading," said Fawcett.

If data science becomes as big as people think, it could lead to new analytical approaches for analyzing torrents of data and new trading strategies, and data scientists could replace the old breed of rocket scientists on Wall Street.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
More Commentary
A Wild Ride Comes to an End
Covering the financial services technology space for the past 15 years has been a thrilling ride with many ups as downs.
The End of an Era: Farewell to an Icon
After more than two decades of writing for Wall Street & Technology, I am leaving the media brand. It's time to reflect on our mutual history and the road ahead.
Beyond Bitcoin: Why Counterparty Has Won Support From Overstock's Chairman
The combined excitement over the currency and the Blockchain has kept the market capitalization above $4 billion for more than a year. This has attracted both imitators and innovators.
Asset Managers Set Sights on Defragmenting Back-Office Data
Defragmenting back-office data and technology will be a top focus for asset managers in 2015.
4 Mobile Security Predictions for 2015
As we look ahead, mobility is the perfect breeding ground for attacks in 2015.
Register for Wall Street & Technology Newsletters
Video
Exclusive: Inside the GETCO Execution Services Trading Floor
Exclusive: Inside the GETCO Execution Services Trading Floor
Advanced Trading takes you on an exclusive tour of the New York trading floor of GETCO Execution Services, the solutions arm of GETCO.