Big data – Benefits Canada.com

Big data, technology changing the nature of investment HR

mschmit — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 04:27:27 +0000

With a rise in big data and artificial intelligence, institutional investors are starting to look for staff with different skills. Much of the success in the investment management industry depends on managers’ abilities to analyze information in a systematic way and generate actionable insights, says Jason Stefanelli, director and head of Canada at William Blair […]

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The benefits of crowdsourcing investment research

mschmit — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 05:13:22 +0000

There’s a crisis in financial research because of statistical shortfalls, says Marcos López de Prado, a professor of practice at Cornell University’s school of engineering and chief investment officer of True Positive Technologies. “When a journal receives a paper, they don’t know how many experiments the researcher has conducted and, as a result, they cannot […]

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Machine learning is the new world of statistics

mschmit — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 04:38:09 +0000

Traditionally, all finance students had to learn statistics, and, in the future, this will likely shift into finance students requiring machine learning, said John Hull, professor of finance and Maple Financial Group Chair in derivatives and risk management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “It’s not that our students are actually going […]

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Beware of tortured data

mschmit — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 04:50:28 +0000

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.” Opening the keynote address at the Northern Finance Association Conference in September with this quote by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase, Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke University, spoke about the challenges of using data empirically. He cited being careful about data selection, delegation, […]

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Learn how search terms reveal who we are at 2019 Benefits and Pension Summit

mschmit — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 05:00:43 +0000

How can search terms help predict elections? Do parents secretly favour boys over girls? For Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google and the author of Everybody Lies, the answer to these questions isn’t found in traditional polls commonly used in most sectors, but rather in the billions of Google searches people make every day. Exploring choice […]

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Big data helps asset management industry across value chain

mschmit — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 04:25:35 +0000

Across the entire asset management value chain, data is helping traditional managers improve, a new study by McKinsey & Company found. Data can improve investment performance by helping eliminate bias in decision making, discovering new sources of alpha through alternative data sets and enhancing the research process, the study said. But big data isn’t just […]

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Learn about new industrial revolution at 2019 Benefits and Pension Summit

mschmit — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 05:01:57 +0000

The industrial revolution has shaped the world, demonstrated by three dimensions: communications, energy and transportation, according to one futurist. However, the lifeblood of a new industrial revolution will be data, says Nikolas Badminton, futurist speaker, researcher and chief executive officer of Exponential Minds, noting all industries will be touched by the momentum this has created. “The signals of […]

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Tips for using big data to measure pension longevity risk

mschmit — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 04:54:44 +0000

While estimating the longevity of a pension plan’s membership isn’t a new concept, developments in using big data and new tools in predictive modelling could go a long way to making predictions more accurate. “Traditionally, most benefit plans were using standard mortality tables and not really differentiating how much longevity risk they had,” says Manuel […]

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The role of data in equities management

mschmit — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 04:22:43 +0000

While the role of data in equities management is important, human expertise is still key, according to speakers at the CFA Society Toronto’s 2019 equities symposium on Jan. 22. “If you want to beat the market as an active manager you have to believe you know something that the market hasn’t incorporated into prices,” said […]

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Combining big data and ESG ratings to find alpha

mschmit — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 03:17:06 +0000

In 2018, there have been over 250,000 unique English articles focused on ESG issues across 8,000 companies according to data from TruValue Labs. But how does public sentiment influence the market pricing of firms’ sustainability activities? Harvard Business School Professor George Serafeim explores the relationship between public sentiment and how markets value corporate sustainability activities […]

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