Soon there will be no room for traditional players without any digital capabilities – markets will become increasingly efficient and the margin pool will shrink. Profit distribution will become skewed and if you aren’t the best, you won’t be able to compete. But technology has it's limitations and there is still very much a place for human traders – if you can’t apply the mathematics to the real world then the tools are useless. 

The Power of Technology stream will offer sessions for all levels, whether you want to go back to basics or discover out-there technology in the early days of implementation. Most importantly the sessions will go beyond theoretical discussion and showcase practical examples on how to get the most out of tech.

The tools available are increasing and improving daily, from quantum computers to machine learning - is there a place for humans in a world where technology is better, stronger and faster? Decide for yourself whether the end result will be collaboration or replacement:

• Move to hyper-awareness by building a system which can continuously check investments over a 24 hour period and monitor         portfolios in real time

• Use evolutionary computing models with constantly evolving parameters to adapt to changing markets

• Avoid alpha decay by creating dynamic systems from the beginning that will be able to adjust and give the best results

• Understand how to overcome the hurdles of using natural language processing for non-English data

• Train traders to work in harmony with machine learning – identifying one off events and teaching the program what this means in relation to the portfolio

• Use sentiment as a way of generating alpha – understand the polarity around information and what the direct and secondary effects are

• Find latent structures within raw, unlabelled and unstructured data

• Perform automatic anomaly extraction without the need for human intervention

• Discover a new level of untapped alpha by analysing text, images and speech

• Decode markets and find “invisible” patterns quicker than ever before 

• Leapfrog existing approaches and surpass the reliability and speed of traditional computing to arrange the best basket of assets and securities for shifting markets in real time

• Calculate a vast series of potential outcomes than binary-based computers with a probabilistic prediction

• Predict market patterns by processing speech data and discover changes before competitors

• Transfer learning by taking a general model trained on one language data set and fine-tune it for more specific examples for a more cost-effective and efficient approach

• Provide traders with important information to analyse from language processed so they can spot market trends faster

• Next-level tech stage: see live demonstrations of the latest bleeding-edge technology from quantum computers to deep learning algorithms

• The start-up platform: 10 companies, 4 minutes to impress, 1 winner

• Tech roundtables: pick the brains of tech providers during this hour session

Alternative data was the biggest buzz word of 2018 – now the buzz has died down, how helpful can alternative data sets really be? With advances in technology our data footprints are constantly expanding, and the amount of data available is growing at a rapid rate.

In the Big Data, Big Deal stream you’ll learn how to tackle data sets from the weird and wonderful to the traditional.

• Break down the Chinese wall and nurture a sharing culture across departments for a seamless amalgamation of internal data

• Discover alpha by utilizing exclusive internal content for a competitive edge at no extra cost

You’ve decided what data sets are worth your time, now you need to process it for insights. Is it better to obtain the data set raw or would a standardised set prove more useful? Hear a case for each side from two data scientists and decide for yourself:

• Can data be made more profitable by outsourcing the standardising and normalising of data?

• Does the structuring of data result in bias and a loss of unique insights?

• Is alpha lost when data is processed? Does raw data mean maximum alpha potential?

• Discover high quality data sets from reliable sources which can be processed to find big world changes and analysed to see how this effects markets

• Overcome barriers to expanding the scope of trading to serve globally by tapping into international news outlets

• Reduce false positives that would otherwise need to be manually investigated by using a news overlay

• Aggregate data using natural language processing to categorise and prioritise

• Navigate the regulation minefield including GDPR and understand which data sets are safe and useful

• Examples of unique data sets which have provided value

There is a major shortage of talent in capital markets. Gone are the days of economic graduates lining up to become a trader. The internal ecosystem of an average hedge fund is now a diverse pool of talented individuals from a wide variety of disciplines. It truly takes a village to raise the technology and analyse the data sets needed to maintain a competitive edge.

This year, AIDST is taking the conversation around recruitment one step further by inviting a steering committee of students to run the very first Talent War Summit – hear from HR executives, recruitment agencies and most importantly the talent themselves to find out how to snag the best and brightest.

• Appeal to mathematical and computational talent with an internal shake-up

• Understand your own unique offering and how this will appeal to prospective employees

• Offer training to senior executives and managers to help them understand each unique role and how it fits into the team

• Populate your team with a multitude of disciplines and talent to build the best processes and architecture

• Recognize the gaps in your organization and the specific capabilities needed to plug these gaps

• Ensure a higher percentage of female employees by forming stronger relationships with female led STEM groups at universities

• Run regular coding competitions for students to nurture the best talent from early on

• Encourage all employees to get involved in these projects – foster a collaborative environment between your traders and tech gurus from the get go

• Expand open-source projects to those with a financial background – find talented fund managers who can operate the powerful         tools available

• Recruitment fair: speak to the top recruitment agencies to discover how they can help you expand your team beyond the conventional

• Student-led roundtables: join talented PHD students from top universities for an in-depth frank discussion about recruitment, work-place culture and the roles that would attract them

• Hackathon: watch the brightest tech minds in action at AIDST all-day hackathon

• Women in finance brunch: women from the financial industry will be hosting a brunch for the up and coming women ready to break into the industry