Friday, July 28, 2017

Data: Mining the Jargon of Traders

From Institutional Investor:

Mining Data From Trader Jargon 
Cloud9 Technologies partnered with Google and Quantiphi to build a machine learning-powered voice transcription service for traders."
For forty years, traders have called each other up to price potential transactions. Now, a fintech firm wants to turn those calls into market data.

Through a partnership with Google and data science firm Quantiphi, New York-based Cloud9 Technologies has developed a transcription service that can translate verbal communications between traders into text data using machine learning. This data, the firm believes, can revolutionize compliance as well as offer new insights into trading activity.

“It’s going to be transformative for the industry,” said German Soto Sanchez, Cloud9’s global head of corporate development.

Although the majority of equities traders have shifted to electronic trading, the bulk of fixed-income transactions are conducted verbally, with traders calling peers at other firms to get price quotes and ultimately agree on a transaction. Roughly 90 percent of fixed-income trades are done this way, according to Cloud9.

But the advanced phone systems used for voice trading have not really changed over the last four decades, Sanchez said. He said Cloud9 was founded in an effort to modernize and improve these systems – an effort which now means recording and mining conversations for data.

From a compliance point of view, turning voice recordings into data makes it possible to “pick out patterns and even emotion,” said Jerry Starr, co-founder and CEO of Cloud9. “Hopefully, catch a trader before he makes a bad trade,” he said....MORE
Yeah but can you do this:
How To Turn Risk Management Into an Alpha Strategy