In various forums members have provided a link to ... SW That Will End The Era Of The Quants.
Powerhouse investment banks - along with titans of the fund management industry - are turning to the cloud to unlock powerful supercomputing capacity that will end their reliance on Excel and give them the tools to compete the "quants" that have taken over the business in the last decade.
I do not want to criticize this but challenge: first by recalling The Cloud and the Grass. Ironically, there are systems (from independent makers) around for many years that integrate valuations and data management and provide web-front-ends (not only our FACTORY) and some do support automated tasks and development, freeing quants from plumbing basic valuation and risk management but enabling them to develop their advanced and individual investment/risk management processes atop it.
And I did not believe that the major players rely on Excel?! But if they did, after a long history in computing, I ask myself how many steps can you leapfrog. Are banks prepared to put data, the core of their business, into the cloud? Provided the major players will, but will the many small and medium sized market participants?
A lot of these differential financial institutions try to do financial analysis and modeling using Excel .. they don't really have the kind of sophisticated market modeling and computing environments that they do a lot at elite hedge funds.
The idea is to providing financial modeling and analysis software resides on a cloud ... users (analyst, investor) can tap into the cutting-edge supercomputing capabilities possessed by the quants at a cost so low ...At this point I want to refer to Do We Face a Supercomputing Crisis? and another approach: Reverse Innovation - make big-systems-for-the-small and let the innovations flow to the larger market participants. And we will work for and partner with quants.
We do appreciate that an intelligent combination of computational finance with machine learning will help to get better insight - but there is still a lot of quant work to do to understand how.
And I ask myself: economy will transform into econophysics - will quant finance transform back to closed financial systems?
Picture from sehfelder
