RE: Bids upCheck this out! Came across my Google alerts this morning. Titan mentioned by industry experts as next big thing!
https://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/watson-arbitrage-research-player-wall-street-27474-1.html?zkPrintable=true
Watson on Wall Street: New Player in Research, Arbitrage
NEW YORK -- IBM’s BlueGene computer – known as the answer to the question “What Was the Original Name of the Jeopardy-champion cruncher called Watson? – will most likely be applied in various forms of research on Wall Street, as well as arbitrage of pricing in trading.
That was the assessment of Edward Epstein, manager of unstructured information at IBM and development manager for its Watson supercomputer development project, as well as Vikram Mehta, chief executive officer of Blade Network Technologies, a supplier of high-speed trading equipment. Their comments came in the opening session of the 2011 High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets Show and Conference at the Roosevelt Hotel.
Sorting through huge amounts of text and “unstructured” information will be Watson’s forte in trading, according to Epstein. As in medicine, there is simply too much information for any human to keep up. Which will become Watson’s responsibility.
Then, the BlueGene supercomputer will take on the best human (and digital) minds, as it did Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, besting those two top Jeopardy champions in the much-publicized three nights of competition on that staple of televised quiz shows.
This will include not just market information, but news, tweets and any imaginable input, arrayed against historical stock data. This will take such analysis, already starting with applications for instance from Titan Trading, to higher, broader and wider use.
The first users, according to Mehta, are likely to be large hedge funds, willing to spend to get an advantage that generates more “alpha,” or above-average returns, to earn their keep.
That will put Watson squarely in the business of arbitrage, he believe, helping funds find minute price differences in stocks or other securities on multiple markets. This will allow them to grab the differences as prices, in millionths of seconds, before other high-speed trading firms and algorithms do.
You’re likely to see this be applied to specialized systems, like the “trading-in-a-box” servers of NYSE Technologies, said Dougla L. Beary, an account executive for Datatrend Technologies in Cary, N.C.
"When you see this program play, it's not connected to the Internet. It has its own knowledge base, it knows a lot of facts. It has a lot of natural language understanding capability,'' said Peter N. Johnson, Chief Technology Officer at BNY Mellon Asset Servicing in Miami in February, just before Watson began competing on Jeopardy.
And what Watson does is not just sort through mounds of information, Epstein pointed out. Whether online or offline, it reviews the information and comes up with answers. And does not give out answers until it has a high level of confidence that the answer is correct.