Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML) and Sentiment Analysis are said to “predict the future through analysing the past” – the Holy Grail of the finance sector. They can replicate cognitive decisions made by humans yet avoid the behavioural biases inherent in humans.
Processing news data and social media data and classifying (market) sentiment and how it impacts Financial Markets is a growing area of research. The field has recently progressed further with many new “alternative” data sources, such as email receipts, credit/debit card transactions, weather, geo-location, satellite data, Twitter, Micro-blogs and search engine results. AI & ML are gaining adoption in the financial services industry especially in the context of compliance, investment decisions and risk management.
This is a sophisticated conference that not only interrogates and explores the implications of AI & ML in the financial services industry but also goes on to identify the investment opportunities of sharing knowledge and exploiting IP in the finance domain.
Attend this event and earn GARP/CPD credit hours.
UNICOM has registered this program with GARP for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits. Attending this program qualifies for 7 credit hours. If you are a Certified ERP® or FRM®, please record this activity in your Credit Tracker.
We are inviting speakers – thought leaders, subject experts and start up entrepreneurs – to share their knowledge and enthusiasm about their work and their vision in the field of AI, Machine Learning, Sentiment Analysis.
Please complete the speaker’s response form and submit a proposal to present at this event.
UNICOM’s Code of Conduct & Views on Diversity
We at UNICOM strive to be a leading provider of knowledge to the business community and to engage the global business community as a specialised provider of knowledge. We strive to do this maintaining a culture of co-operation, commitment and trust. We want every UNICOM conference and training day to be a safe and productive environment for everyone – a place to share research and innovation and to build professional networks. To that end, we will enforce a code of conduct throughout all our events. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.
Our approach is that our events are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity or religion. We do not tolerate intimidation, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of sessions or events, and unwelcome physical contact or sexual attention. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, Twitter and other online media. Event participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers. Please bring your concerns to the immediate attention of the event staff.
Diversity: In our endeavour to be the provider of knowledge to the business community, we understand that this depends on hearing from and listening to a variety of perspectives that come from people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions, sexual orientation, and military service. We welcome diverse speakers for all our events, we do not always fully achieve this goal, but it is an ongoing process.
Ronald Hochreiter, Docent & CEO, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business & Academy of Data Science in Finance
AI and Machine Learning methods can be used to generate investment decisions successfully. A clever combination of Data Science methods with methods from the field of Decision Science (Prescriptive Analytics) may lead to even more successful models. In this talk a general outline for such a successful methodological combination will be presented as well as a concrete novel Deep Learning investment model which is based on graphical TTR series representations instead of using time-series directly. It will be shown how important Feature Engineering for Deep Learning in Finance actually is.
Enza Messina, University of Milano-Bicocca
We analyze how AI and Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis of News and Micro-blogs are and impacting the two rapidly expanding markets, namely, Financial market and Retail market. We support our analysis by a few Use Cases for these markets.
Gautam Mitra, CEO, OptiRisk System & Visiting Professor, UCL
We compute daily trade schedules using a time series of historical equity price data and applying the powerful mathematical concept of Stochastic Dominance. In contrast to classical mean-variance method this approach improves the tail risk as well as the upside of the return. In our recent research we have introduced and combined market sentiment indicators and technical indicators to construct enhanced RSI and momentum filters. These filters restrict the choice of asset universe for trading. Consistent performance improvement achieved in back-testing vindicates our approach.
Claus Huber, Portfolio Manager, Deka Investment
A very valuable feature of the Self-Organising Map, a method of Machine Learning, is its visualisation capabilities. We show how the Self-Organising Map can be deployed to visualise the risk structure in a portfolio, in particular for assets for which no risk models exist. Some examples to this end are the visualisation of risk concentrations, identifying diversifiers and scenario analysis. Real-world applications are the selection of hedge fund managers or the analysis of a portfolio of Alternative Risk Premia.
Christopher Kantos, Senior Equity Risk Analyst, Northfield
In December of 2017 Northfield introduced the first commercially available factor risk models that incorporates computerized analysis of news text directly into volatility risk forecasts for individual stocks, corporate bonds, industry groups and ETFs based on market indices. Market events in early 2018 provided several excellent examples of why we believe that Risk Systems That Read® is the most significant innovation in factor risk models in more than three decades. We will illustrate show how recent news events drove financial market outcomes for Wynn Resorts, Wynn Macau, Facebook and Wanda Hotels (HK). Each day the content of thousands of news articles are now part of the input for the full range of models available from Northfield. The line of research that led to this innovation stretches back to 1997, and includes five published papers by Northfield staff [diBartolomeo and Warrick (2005), diBartolomeo, Mitra, Mitra (2009), diBartolomeo (2011,2013,2016)]. Beyond the obvious improvement in risk estimation, the method has important implications for alpha generation by both quant and traditional for active managers.
Anders Bally, CEO & Founder, Sentifi
In the early 90’s, the majority of financial market participants used news mainly from services like Bloomberg and Reuters to inform themselves. 20 years later, they still do. During the same period, our society went through a communication paradigm shift. Today more than 2 billion people walk around with mobile devices and communicate what they see and think on social media. These billions of voices, when structured, can generate insights which can help investors make better investment decisions. This presentation will touch on how Sentifi structures and delivers these insights, providing an information advantage for media platforms globally.
Panos Parpas, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Computing, Imperial College London
– Reformulate deep learning as an optimisation problem
– Discuss the importance of stability for robust solutions.
– Illustrate the use of deep learning to solve high dimensional (more than 100 dimensions) nonlinear parabolic PDEs (Black&Scholes, Hamilton-Jacobi Belman)
– Provide code and some examples for participants to experiment with.
Matthias Uhl, Executive Director in Analytics & Quantitative Modelling at UBS Asset Management
We show that sentiment from news articles can explain and predict movements in the term structure of U.S. government bonds. This effect is stronger at the short end of the curve, coinciding with greater volatility and investors’ need to continually reassess the Fed’s reaction function. Facing such uncertainty, market participants rely on news and sentiment as a central element in their decision-making process. Considering this dependence, we propose a new yield curve factor-news sentiment-that is distinct from the 3 established yield curve factors (level, slope, and curvature) as well as from fundamental macroeconomic variables.
Francesco Cricchio, Co-founder and CEO of Brain
Brain developed a sentiment Indicator on about 7000 global stocks monitoring the news from financial media with the objective of providing the ‘market mood’ on listed companies.
The proprietary sentiment scoring indicator (BSI) is based on machine learning techniques used to categorise the news in specific topics combined with natural language processing techniques that make use of a proprietary dictionary of financial terms.
The sentiment indicator can also be aggregated on thematic baskets of stocks related to non-conventional themes (e.g. nanotechnology, wearables, drones) selected by machine learning analysis of company public information (e.g web pages) of global stocks.
Richard Peterson, Managing Director, MarketPsych
In this talk Dr. Richard Peterson describes how media analytics are providing new insights into the origins and topping process of asset price bubbles. Examples from price bubbles including the China Composite, cryptocurrencies, housing, and many others will be explored. Recent mathematical models of bubble price action will be augmented with sentiment analysis. Attendees will leave with new models for identifying and taking advantage of speculative manias and panics.
Jochen Leidner, Director, Research, Refinitiv
Kamilla Kasymova, Associate, Quantitative Research and Analytics, Northwestern Mutual and Jacob Gelfand, CFA, Director of Quantitative Strategy and Research, Investment Risk Management
We present a framework for ex-ante analysis of the USD denominated EM Sovereign spreads and respective currencies based on the flow of news in global and local media. The public domain GDELT data is currently being used, but the framework is agnostic to data source, and can be adopted to any data source. We will discuss use cases pertaining to selected countries and spearhead the discussion about predictive qualities of the produced analytics.
Dr. Sofiane Oussedik, Technical Leader, Decision Optimization, IBM
Volatility in the financial sector-lending, investment, securities, banking and insurance-has focused executive attention on near-term issues of survival and recovery, especially in the area of risk management. Improving operational efficiency and building customer relationships remain important competitive advantages for leading companies in this sector. Technologies like IBM Decision Optimization and Data Science play an important role in enabling financial organizations to make better decisions faster. These advanced analytic solutions enable addressing the financial sector’s most important competitive differentiators in three key areas:
1. Risk management
2. Operational efficiency
3. Customer-focused product innovation
We’ll go thru use cases and highlight the Decision Optimization and Data Science impact.
Arun Verma, Quantitative Research Solutions, Bloomberg
To gain an edge in the markets quantitative hedge fund managers require automated processing to quickly extract actionable information from unstructured and increasingly non-traditional sources of data. The nature of these “alternative data” sources presents challenges that are comfortably addressed through machine learning techniques. We illustrate use of AI and ML techniques that help extract derived signals that have significant alpha or risk premium and lead to profitable trading strategies.
This session will cover the following topics:
♦ The broad application of machine learning in finance
♦ Extracting sentiment from textual data such as news stories and social media content using machine learning algorithms
♦ Construction of scoring models and factors from complex data sets such as supply chain graph, options (implied volatility skew, term structure), Geolocational datasets and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance)
♦ Robust portfolio construction using multi-factor models by blending in factors derived from alternative data with the traditional factors such as fama-french five-factor model.
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