Ober: Satellite car-counting data rarely drives hedge fund investment decisions
Matt Ober · Fireside Chat: Matt Ober, Chief Data Scientist at Third Point (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC) · Feb 25, 2019 · at 8:34
Matt Ober, Chief Data Scientist at Third Point, addresses hyped alternative datasets at Data Driven NYC and discusses why satellite car-counting data has limited standalone value.
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“I don't think that there's a lot of firms really counting cars in parking lots, and that's what's really making their, ah, decision making.”
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More from Matt Ober
Ober: Fundamental funds need more data per company than quantitative funds
“So it's interesting because when you move from quantitative to fundamental, the amount of data that's relevant is, you know, Enormous on the fundamental side, because you're really diving into these single names.”
Ober: Quant funds require two years of backtestable daily data before purchasing
“If you're going to sell to a quantitative hedge fund, anything less than two years of daily data that's really been stored point in time that you can really back test is really going to be tough to make that ten million dollar sale.”
Ober: Simpler financial models outperform complex machine learning over time
“Going back to the very basics, you kind of find that, like, the simpler it is, the better it actually performs over time, if you're not trading at this higher frequency.”
Ober: Fundamental funds prioritize good communicators over the smartest PhDs
“We may not need the smartest PhD within a fundamental shop because we have to be able to explain and understand what they're doing and really talk their language whereas a quantitative hedge fund, there's more opportunity to maybe work on your own and not have…”
Ober: Fundamental hedge funds began data transformation around 2016–2017
“Sure, so I think kind of a revolution in the hedge fund industry mainly because you have the quantitative hedge funds that have really been leaders in technology and data, and now you have the fundamentals really over the last, call it two, three years, thinki…”
Ober: Third Point uses data to evaluate existing ideas rather than mine new ones
“Rather than mining data for new ideas, we're almost looking for data to help us understand the ideas we may already have, or to, you know, create very sophisticated screens, you know, looking across all these companies to kind of dwindle down a smaller list of…”