Conference Will Explore Intersection of Finance and Technology

Sebastopol, CA, October 28, 2008 - Given any thought to the market lately? As the crisis on Wall Street leaves the financial world careening from highs to lows, finding the best new tools for the volatile new times ahead becomes more crucial than ever. The O’Reilly Money:Tech Conference defines these tools at the intersection of finance and technology. Registration has opened for Money:Tech 2009, February 4-6, 2009, in New York City, and program chairs Paul Kedrosky and Rob Passarella have announced the program.

Money:Tech 2009 is the preeminent conference for investment professionals examining the impact technology has on trading, finance, and investing. Money:Tech 2009 will showcase tools, techniques, and technologies; provide a forum for leading-edge viewpoints; and deliver a first look at industry trends that will have merged into the mainstream by next year.

Read the full press release.

Sebastopol, CA, July 30, 2008–The second O’Reilly Money:Tech Conference will mine the new veins where technology and finance meet February 4-6, 2009, at the Marriot Marquis in New York City. Program Co-chairs Paul Kedrosky and Robert Passarella invite proposals for conference sessions and a newly added full day of tutorials at this year’s expanded Money:Tech Conference.

An intimate, collaborative event that melds thought leadership with practical how-tos, Money:Tech 2009 will showcase the new kinds of technology and data from today’s increasingly networked world that can become the foundation for insight and value creation. Money:Tech brings together institutional and professional investors, web entrepreneurs and activists, technology and research experts, VCs, and high-profile thought leaders to expose the edges and give fundamental research new traction.

Read full press release here.

We’re starting the preparations to launch the 2009 edition of Money:Tech, and to that end we’ve started posting select video from the inaugural 2008 event, including this VC panel led by program chair Paul Kedrosky:

“In this issue of Release 2.0, we consider the Wall Street/Web 2.0 mashup from a number of angles, writes Jimmy Guterman. “We talk to Paul Kedrosky, chair of our Money:Tech conference and an influential blogger on the topic (as well as others), about why some on Wall Street hate Web 2.0 — and what Web 2.0 can do to infiltrate Wall Street nonetheless.”

Locust wrote about a two important topics that came out of February’s Money:Tech conference:

A lively public stock exchange is often considered the necessary centrepiece of any successful economy. Yet at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference in New York in February, which looked at how the internet is affecting the financial industry, one session discussed two troubling developments in the world of share trading: dark pools and crossing networks.

One of the speakers at Money:Tech wrote this wrap-up of his panel discussion:

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference. We discussed the extent that the financial technology community had embraced open source. Other members of the panel were Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, James Altucher who founded StockPickr and Graham Miller of Marketcetera. I was representing free financial open source software developers in my role as founder and project lead for the QuickFIX/J project.

A blogger who normally focuses on “the interface of biology and information technology was intrigued by some of the conference presentations:

Over at the Money:Tech conference (O’Reilly does organize some of the coolest conferences), a couple of talks caught my eye, notably one by Michael Stonebraker on Streambase and another by Steve Skiena on using computer simulations and mathematical modeling to make bets (You can find the slides on the web site). After going through the slides, I wondered, is there anything there which would be useful for the life sciences.

Tech Ticker host Aaron Task posted a video interview with speaker Jim Cramer shot during the conference.

The “Mad Money” host and my old boss at TheStreet.com reveals his favorite shorts in tech, a sector he believes will lag for several months because of the mindset of institutional investors. But is Cramer a contrarian indicator?

Money:Tech program chair Paul Kedrosky wraps up the first-ever event on his blog:

Money:Tech came off better than I could ever have reasonably expected, especially considering it was a) a first-time event b) in an emerging subject and c) on the other side of the country. Ordinarily, self-centered sort that I am, I would cheerfully accept all praise for the event’s success and motor on, but it sure wasn’t me. Far from it.

First, Money:Tech was about the people who attended. We had more than 400 registered Money:Tech conference-goers, which was great. When I finally forced myself to peek out from behind the on-stage screen Wednesday morning minutes before showtime and saw a full house, it made all the work and worry of the last six (!) months worth it. As I said at the end of the event, the Money:Tech audience’s enthusiasm and interest carried the show (and I’m personally delighted at all the people I had a chance to meet and talk to).

“Many of the more interesting presentations at the Money:Tech conference dealt with the topic of data overload,” writes Stacy-Marie Ishmael “with an emphasis on how best to mine the Web and related online resources for ‘investment-grade information.’”

This episode of Loaded with Natali Del Conte features interviews with a couple of Money:Tech participants onsite at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York.

A post on AllAboutAlpha.com observes that the intersection of finance and technology is getting crowded.

Along with information aggregation services and social investing networks, today’s the O’Reilly MoneyTech conference in New York featured celebrity financial bloggers. Barry Ritholtz (The Big Picture), Roger Ehrenberg (Information Arbitrage), Veryan Allen (Hedge Fund Blog), and even the reclusive and media-shy “Finbar Taggit” (Fintag.com). The event itself was moderated by blogger Paul Kedrosky (Infectious Greed) and counts among its four promotional partners, Footnoted.org and AllAboutAlpha.com.

Christian Braun summarizes the highlights of final day of Money:Tech, including Devin Wenig of Reuters; Richard Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design”; Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research; and Bill Tancer of Hitwise, plus others.

“Call it the monetization of opacity,” writes Felix Salmon. “One of the biggest buzz topics of the Money:Tech conference is dark pools: the way that stock trades are migrating away from open and transparent public exchanges, and into black boxes which don’t make their trade data public.”

In her Financial Times blog, Stacy-Marie Ishmael posts a brief overview of the conference:

How do you find Alpha in a world where data is essentially a commodity? That was the question posed by the organisers of the Money:Tech conference in New York this week, Messrs. Tim O’Reilly and Paul Kedrosky.

Anju Marempudi, a speaker at Money:Tech, announced the launch of eventVestor during his presentation. “EventVestor aims to become the most comprehensive data and analytics platform for event driven investment analysis and business decision-making. We identify, synthesize, and quantify key corporate actions, market reactions, and macro economic events into a near real-time structured database and provide an advanced analytics and flexible data delivery platform.”

Clint Boulton’s take on LinkedIn’s announcement:

The professional social network is getting into the expert advice game, joining Gerson Lehrman, Yahoo and Google. Looking to leverage its base of millions of professionals, LinkedIn this year will launch a primary research service to help financial services employees tap experts for advice on the social site’s network of 18 million-plus users.

More on LinkedIn’s announcement at Money:Tech:

LinkedIn, the businessperson’s social network, is offering a new way for companies to gather valuable background information when they’re making decisions. It’s mining the data in its own network to identify people who are experts on trends, companies and people related to financial markets, and pairing them with customers.

Over on his Market Movers blog, Felix Salmon has posted about issues around monetizing and owning content, from a very personal perspective:

One of the main themes of the Money:Tech conference is the way in which companies and investors can search and aggregate and mine blog information in order to help generate the elusive alpha. There was even a slide in John Mahoney’s talk which showed a screen capture of a search for YHOO on one of his products; the top result was a post from Market Movers.

• From Tim O’Reilly, LinkedIn Announces New Research Platform–”At the Money:Tech conference, Mike Gamson of LinkedIn announced their new line of business to provide primary research services to financial markets, the LinkedIn Research Network.”
• From Jimmy Gutterman, Money:Tech Day 1: Best Lines–”There’s so much going on at Money:Tech today that I won’t try to cheapen it my squeezing it all into a blog post. Indeed, we’re planning a full issue of Release 2.0 in April to capture how much has happened in the collision of Wall Street and Web 2.0 since we first identified it last year…”
• From Jimmy Gutterman, Jim Cramer, unplugged–”Those who know Jim Cramer only from the final segment on his nightly CNBC screamfest are missing someone as reasonable as he is entertaining. That more balanced Cramer spoke with Money:Tech conference chair Paul Kedrosky this morning about how technology has changed investing. Kedrosky noted that, compared to 20 years ago, “we’re all quants today” because we have so much more information. Cramer characterized it as a move from the anecdotal to the empirical.”

More thoughts on the first day of Money:Tech:

Today was a mixed bag for the first-ever Money:Tech conference hosted by Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. The morning was terrific: Tim did his Web 2.0 overview, which I’ve heard/seen before, but this time it was well-tailored for the audience. Then Jim Cramer came on and was on fire. More interesting nuggets in 30 minutes than pretty much the entire afternoon.

On the Sovereign Wealth Fund Radar, Christian Braun has posted a summary of the first day’s highlights. He notes that “several presentations threw some interesting light on where financial research is going in the world of Web 2.0 and RSS feeds.”

Our friends over at Zecco, a Money:Tech sponsor, are posting session summaries over on their blog, ZeccoPulse.

AGORACOM, the first Platinum Sponsor of Money:Tech, has made an announcement to coincide with their participation in the conference:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that AGORACOM has recorded 26,802,451 page views in the first 3 full months since we announced the launch of our wiki-powered ‘Investor Controlled Discussion Forums’ on October 11, 2007.

When we made first made the announcement, we set out to destroy the stock discussion forum status quo that we have all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and assorted noise.

Money:Tech sponsor TradeKing made an announcement at the conference today:

The Community’s Top-Ranked Contributors to Be Rewarded with Free Trades

NEW YORK, Feb. 6 /PRNewswire/– O’Reilly Money: Tech Conference — The first to introduce social networking into the world of online trading, online discount broker TradeKing (https://www.tradeking.com) today announced here from the O’Reilly Money: Tech Conference major new features to its ground-breaking TradeKing Community. In addition to its signature capabilities such as Certified Trades, the TradeKing Community now includes more powerful views into trader rationale through Trade Notes and a new “All-Star Trades” blog, offering “color commentary” and daily insights from TradeKing experts on actual member trades, as they happen.

Over on paidContent, Joseph Weisenthal had this and more to say about the opening presentations at the conference:

The Waldorf=Astoria, Jim Cramer, a discussion of the future of financial media… why this sense of deja vu? In a keynote discussion with Money:Tech organizer Paul Kedrosky, TheStreet.com founder waxed giddily on the markets, the way investors consume data and the way things have changed since the launch of TheStreet.com (NSDQ: TSCM). The oddest, yet most predictable point of the discussion: about halfway through, Cramer segued into full-on Mad Money mode, giving his quickfire views on everything from tech stocks to forestry products, coal and bonds. In fact the discussion ended with his views on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) stock (FYI: Cramer likes it long term).

AGORACOM, our very first sponsor of Money:Tech, has also made the first announcement of the conference:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that AGORACOM has launched “Investor Controlled Discussion Forums” for small-cap and micro-cap investors. What does this mean exactly? It means we are smashing the discussion forum status quo we’ve all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and all the rest of the noise.

Over on his blog, program chair Paul Kedrosky notes some interesting developments that will happen during Money:Tech:

-Motley Fool and LinkedIn have been added to the program, both with some very neat stuff
-Two new stealth companies will launch, taking to total to four company launches, and at least many other new products, but I have admittedly lost count

The conference will be upon us quickly. Here’s the rest of the [schedule] story.

Over on his blog, Infectious Greed, Money:Tech program chair Paul Kedrosky outlines the agenda, which he and Tim O’Reilly have been tinkering with recently. He begins with:

The conference is, of course, all about the confluence of Wall Street and Web 2.0. And what does that mean? Well, new ways of Web-2.0-style collaborating are changing money and investing, with the zero-sum game of Wall Street changing in the process. At the same time market mashups with new sources of web-based data — auctions! real estate! pricing! weather! — are transforming the never-ending hunt for a money-making edge.

The schedule has really filled in recently. Speaker additions include big thinkers like Nouriel Roubini from RGE Monitor, Cary Davis of Warburg Pincus, Jonathan Glick from Gerson Lehrman Group, and Renny Monaghan of Salesforce.com.
Other folks have some thoughts on Money:Tech too, including:

• Roger Ehrenberg, Money:Tech 2008–Be There or Fall Behind
• John Musser, Enterprise Mashups and Money
• Tim O’Reilly, Human vs. Machine: The Great Challenge of Our Time
• Tony Leach, Zecco At Money:Tech in New York

It’s great having a conference chair who also has an active blog. Here’s what Paul Kedrosky had to say about Money:Tech this week:

Two stories caught my eye today with respect to my conference on financial technology and alternative data sources.First, today’s Jimmy Cayne story in the WSJ about how the Bear Stearns CEO was, apparently, golfing and playing bridge during some of the worst days of the Bear Stearns hedge fund meltdown this summer. How do we know that? From looking at publicly available data on golf handicaps, and the 2007 North American Bridge Championships.

This is a good article that points out why the Money:Tech conference is so timely:

But the event described below is truly unique in that it is about the intersection of finance and technology. Financial blogs are just one example of the inhabitants of this intersection. Others include various forms of “Web 2.0″ trading and research technologies. This event will feature Barry Ritholz, the world’s most-read financial blogger and the most alarming and hair-raising financial technology yet to be developed by scientists: Jim Cramer.

Paul Kedrosky on social networking and Money:Tech:

Mention “social networks” in a stock market context and most people immediately think of a host of icky prediction sites that try to get people to wager on stocks & markets. Some of that stuff works, most of it doesn’t, but that’s a topic for another day.

It’s official, the conference is open and ready for business. Here is the release announcing the opening of registration for Money:Tech:

Inaugural Event Coming to New York

More coverage for Money:Tech:

Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly are the hosts of a new conference being held in November February: Money Tech. Its a look at the intersection of Technology and Money, Asset Management and Networks, Computing Horsepower and Trading.

A nice story on the upcoming Money:Tech Conference:

O’Reilly announced a new addition to its conference roll with Money:Tech, which will take place in New York in February 2008. This event brings some excitement back to a market that’s been out of favor with Silicon Valley’s cognoscenti since the burst of the Internet bubble and the e-brokerage consolidation.

Roger Ehrenberg joins the debate and mentions Money:Tech:

My Infectiously Greedy friend Paul Kedrosky, major domo of the upcoming Money:Tech conference, ripped out a little ditty where he implied that developers were becoming even more important and prevalent at hedge funds than at software companies.

Conference Chair, Paul Kedrosky from his blog regarding Money:Tech:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of technology as it’s used by Wall Street.

When someone as influential in the technology industry as Chris Anderson speaks, we listen. Check out this wonderful quote conference Chair Paul Kedrosky blogged today regarding the upcoming Money:Tech Conference:

Many congrats on the conf, which is the first I’ve seen in years that I feel I absolutely must be at.

Valleywag, always a site to tell it like it really is, had this to say about the upcoming Money:Tech Conference:

Finally, a get-together where geeks can safely admit to being motivated by something other than changing the world.

Nice coverage about the topics that will be featured at Money:Tech. I particularly like the last comment:

Not to be missed!

Kara Swisher comments on the upcoming Money: Tech:

Set to take place in February in New York (this dead-of-winter-and-thus-grimy-in-Manhattan prospect loses the conference immediate sexy points) and in partnership with longtime conference pro Tim O’Reilly, the event will focus on “near and dear to my heart: the confluence of money and technology (hence the name),” wrote Kedrosky on his also aptly named “Infectious Greed” site.

This article demonstrates why Money:Tech is right on time. Note that conference speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb, former quant-jock and bestselling contrarian author, is quoted…

They are the powerful, cerebral and offstage actors of Wall Street, but the recent turmoil in the financial markets has yanked them into the light.

Direct from Amsterdam, coverage of our newest conference Money:Tech:

Money:Tech, O’Reilly’s Newest Conference

Conference Chair, Paul Kedrosky discusses the latest addition to O’Reilly conferences:

I’m delighted to be chairing the conference, and thus partnering with the estimable Tim O’Reilly and the fine folks at O’Reilly, as the subject is one near and dear to my heart: the confluence of money and technology (hence the name).

Here is a link to the official release announcing the new conference:

Money:Tech Explores the Intersection of Technology and Money

Welcome to the news and coverage page for our latest addition to O’Reilly conferences: Money:Tech. The conference is scheduled to take place February 6-7, 2008 in NYC, NY. Money:Tech will bring together entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, academics, and high-profile speakers to uncover the opportunities created by rapid change in money and markets. The conference will include two days of plenary sessions, demonstrations, panels, and keynote presentations around the new technologies and methodologies that are transforming how money–and information–changes hands.

Watch for more news here!