Risk as Sales Support?

Article in FTFM yesterday saying that the risk function is being ignored by asset managers when formulating new financial products.This seems consistent with some recent comments from one risk manager who said that their role was a lot to do with sales support i.e. to convince potential investors that the asset manager has good risk management capability. Given all the discussions on the sell side about the role of risk managers and the risk function, sounds like the debate should open out more onto the buy-side too.

Data Pirates and Getting a Share of the Booty

Seems like data piracy (illegal sharing of logon IDs and scraping data) is costing the financial information industry around $8 billion in subscription revenue each year reports Inside Market Data. My first reaction is that $8 billion is a lot to loose, and shows just how (surprisingly?) big the whole market is ($23 billion apparently). My second is that I wonder how many end-users who share logins illegally would not that if they faced the full costs, so maybe the number should be a lot less? Either way the stat is interesting, particularly at a time when Bloomberg seems (!) to be taking a more constructive stance on data provision and partnering. Ironic also that the report suggests that the biggest set of guilty parties on illegal page scraping are the data vendors themselves, checking on each others data.

The company that put the survey together, Burton-Taylor, seem to have some interesting background on the major data vendors. The first is on news content, saying that Bloomberg seems to concentrate on news alerts whereas Reuters seems to put more emphasis on news analysis.  The second shows shows financial information/analysis revenue broken down by vendor and geography in 2008, showing how dominant Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are in the US and EMEA, with Quick having significant share with the big two in Asia. The third shows revenue broken down by segment and geography with FX/Fixed Income Sales & Trading, Equity Sales & Trading, Investment Management and Corporate expenditure dominating. 

Which email have you hidden behind?

Pet subject (partly because I have been guilty of it), but good reference article by Luke Johnson of the FT on email and how many of us hide behind it rather than speak face to face to colleagues and clients.

Twittering the Wisdom of Crowds

Deserving an award for title alliteration, an article on Finextra has announced that Streambase Systems have connected their system to Twitter, the fashionable microblogging site. Regardless of the intent, it is an excellent marketing exercise by Streambase (er, maybe one that I should remember for the future!...).

Reasonable comments from Finextra at the end of the article, saying that Twitter is a notoriously bad source of information, very open to (designed for?) rumour, and as such it would be difficult to see what real information traders could extract from the noise. At one level, then rumour and counter-rumour are the basis of markets, although the recent financial crisis has illustrated how powerful rumours can be. I would suggest it begs the question as to when rumour and counter-rumour is part of the price formation process, and when it becomes market manipulation.

On a related note, the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), the financial theory that all information (including rumours) is reflected in current prices, has been coming under some attack in the press recently. With a fund-management and Monty-Pythonesque slant, James Montier of Société Générale takes EMH to task in his recent article in the FT (see Pablo Triana for an alternative view).

My opinion is that EMH has still got some legs in it as a model, but behavioural finance probably has a lot more to explain (or rationalise?) about this theory and others in light of recent events. Anyone got a different opinion, or do I need to open a Twitter account to find out?...