Topic: Technology and the Great Mess of '08

The financial crisis of 2008 is one of the great technological disasters in history. None of this would have been possible without computers. Who is to blame for the interconnected structure for disaster that came so close to taking the global economy with it when it crashed? What should we be doing to avoid a dreadful encore performance?

Part IV of "Nerds on Wall Street" sorted out the key technological issues that caused so much damage: a lack of transparency in markets for what we now call "toxic assets", which led to pricing by models instead of by markets. Models that proved toxically flawed, applied so recklessly, they nearly broke capitalism.

This talk brings this discussion up to date. Are current proposals based on the right information and data? Are modelers learning that the models aren't the markets? Can we achieve safe markets without stifling innovation?

Speaker Bio: Dave Leinweber has been called "one of the greatest financial innovators of our time"[1] by billionaire traders and investors, and "the class clown of the quantitative investing industry" by his Wall Street colleagues.

Leinweber combines the traits of an expert money manager with "alpha nerd"[2] computer scientist experience as an "early architect of automated trading"[3] . What really separates him from everyone else is his especially accessible way of thinking and writing. He believes that you can have a good laugh and learn something at the same time.

Judging by the praise for his new book, "Nerds on Wall Street", Leinweber's fans include the CEO of Barclays' Global Investors, the world's largest investment firm, the founder of the largest quant fund, D.E. Shaw, computer mega-publisher, Tim O'Reilly, and financial mega-journalist Jane Bryant Quinn; along with leading lights of finance from Harvard, Yale and MIT.

Currently a Fellow in Finance at the Haas School of Business at University of California Berkeley, and spent two years in the Caltech economics department. He is active in research relating what happens on the Internet to what happens in the market.

A semi-serial entrepreneur, he established two visionary financial technology firms, Integrated Analytics (which did algorithmic trading in the 1980s, acquired by Jefferies and spun off in ITG) and Codexa (in 1999, which extracted web information for professional investors and traders). In between, for nearly a decade, Leinweber successfully managed over $6 billion of institutional quant equity portfolios spanning 25 global strategies. His clients ranged from hedge funds to state employee pension plans.

He is now Institutional Investor magazine's monthly back page "Nerd on the Street" columnist.

Haas Center for Innovative Financial Technology:
http://cift.haas.berkeley.edu
Nerds on Wall Street book companion website:
http://nerdsonwallstreet.com
NOWS Blog:
http://nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com

[1] Blair Hull, Founder of options pioneer Hull Trading, purchased by Goldman Sachs in 1999 for more than 500 million.
[2] Tim O'Reilly -- NOWS endorsement
[3] Andrew W. Lo, Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management