Interesting presentation from an O’Reilly Webcast by Robert Passarella. According to his O’Reilly bio: “Robert Passarella has spent over 18-years on Wall Street in the gray zone between business and technology…focused on leveraging technology and innovative information sources to empower Equity Research and serve clients. A veteran of Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns…
…Rob is passionate about leveraging alternative data and news provided by the Internet for investment analysis. Robert holds a BBA in Finance from Baruch College and an MBA from the Columbia Business School.”
It’s a good watch but a tad long (it’s over 1hr).
Couple of interesting points:
- gives a lot of credence to the rise of financial bloggers, aggregators and independent research sources for use on by investment firms
- thinks the whole “buy, sell, hold” model of sell-side research is commodity now
- abundance of info (from horrible to really good) is just amassing outside of traditional research channels, some of it “just waiting for analysts to connect the dots”
- exodus of professional analysts out of ibanks leading the trend towards independent research combined with commission sharing agreements: barrier to entry low, good little business
- 75% of journalists consult blogs to get ideas for stories
- key is to take publicly available information (like from Amazon) and transform it into investable information/within human context of financial models/compare data sources
- different business models competing against traditional research models (mentions SeekingAlpha’s ad revenue and blogger revenue streams)
- out of ashes of crisis, lot of creativity and entrepreneurship plus low costs and easy-to-use distribution tech will prove fertile ground for new products, services, models in investment research
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM6cdnc3dT4]
[Hat tip: IR Web Report, a great read, turned me onto this presentation.]
