Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I totally agree with that, particularly in the model itself. Maybe you could argue the model is a cornered resource. I am going to argue that the data is a cornered resource. I don’t know for sure about the model. Maybe? I guess that’s the same thing as saying the knowledge of what the 10 million lines of code does, that’s the model. But I actually think the fact that they have clean data and they’ve been creating systems. They have the best PhDs in the world thinking about data cleaning. That’s not a sexy job, and yet they have probably the treasure trove of historical market data in the best format that nobody else has. That’s an actual cornered resource. I have a couple of nuances on this. One, I think it probably is true that they have better data than any other firm thanks to Sandor Straus and the work that he started doing in the 80s before anybody else was really doing this. They have that and other firms don’t. That said, certainly all the other quant firms are throwing untold resources at all this, too.…

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