Bartt Kellermann, CEO of Global Capital Acquisition and founder of Battle of the Quants, invited Matthew to keynote the Frankfurt edition of the event, which moves between Frankfurt, London and New York and focuses on algorithmic and high frequency trading. Having seen Matthew present at Innovation Enterprise, Bartt asked him to speak on the future of hedge funds in a hyperconnected world.
In the early years few people knew what quant traders were and the event struggled to draw a crowd. Ten years on, the queues are out of the door, quant traders are consistently beating their human equivalents, and no one can imagine doing business on Wall Street without some form of quant trading system.
"Quant traders are convincingly and consistently smashing their human equivalents on Wall Street. Now no one can imagine doing business on Wall Street without using some form of quant trading system."Matthew Griffin, Frankfurt, February 2017
The event was held at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, and was covered by Handelsblatt Global, which interviewed Matthew beforehand for its "Battle for a Trading Edge" article on the rise of AI in trading. Quant trading depends on three things: ingesting large and varied sources of information, analysing it, and acting on the output. Matthew's role was to show how AI is evolving and how new data sources are exploding, from global satellite networks and persistent surveillance systems to sensors in everything from nanobots in the bloodstream to the Internet of Things.
Just before he went on, the projector failed, and after ten minutes of attempted fixes he went off script. Over the next hour he and the audience covered uploading knowledge to the brain through telepathic interfaces, the automation of data scientists and Terminator robots. The quants loved it.
