To kick off Day 2 of this year’s Money:Tech conference in
New York City, Tim O’Reilly sat down with Devin Wenig from Reuters to discuss
how new data sources (and better availability of existing data sources) is
changing the way people get information for investing. It was a fascinating conversation that
focused on professional investors and how they get information – and how it’s
really much different from how retail investors do.
Some of the highlights from their conversation:
- According to Wenig, Google
isn’t very useful for vertical search – especially in finance. The way to address search is through a
community of users tagging and sharing information and news. So people, not machines, highlight the
relevant content and bring it to the attention of others. He believes this belongs to professionals
only, whereas we believe it’s powerful to get all online investors
involved, but that’s beside the point.
- Professional investors today
have grown up on the web and demand all the speed and information that it
can provide – and more, in order to be able to beat the rest of the
market.
- Tagging makes content
machine-readable so that computers can display what the community has
decided is relevant and important.
- The added value today is in
finding information in companies’ value chains. For instance, information about the mine
in Chile supplying materials for Dell batteries is incredibly
important. How we make those
connections – either by machine or by some form of community intelligence –
will be incredibly important.
Overall, it was a fascinating conversation that highlighted
some of the differences between retail and professional investing – and the
related communities. We took a lot from
Wenig’s comments on tagging content, and think that it could provide a great benefit
to our users at Zecco.
Photo of Tim O'Reilly and Devin Wenig from duncandavidson on Flickr