Technology

When I entered the telecom scene in India, in the early nineteen eighties, we had two million telephones for seven hundred and fifty million people. It used to take fifteen years to get a telephone connection. In a very short space of time, just twenty five years, we have seven hundred and fifty million telephones.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

We have a much more connected marketplace. We have had, what I reckon to be an extremely overvalued stock market since 2000. When you have that situation, you are prone to very sudden negative revaluations.

Hedge Fund Manager & Author of "The Black Swan" Risk Management

Academics, research analysts, and even regulatory agencies have recognized that today's markets are more liquid and less expensive than before the advent of HFT. This is no doubt due in part to the improvement in liquidity provisioning that has arisen from the better risk management that computers provide over human traders.

To take the example to an extreme, consider how many real estate or private equity transactions are currently executed by a computer versus a human being. Being an 'alpha-less market maker' in such a market is not possible.

Once one understands the disadvantage of being at the bottom of the stack, it becomes much easier to understand the importance of speed in HFT. As new price levels form, HFTs compete with other HFTs to join the new price as quickly as possible in order to secure advantageous stack position for passive orders.

The majority of US Equity HFT is employed in the strategy of liquidity provisioning, also known as electronic market making. Historically, such a service was provided by NYSE specialists and NASDAQ market makers but, with the advent of decimalization, human specialists and market makers were no longer able to keep up with the liquidity demands of investors and automated technology became necessary for this function.

For the iPad it's game over in terms of market-share… Apple has won! It's a preposterously cheap stock…

I think Apple is preposterously undervalued. Apple has this mind-boggling margin structure, phenomenal consumer brand, and is accumulating mountains of cash. I joked on television that they should lever up and buy Greece! They have something like 7x cash-flow.

Cyber-threat is the single most serious threat faced by the markets. The United States is very good at cyber warfare and counter warfare, but so are others. This is what we call 'asymmetric' warfare where adversaries have been able to level the playing field.

Currency expert & author on financial threats to national security

What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap... cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

One way to think about reserve currencies is to liken them to an operating system for a computer. Today, everybody is on Microsoft... but nobody changes... why? because everybody else is on Microsoft and if you want to exchange files and work together, you have to be on the same platform.

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

Bill Gates of Microsoft is on-record as saying, 'Microsoft would not function as a company in the way that it does without operations in Israel.'

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Israel is not called 'the start-up nation' for nothing. We have great statistics to show the number of start-ups per capita, the number of PhD's per capita, V/C Dollars per capita, Patents per capita and more. Israel creates a huge amount of innovative start-ups which are often bought out before they are even revenue producing!

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

In the advanced countries, it is a very challenging time for people in the middle-income and middle-education range. They are being subjected to greater competition from labour saving technology.

Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president

When it came to Avatar… James Cameron's track record was just second to none- phenomenal. The creative vision he had to that film, tied to Fox's commitment in the movie and the advances in technology made it seem- at the time- quite an easy decision.

We're platform agnostic. People tend to see the market in terms of discrete sectors such as film, TV, music, video games, live and so on. We like to invest in content you can view many different ways- and that gives us depth and diversity within our portfolio.