Troy Will Burn – the Big Deal about Big Data
I know, I know … I’m a broken record and a Cassandra, with 2 successive notes on Big Data. But I don’t care. This is a much larger structural risk for markets and investors than HFT and the whole Flash Boys brouhaha, it’s just totally under the radar and hasn’t surfaced yet. And unfortunately, just as I think Jeb Bush speaks for most Americans – Democrat and Republican alike – when he says that he doesn’t get what all the fuss is about when it comes to metadata collection and Big Data technologies, so do I think that most investors – institutional and individual alike – are blithely unaware of how their market identities can be stolen and their market behaviors influenced, all in plain sight.
Jeb Bush should know better. I think he probably does. Investors may not know better yet, but they will soon, one way or another. As you read this note, a small group of hedge fund managers are doing to you exactly what the NSA is doing to “terrorists”.
Today a handful of governments use Big Data to identify individual behavioral patterns so that certain individuals can be killed. Today a handful of hedge funds use Big Data to identify investor behavioral patterns so that certain investors can be crushed. Today Big Data is primarily an instrument of social information gathering, with a powerful but punctuated impact on those individuals on the receiving end of a drone strike or a targeted trade.
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