Common Sense Investment Management (CSIM), an independent, privately-held investment manager, has appointed Dr Matthew Schneider, as Director of Research in the firm’s new Liquid Strategies team.
A complement to their existing Hedge Fund business, Liquid Strategies will invest in Managed Futures & Currency managers using a combination of non-finance techniques and patented risk management processes.
Dr Schneider is also a Visiting Scholar at the Samuel C Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Prior to joining CSIM, Dr Schneider worked as an adjunct policy analyst for the RAND Corporation for five years, researching and advising on policy decisions for multi-billion dollar government programs. Prior to the RAND Corporation, Dr Schneider served in the US Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer on the USS Boxer. He holds a PhD and MS in Statistics from Cornell University, an MS in Management & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS in Quantitative Economics from United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Dr Schneider's doctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), developed methods to identify key and persistent relationships from among millions of time series and terabytes of data.
"As an NSF-funded graduate student, I valued developing new techniques that were ten to 20 years ahead of commercial practice. It is important to me to be part of an organisation that acts that way too. The CSIM Liquid Strategies' Co-CIO, Mel Meinhardt, has been a leader at introducing new techniques, and that drew me to the team here," says Dr Schneider.
Mel Meinhardt, Co-Chief Investment Officer of Liquid Strategies, says: "Many investment companies are pursuing a financial edge from 'Big Data.' However, Dr Schneider, who has recently presented his work at the Big Data and Mobile Analytics Conference in Philadelphia, believes there is more to 'Big Data' than just the magnitude."
Dr Schneider says: "There is a natural tradeoff between the largeness of data and the sophistication of modelling. As the availability of data continuously outpaces the development of theory and models, the temptation is to use fast yet simple models to cover as much data as possible. However, I find greater value in focusing on how the data is being modelled rather than how big the data is. This becomes particularly important when dealing with sequential and dependent events like we find in finance."
A key part of Matthew's doctoral research has been accepted for publication next year in the prestigious Journal of the Royal Statistical Society — one of the top journals of statistical science. He also has publications in print or forthcoming at the International Journal of Forecasting, the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, and the International Conference of Data Mining.
"We welcome Matt to the CSIM Liquid Strategies team," says Mel Meinhardt. "His addition will help ensure we maintain our leading edge in portfolio design and management, exploiting the best of new and robust methods."
