As 2019 has come to an end, the Alphien team would like to thank you for your unwavering support. We hope to ride on the success of year 2019 and continue to offer high quality events and services through our platform.
New research challenge: Beat the next market crash
In order to keep the momentum going for the community, we launched a new research challenge. This time, the focus is on downside-risk.
Researchers have to look for efficient market timing long/short strategies on the S&P 500 futures. The input set is limited to S&P 500 historical levels (Open/High/Low/Close), the S&P futures building block - Alphien’s concept for adjusted price series that can be used directly in backtests - and the VIX index level. Researchers also have to use at least one data science based model in their algorithms. At a time when the S&P had its second best annual return since the Dot Com bubble burst, with high equity multiples and declining expected earnings, being able to anticipate the next market turn proves crucial. We are convinced that machine learning techniques can help to unveil new dimensions and original approaches to time the next recession.
Click here to join the challenge.
A focus on flexibility and scalability of IT infrastructure
Scaling and adapting to Alphien’s growing research community has been our foremost objective and motivation. In order to grow big, we are going small. Alphien’s tech team is in the process of testing containerized services using Docker and orchestration and clustering using Kubernetes.
Once deployed, this infrastructure would enable us to build, manage and deploy applications in a completely different way. We can spin up services and tear them down in a very dynamic way now. Besides containers, we are also in the midst of testing a new Jupyter kernel, the name of which starts with a P and ends with an N.
Alphien at the forefront of cyber security
In an FT article, JP Morgan announced it will implement tougher security standards when it comes to sharing customer information and security credentials (JPMorgan to ban fintech apps from using customer passwords, by Laura Noonan). In a nutshell, JP Morgan realised many of its commercial partners had poor security standards, even amongst fintechs, leading to security threats for clients. Besides the initial surprise that a company like JP Morgan would share customers’ private information with other businesses, this also highlights many tech actors are subject to sensitive information leakage.
At Alphien, we are well-aware of such issues. As a technology company that puts security and Intellectual Property rights at the center of its offering, we endeavour to use high-end technology to ensure all user information are fully-secured without neglecting user experience. We use Kerberos as a robust authentication protocol to enforce security on our web-based accessible platform. Our users also benefit from the Single Sign-On (SSO) feature, allowing them to only login once to the platform in order to access all the tools that are available to them; all of this in a secured fashion. The system uses authentication “tokens” just like the model JP Morgan wants to implement as reported in the FT article. This is possible through the implementation of a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to securely store and quickly access credentials over the network.
We are happy to see the broader industry move towards standards we have already adopted at Alphien.