Berkeley CIFT 

	David Leinweber

Wishlist for Student Resources

For quantitative investing, an optimizer is an important tool, in long only, market neutral, and equitized strategies. It provides a systematic means to deal with multiple risk factors.

I don't see why it would be become unimportant in 130/30 strategies. The arguments for the dynamic benchmark are interesting, but likely too complex for many investment clients. Keep in mind, many public funds did not even allow shorts until recently. Some still don't.

A simpler benchmark is to ask what the funds would earn if the manager made no active bets. For a long only strategies, that turns out to be an index. For MN, T-bills, for 130/30, regarding the strategy as the (weighted) sum of a long-only plus MN suggest a similar sum of benchmarks.

	Paul Hoff

What would a finance card do? Parallel Computing in Wired Markets

You probably already know about Interactive Supercomputing and their "parallel system on demand" product which they call Star-P. You might check out their financial service page (http://www.interactivesupercomputing....) for some examples of the problems that they are positioning thier solution to solve. (Also I see Star-P a pretty interesting offering which could level the playing field for smaller organisations).

Julius Finance (http://juliusfinance.com/) is one of their customers. I can put you in touch with one of their board members if you want to have a discussion. This person would be intersting as he was also the founder of a start-up that made applications that exploited the parallel computer power in commodity graphics cards to run other applications.

- Paul

	Toby Segaran

Talk at Web 2.0 New York

I'll be doing a talk on "The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data" at Web 2.0 NYC. It seems like it could be relevant to some of you. Details here: http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4866
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	David Leinweber

Open Source Pipes Movement

We've asked Yahoo to consider making Pipes open source, and offered to host it at CIFT. We'd also like to have a few examples of "hello world" financial Pipes applications to help people get started. Any Pipes BOFs out there?
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	David Leinweber

We missed CIFT at BarCampBankSF, maybe at BarCampBankSF2?

Don't feel too bad about not knowing before. The shrink-wrap is barely off the website, which only went up a week ago. BarCampBank sounds interesting. Please keep us posted on its status and dates here.

	Tito Ingargiola

Hardware for High Speed Finance

You should take a look at tervela (http://www.tervela.com) as they have something like a hardware implementation of CEP. Very compelling looking product though it remains out of my price range, so I can't provide a detailed product review as yet!