Posts

Data science discussions and general updates from Conlan Scientific.

The Size Factor is Upside-down

Excerpt from the The Factor Investing Chartbook (2024). Fama-French famously coded the size (market capitalization) factor as "SMB" which stood for "Small minus big". Their work implied that the small companies outperform large companies in U.S. stocks. Recent research shows this has not been the case since 2008.

The Pointlessness of the Expectation Operator in Investing

Download the PDF here.

Measuring the ROI of Investment Prediction Models

The following is a draft from a chapter of the upcoming book: The Financial Data Playbook MathJax = { tex: { inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']] } }; Data scientists want to build prediction models with a high level of accuracy. Executives want to invest in projects with a high …

Finding Alpha with Financial Machine Learning and Alternative Data

Alternative data can be defined as any non-obvious leading indicator of financial performance. Nowadays, people talk about satellite imagery and social media analysis when they talk about alternative data. Before the dawn of the internet, it existed in different forms. For example, if you wanted to know how many customers …

Chris Conlan Lectures at Winthrop University on The Discipline of Financial Data Science

Special thanks to Paul Weigand and Winthrop University for hosting this talk. Paul Weigand is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Quantitative Methods at Winthrop University.

Chris Conlan Guest Lectures on Financial Data Science at University of Virginia

Transcription: Chris Conlan: Professor Martinet was one of my favorite teachers when I was in the statistics department. I tried to take all the classes I could with her. So, this has always been a dream of mine to come back and guest lecture at one of her classes. My …

Goodbye Power BI

Transcription: Chris Conlan: My name is Chris Conlan. I am the president of a data science company here in Bethesda called Conlan Scientific. I will get my bragging and self-promotion out of the way. We do financial data, and we were recently ranked the number one artificial intelligence company in …

Achieving Fairer Lending through Data Science

I believe one of the biggest achievements in FinTech, since the term was coined, has been exposing bank account balance data, transaction data, and payment portals via APIs. I won’t name any specific APIs, but there are now an ample supply of well-supported products that allow users to easily share …

Old-School Alternative Data

In 1958, Philip Fisher published the widely acclaimed book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. In this book, he advocated use of the "scuttlebutt" technique as a way to find and keep strong growth companies in your portfolio. In case you aren't the seafaring type... "scuttlebutt" is a sailing term for …

University of Virginia Master's School of Data Science Interviews Chris Conlan

Chris Conlan discusses why specialization is the key to a successful career in data science.