John Adam is the senior vice president of portfolio management and trading solutions at FactSet.
John Adam, FactSet
Will fintech investment rise, plateau, or trail this year?
Investment in fintech will continue to rise in 2019 because of the ROI seen by early adopters. As the portfolio lifecycle becomes more electronic, it becomes more efficient, and those efficiencies mean better investment decisions implemented with minimal friction. An integrated and open platform means that alpha identified by the portfolio manager is retained in the market by the trader.
Will Wall Street innovation drive alpha in 2019?
Crypto-fever may have taken the spotlight for a while, but Wall Street never really stops innovating. That will remain true in 2019. Whether it is a new and verifiable application of machine learning, new ways of analyzing an open data set and capturing alpha from it, or a more comprehensive and unified view of risk, much of the innovation we see is often quiet and incremental. The hype may wax and wane, but the innovation does not.
Are there any market structure changes that take place in 2019?
Regulatory changes, particularly MiFID II, have taken up much of the dialogue in 2018, but 2019 will be interesting because of how the market reacts to the new structure.
We are just now gathering enough statistically significant data to understand how the markets have changed. Regardless, it is all but certain that trading will continue to move faster and more asset classes will trade electronically than ever before. Algorithmic trading is here to stay and will continue to be applied in ever increasing sophistication to a wider range of asset classes.
