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Area4: Equity Trader

Big companies look for big projects.

Their automation solutions are always huge rollouts with multi-million $$$ invested in the software.

Is that the best way to go about making your business more efficient?

I propose there is a tremendous amount of improvement that can be made on all levels of work. Especially in large companies. At that those improvements can be behind the scenes, working quietly in the background. With no training and maintenance costs.

Let’s take a hypothetical equity trader. Call her Morrison.

To automate a whole workflow of a junior equity trader would take considerable effort and very large amounts of data to train the state-of-the-art AI developed over the years. But automating 60% of the workflow is easily done with a combination of scripting and background processes.

A large part of a work of Morisson’s daily work is “processing email”. His team would receive market analysis from different firms via email. The task is to find those emails in a “sink” email address and combine them into a report that the whole team discusses every week. This task is extremely easy for a computer and doesn’t require any state-of-the-art blockchain machine learning. Giving it to a computer, saves Morisson’s precious cognitive space, leaving him with time to express their creativity in more engaging tasks.
This makes the task literally disappear. It happens automatically in the background. The output just appears in the right place when all the data becomes available.

Another part of a typical workflow would be looking up information on equities. Each trader would have their favourite databases/Bloomberg terminal functions, etc. They look at their own personal blend of information, every time clicking through the same UI maze. This can be automated and brought into a dashboard that will save time.
In this case the automation is an efficiency gain, it’s streamlining repeatable tasks. When you do something hundred times a day, saving 5 clicks each time might be worth it. Sometimes it might be not:

Is it worth it?

As with any good problem: “It depends”.

This article also appears on: Medium

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