I'm long-winded and not very good at
reading which makes my current career of
reading and summarizing thousands of
documents an odd choice and teaching a
combination of students and
supercomputers to speed read well that's
an insanity that I never expected to
embrace let alone make up a word to
describe it the word context you're
combining the quantitative power of
modern machine learning with the
contextual savvy of human experts to
summarize research my goal is to rid the
world of information overload and to
help you with your personal information
deluge as a finance researcher I'm
inundated with documents financial
reports economic analysis suicide
research and academic papers hundreds of
documents received online every day
millions available online I'm inundated
with information with barely enough time
to read the headlines let alone sit down
and dig deep for inspiration and as I
talked to researchers all over the world
I realize that we are all in the same
boat sure talk to them at a crowded
cocktail party and they'll tell you
about an interesting article they read
in the Wall Street Journal or they'll
say something like you know I read an
interesting paper by Professor Marc
Greenblatt in the Journal of Finance and
they sounds so educated as they tell you
this but talk to them in private as I've
done countless times and a disturbing
truth emerges that research that they
paid good money to receive there
straight from their inbox into the trash
without even being opened and that grand
plan for getting inspiration from
academic research pick a paper at random
from the nearest journal and read the
abstract now if you want a cool cocktail
party trick remember the names of the
authors so you sound intelligent when
you bring it up
let me try mark grin laughs did I do it
it's an deception of epic proportions
and I'm just as guilty as anyone because
I'm a researcher and I don't read
research reading research is hard work
and frankly overwhelming now when I was
at college studying for my doctorate my
professors would get me to read all the
time papers by people like Mark
Greenblatt's
and I think the hope was that if I kept
reading all the time they wouldn't have
to answer difficult questions like
what's up with this data or when am I
going to graduate well reading as much
as I did
I learned a couple of simple tricks that
helped me along the way I looked at a
paper and read both the abstract and
conclusion and decided whether the paper
was worth reading now if it was I looked
at the meat of the paper and look to see
if the key conclusions held true and
then if the paper was truly awesome I
would read and reread it again in
greater and greater detail well I
finally read enough research to be
allowed to play with data and graduates
but College never taught me the secret
of keeping my head above water with
research so five years ago I set out on
a crazy journey to read as much research
as I possibly could I hoped that I might
find personal inspiration along the way
or at the very least offer my colleagues
some research summaries like cliff notes
for Finance dummies I set out to read
six hundred papers over two months with
my boss and an intern and it was torture
academic paper torture it's that point
of exhaustion where you can't even stand
the sight of paper let alone a hundred
more and not only was this hard work we
were barely even scratching the surface
SSRN the leading source of economic
papers receives over 60,000 new papers
every single year now most people aren't
gonna do the math to figure out how much
work it would take to read all of that
but I did 45,000 hours of work now
that's more than five times the number
of hours in a year so nobody is gonna be
able to do this alone
realizing this I recruited all of my
co-workers to help me and as they
started to realize what was in store for
them well let's just say there was a
sudden increase in unannounced vacations
and jury duty
herding co-workers is harder than
herding cats so I turned to the only
resource that I knew I could rely on
interns current PhD students working
part-time to read for me now this sounds
like an incredibly evil plan give the
interns the job that nobody else wants
but they're uniquely motivated they're
already in the same Halbert my
professors put me through so why not get
paid to read research you're gonna read
anyway and besides reading for a couple
of hours each week help them to develop
skill in the same way that an athlete
owns their body after a couple of weeks
an intern can read better research than
a full-time researcher but even if I had
an army of researchers I still wouldn't
be doing anything to address that deluge
of information that comes into my inbox
every single day to handle that I
thought about the quantum contextual the
power of machines and actually
remembered back to when I was at college
i moonlighted for google acting as a
human interpreter for the search engine
now you all know how Google is great at
answering questions even when you phrase
them weirdly well that's because they've
used interpreters like myself to train
their algorithms over and over again and
now I'm doing the same sort of thing
with economic students and economics
questions here's how it works
I ask a researcher to think about a
question that a document answers and for
example an hour paragraph on global
earnings answers well a question like
what are the prospects for global
earnings they highlight the paragraph
and the question and then a series of
algorithms breaks it down and linked it
all together creating a rich tapestry of
insights which it then adds
with new insights based on new documents
and regurgitates all of it in a second
when prompted kind of like Siri on your
phone but for economics questions Siri
what are the prospects for global
earnings this year I'm sorry I don't
understand your question why don't you
go ask the interns it has its
limitations
computers are great for things like
figuring out the topic or the general
sentiment or tone but they struggle with
things like is this research novel or do
we believe is key conclusions
for that you need experts you need the
PhD students so I use a combination of
the two when I need speed I rely heavily
on machines deep insights I unleash the
phd's the combination of the two works
well together they train summarize and
prioritize for each other and they're
both fast and flexible as my interns
have seen their work become leveraged by
machines they've come to embrace
contextual as a banner for our combined
efforts for me life in a quant extra
world is better organized sure I have an
inbox full of research but now I know
what's in there what's important and
where to look for answers and because
I'm no longer lying to myself about what
I'm reading I'm less likely to be caught
off guard how we handle information
overload is changing in ways that we're
only beginning to grasp for example
doctors would be better able to
prioritize their patient updates and
keep on top of important medical
advances politicians and rock stars able
to understand what their constituents or
fans are saying and the average
co-worker doesn't have to worry about
emptying their inbox every day they can
just focus on getting their work done
because having a human in the mix
keeping tabs on things we can worry a
little bit less that a computer is
overlooking something important
and with all the time that we have for
inspiration we can focus on things that
are of relevance to us for example I
just read that analysts are more likely
to be overly optimistic about highly
risky stocks and that this over optimism
drives up prices in stocks this has
important investment implications and my
intense and computer highlighted this to
me
this is brand-new research that hasn't
even been published yet and yet I'm
reading it right now but even though it
hasn't been published I suspect that it
will do soon probably even in the
Journal of Finance because I can
honestly tell you that I just read a
great article written by Professor mark
brinnlitz thank you